Description
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), plans to award a contract to support various State agencies in the design/redesign of their food stamp application forms. Specifically, the Contractor will provide close technical support to assist State agency personnel in enhancing their document design skills. In addition, the contractor will be tasked with the development of a guide for evaluating the application forms and identifying opportunities for improving them. The contractor will not develop application forms for the State agencies, but will assist State agency personnel as they develop the forms. Both printed and electronic forms are included in the scope of the project. The contractor selected for this project must have a high level of technical expertise in applying research-based principles for making documents easy to understand and use, enhancing the visual appeal of documents, and assessing the communicative effectiveness of documents. The required knowledge and skills draw upon research in such fields as linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, rhetoric, and socio-linguistics, and especially upon research on such topics as the writing process, problem-solving, reading comprehension, discourse analysis, audience analysis, graphic design, and document design. This procurement is a small business set-aside. The small business size standard for this project is $5 million. The North American Industry Classification System Code is 541430, Graphic Design Services. The resultant contract will consist of a base year and three (12-month) option years. The RFP will be issued on or about February 8, 2002. Applications will be due on or about April 9, 2002. Award will be made to the offeror whose proposal offers the best value to the Federal Government. Any qualified small business interested in receiving the Request for Proposal must request a copy in writing from Suzanne A. Pastura, Contracting Officer, USDA, Food and Nutrition Service, Contract Management Branch, 3101 Park Center Drive, Room 228, Alexandria, VA 22302 and MUST include four self-addressed mailing labels with the request. TELEPHONIC AND DATA FAXED REQUESTS WILL NOT BE HONORED.