Extended: Call For Expression Of Interest For Consultancy For Website Design And Regional Resource Hub (RRH) Development

Extended: Call for expression of interest for Consultancy
For
WEBSITE DESIGN AND REGIONAL RESOURCE HUB (RRH) DEVELOPMENT

I. Background

The Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) is a regional organization founded in 1992 by Indigenous Peoples’ movements across Asia. It promotes and defends the Indigenous Peoples’ rights and strengthens the solidarity of Indigenous Peoples across Asia for self-determined sustainable development. AIPP over this period has been engaging in different human rights mechanism, instruments, treaty body and processes including HRC, UPR, CERD, CEDAW, UNFCCC, CBD, IPBES, BHR, UNPFII, EMRIP1 and Agenda 2030 on sustainable development. AIPP believes the inherent rights to self-determination and self-governance of Indigenous Peoples equal as all peoples, and advocates for the international human right standards compliance enshrined in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), ILO169 and United Nation Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). AIPP critically observes, analyzes and safeguards the rights of Indigenous Peoples and the intersectional groups through ensuring their voices and issues. AIPP has built the capacity and created enabling environment for Indigenous Peoples including Indigenous Women, youth, elderly, LGBTIQ and person with disability. It facilitates them to participate and represent in different platforms at different level. Consolidation, analysis, publication, and dissemination of the relevant national, regional, and global processes from Indigenous perspective is one of the role AIPP is playing.

Rationale

AIPP has been engaging in collaboration with diverse actors, alliances, and stakeholders at different level. It had reflected, analysed, and synthesized learning of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It had contributed to shape, define, incorporate the learning, and advocate and lobby to ensure Indigenous Peoples’ rights and issues recognizing intersectionality in Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and its processes AIPP facilitates participation and representation of Indigenous Peoples including Indigenous Women, youth and person with disability in SDG processes. Raising awareness, educating, and building capacity of Indigenous Peoples, including Indigenous Women, youth, and person with disability on SDG, monitoring its progress, advocating for effective implementation at different levels.

This website redesign and creation of Regional Resource Hub is primarily for AIPP and its member and partner organizations who need to access information and data in order to make informed decisions, including following up on case studies and documentation of a wide scope of issues that impact Indigenous Peoples in AIPP’s networks. For greater accountability and transparency in effective donor management, proposal drafting and generating reports to discuss the outcomes and impact of campaigns, projects and activities within the Secretariat and external teams. This will also act as a guide in project leadership and guidance in the right direction with the ability to adapt in order to achieve the objectives and goals mapped.

The Regional Resource Hub will also provide practical guidance to Indigenous Peoples on their engagement and contribution in measurable processes from local to global levels. It will be widely used by AIPP, Member Organizations (MOs), networks, partners, Indigenous Communities and by other stakeholders. This will serve as a hub for key resource materials and guiding documents for the trainings and workshop and self-governing modules organized by AIPP, MOs and partners and provide further improvement to include not only goals and targets considered important to IPs, but develop a simplified and user-friendly version incorporating the local examples and contexts.

WEBSITE DESIGN AND Regional Resource Hub DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANCY

AIPP invites expression of interest (EoI) from reputable and qualified consultancy firms or individual consultants with a track record of successfully designing Content Management Solutions (CMS) to develop a website platform and regional resource hub. The website will act as a tool to raise awareness of and promote cross-border collaboration, a platform to access and share information, a database of case studies, and knowledge products from AIPP’s Member Organizations, networks, focal organisations and global partners for local and global visibility of the cross-border initiatives in the fourteen countries where AIPP is present. It will also be used as a tool for communication and collaboration between the stakeholders to share expertise, knowledge and resources

1.  Objective of the Consultancy

The objective of the website redesign and creation of Regional Resource Hub, is for AIPP’s stakeholders both internal and external, to have a visible and navigable centralized hub and website which highlights engagement spaces both offline and online, with linkages to other human rights instruments and mechanisms that AIPP is engaged with and through different initiatives.

The redesign is also aimed at creating a user-friendly website design that will allow for greater cohesion in decision making as this will be the primary site for all developments, news and views, events pertaining to the intensive and extensive scale of scope of work undertaken by AIPP’s thematic programmes, Secretariat and Member organizations in advocacy and outreach of Indigenous Peoples in Asia.

2. METHODOLOGY

The consultant/firm will utilize mainly the primary data provided by the Communications Programme to develop a CMS website. The platform will use the agreed CMS system based on the usability and requirements of the portal.

3. SCOPE OF THE ASSIGNMENT / DELIVERABLES

1) AIPP Mockup website:

Once a contract has been signed, and within 15 working days, the consultant is expected to present a mockup of the proposed website (2 design templates from which the AIPP team will select one). The chosen template will be jointly reviewed by AIPP Secretariat and key stakeholders with feedback provided for enhancement, and the agreed template will become the foundation for the AIPP website and regional resource hub platform

2) AIPP Website:

The consultant will be required to create (design, develop, and host the website using the agreed template (AIPP Mock-up website) within the designated timeline, which meets the following criteria:

• Interactive, appealing, highly usable, and responsive web design. The design and solution must be easy to use.
• Average site load-time should be reasonable.
• Search engine friendly. (SEO from design, tagging to keywords)
• Able to render appropriately on a wide variety of different browsers. (Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari among others)
• Be secure: The design of the solution should adhere to security best practices; i.e., passwords should not be stored in plain-text, all forms of data should be validated, all user input should be sanitized, content copying restricted, user interactions and activities should be logged etc.
• Design and final solution should adhere to accessibility and compliance requirements (as defined by the project team): The Web solution should be designed to ensure that everyone, including users who have difficulty seeing, hearing, and making precise movements, can use them.
• Public and registered users (Members) only areas. The portal will hold a database of various stakeholders operating in different border areas
• Site news/trending now content blocks: The web solution will provide content/ areas containing: Calendar of events, Latest News/Site news, Trending topics
• SSL Certificate: web solution should be secured in accordance with current best practices, for example uses https not http.
• User registration and administration: The solution should allow users to complete an appropriate user registration process. The solution must persist user registration data and credentials in an appropriate form. The user registration process should adhere to best practices, including CAPTCHA and email verification for regional resource hub, and should be able to scale as needed, i.e., no limit on the number of users that can register.
• Administrators should review user registration/profile details, change user roles/access rights, terminate / close user accounts.
• User profile and account administration: Users should view and update user-generated information on themselves, for example, personal details, password and account details, posts, preferences and interests.
• Content Management: The solution should allow authorized project staff (or appointed personnel) to edit and update the website, including creating, removing, editing, and publishing content with a moderation aspect. Content can be in the form of text, video or Photos. Videos will be streamed from other sources, not necessarily uploaded. i.e., from the AIPP Facebook page, YouTube
• Site Statistics: The solution should provide authorized users with a number of relevant reports, for example, user registration, site usage, key interests/topics being visited within the collaborative spaces and other relevant statistical data.
• Calendar, Events, reminders integration: Specific authorized users should have the ability to create and administer events and event details. Other users should be able to search for and find events based on specific criteria. Members should be able to receive notifications in registered emails that an event has been scheduled and reminders of upcoming events.
• Social Network Integration: including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, and can be fed by handle and hashtag.
• Mass Email/Messaging: The system should provide a feature to allow authorized content administrators (or other authorized administrators) to contact all or group/community members. This feature may be used to facilitate the dissemination of newsletters and different project outputs.
• Document Posting: Document upload (standard file formats i.e., pdf or word) with Description – Who uploaded – Date of upload – File Format etc., creation of new relevant page (if required), Mouse Over description on File Name (compatible to major Browsers) image uploaded should be uploaded with the appropriate meta-data including mandatory keywords / tags / fields (will be decided later) – for internal Search Indexing and SEO.
• Spam Control: The solution should provide an automated challenge system that reduces the number of spam comments/posts that either needs moderation or slip through filtering mechanisms.
• Search functionality: The solution should allow users to search for and locate content based on keywords, tags, and key phrases. Search should not be limited to articles, pages or other forms of content-administrator created posts but should also include user-generated content found within the community areas.
• Website wireframe and landing pages: The portal should be capable of having landing pages for AIPP’s thematic programmes and their networks (HRCPA, Environment, Communications, Regional Capacity Building, Indigenous Women with links to their respective social media pages) with different themes/designs (at least two themes/designs to choose from).
• Public Users and members should be allowed to search for, view and/or download articles and documents from the site.
• Source code handover: Full source code, including the website and all developed libraries /plugins, shall be handed over to AIPP in a standard external hard disk.
• Should be a WordPress platform or suggestion for CMS
• Should use or set up the plug ins and theme which should be able to updated normally by our-self without breaking the site
• Should provide a usage manual for website and resource hub after they completed
• Should provide a proper training on how to use the provided manual
• Develop a user manual and deliver training to the project team and website administrators to perform the content upload, system maintenance and administration.
• To develop and integrate the open access resource hub section on the website (or hybrid dependant on insights from the consulting firm) keeping the mind the following points that will allow us to:
  • • Educate visitors, leads and stakeholders
    • Help improve search engine optimization, lead generation and community building.
    • Educate your audience, allow visitors to find relevant content quickly and keep visitors engaged
    • with your website and business.
    • Enables site visitors to share and spread your content

Measure the following:

• • Landing page conversion rates
  • Visits to each Resource Center page
  • Resource Center call to action performance
  • Exit Rate of Resource Center page
  • Bounce Rate of Resource Center page

4. TIMEFRAME

The estimated duration of the contract for the website development is 25 working days spread over October and November, 2022. The consultant will submit a clear work plan with specific timelines, which will be reviewed and agreed upon at the beginning of the consultancy work.

A first meeting call will be scheduled to brief AIPP on the background information to develop the requested deliverables.

5. TERMS OF PAYMENT

Payments will be made in two instalments: 50% on signing of agreement, 20% on completion of first mock-up and remaining 30% on satisfactory completion of deliverable i.e., new website and creation of resource hub as per AIPP’s procurement policy.

6. CONSULTANT’S QUALIFICATIONS

The consultant should demonstrate and provide examples of previous experience in the performance of similar services as follows:

• Be a reputable firm/consultant with at least five years of prior experience designing visually appealing and navigation friendly websites;

• Familiarity and relevant experience in using different Content Management Systems (CMS), particularly WordPress.

• Have a broad knowledge of current web development technologies and design tools in the field, and new software and other web programming languages and programs including the use of HTML 5, PHP 8, SEO, Google Analytics, among others;

• Have excellent knowledge of recent trends in graphic design dynamic websites, including online video publishing, online library catalogue and social media networking.

• Demonstrate the ability to create an innovative, visually appealing and responsive mobile design.

7. SUBMISSION OF APPLICATIONS

The applicant(s) is/are requested to submit a technical and financial proposal with following information:

i. A technical offer of a maximum of six (6) pages, including:

• Description of the firm/consultant

• Firm registration documents

• Understanding of the scope of work;

• Proposed methodology / approach and clear timeline with expected working days and deliverables;

• Proposed technology (with justification); highlighting the pros and cons of the technology proposed;
• Sample(s) of similar work completed by the consultant; at least three links (preferably for NGO/INGOs).
• Proposed team structure; showing brief profiles of proposed project team members, including references (attach very short CVs).

ii. A financial offer, including:

• Detailed cost break-down, the price component must cover all the services to be provided (website development, Training, Upload to the server, hosting etc.), and must be itemized and aligned with expected deliverables.
• Tax element, if applicable.

8. HOW TO APPLY & SUBMISSION DEADLINE

AIPP invites eligible and qualified interested Firms/Consultants to submit their non-binding proposals/applications in English, indicating “**AIPP Website Portal 2022**” in the subject line via email to nina@aippnet.org and fuji@aippnet.org by 08 November, 2022 latest 24:59 PM BKK (Bangkok time). Tenders submitted in another form or to another email account will be excluded from the procedure.

Note:

Complete proposals will be assessed based on the consultant’s qualifications and experience, quality of the methodology proposed, and cost-effectiveness (value for money). AIPP may decide to host the website on their own without using the proposed hosting firm. Finally, due to the volume of submissions, only shortlisted applicants will be contacted.

9. PUBLICATION AND PROCESSING OF PERSONAL DATA:

During initiation and performance of contracts, AIPP may process personal data [1] of natural persons that are collected by AIPP or transferred or disclosed to AIPP by prospective contractors or third parties under their instruction, e.g., personal data of employees, legal representatives, agents, or other partners of the prospective contractors or such third parties.

For any inquiries related to this consultancy, don’t hesitate to contact Nina Sangma via nina@aippnet.org and Hpuji Nawng via fuji@aippnet.org before the deadline.

10. BUDGET

The financial aspects will be included in the evaluation of the best bid. The contracted sum consists of the consultant(s)’s remuneration and all expenses for the services described above, including website development, training, upload to the server, hosting, taxes if applicable, and will be paid upon confirmation of said deliverables. As mentioned above, payment shall be made in three schedules 50% on signing of agreement, 20% on completion of first mock-up and remaining 30% on satisfactory completion of deliverable i.e., new website and creation of resource hub as per AIPP’s procurement policy

(See the – SCOPE OF THE ASSIGNMENT / DELIVERABLES).

[1] By submitting information to AIPP, you, as a prospective contractor, acknowledge:

• to have taken note of AIPP’s Safety and Security Policy guidelines which will be shared after finalization of consultant/consulting firm

• to ensure that each direct or indirect transfer or disclosure of personal data to AIPP during the initiation or performance of a contract is lawful pursuant to applicable data protection law;

• to ensure that all persons whose personal data are transferred or disclosed to AIPP were promptly and demonstrably provided AIPP’s Safety and Security policy; and

• that if a contract is concluded and in accordance with its terms, AIPP or its donor publishes, in particular on the AIPP or donor website, information about the contract and the contracting parties.

The total number of days will be agreed upon, informed by the technical proposal submitted to AIPP.

Dispute resolution

Both parties are entitled to terminate the consulting at any time giving one-week written notice. If such an event were to occur payment would be need to be made on actual days that were completed.

This Agreement shall be governed in accordance with the laws of Thailand.

In the event of a dispute arising out of or relating to this contract, including any question regarding its existence, validity or termination, the parties shall first seek settlement of that dispute by mediation under Thai law

If the dispute is not settled by mediation within 30 days of the appointment of the mediator, or such further period as the parties shall agree in writing, the dispute shall be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration under Thai law

The language to be used in the mediation and in the arbitration shall be English.

The governing law of the contract shall be the substantive law of Thailand.

In any arbitration commenced pursuant to this clause,

(i) the number of arbitrators shall be one; and

(ii) the seat, or legal place, of the arbitration shall be Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Entire Agreement

This Agreement contains the entire understanding of the parties with respect to its subject matter hereof, and supersedes all prior discussions, negotiations and understandings between the parties with respect to such subject matter. This Agreement may not be changed orally but only by a written instrument signed by the party against which enforcement of any waiver, change, modification, extension or discharge is sought.

This Agreement must be signed and returned before the Consultant can schedule or begin this job.

*This job description is not incorporated in the employment contract. It is intended as a guide and should not be viewed as an inflexible specification as it may be varied from time to time in the light of strategic developments and following discussion with the post holder. The post holder will be expected to work to agreed objectives which should facilitate achievement of the responsibilities in accordance with the performance review process.

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