Question & Answers

Description

RFP 2026069 Scholarship Award Management System Questions and Answers RFP Submission date has been extended to Friday May 22, 2026 at 2:00 p.m. Q1. Can we submit our proposals electronically? A1. Yes. If you did not receive an invitation to reply in Bully Buy, contact the person on page one and request an invite. Technical Proposal: Proposal must be submitted in PDF format and state “Technical Proposal” in the title of the document. This document must be separate from the cost proposal or the response may be considered non-responsive. Cost Proposal: Cost proposal must be submitted in PDF format and state “Cost Proposal” in the title of the document. This document must be separate from the technical proposal or the response may be considered non-responsive. Q2. Can MSU elaborate on the integration with Banner SIS? What data will need to come into the vendor's system? What data from the vendors system would need to be pushed to Banner SIS? A2. The information needed to move to Banner would be the student’s MSU ID, Name, Fund Code, Award Amount, and Award Period. Ideally, the vendor would have integration options that include Ellucian’s Ethos integration platform. Q3. Regarding individual offices must be able to conduct these processes as separate units - can MSU elaborate on this? Does the data from separate offices need to be segregated? If so, does MSU have a system-wide admin that can support the software? A3.Each academic college and most academic departments have an administrator responsible for making scholarship offers in the system. Our current system has different “roles” that system administrators can assign depending on the users’ needed access. Scholarships can be “tagged” with different scopes that can be used to limit a user’s access to only the scholarships in their academic college/department. Q3. What is the current system MSU is using? What is the reason for going out to bid now? Are there any pain points with the current system? If so, what are they? A4. We are currently using Blackbaud Award Management. The contract is about to expire, so we have to request new bids. Some issues we are having include the student user experience and system communications to the students. Q5. Is MSU anticipating needing helpdesk for applicants? If so, what is the average amount of tickets received? A5. We do not anticipate needing a helpdesk for applicants.