Procurement and Vendor Evaluation

Find the best tool or service for your use case and budget

Why get help with procurement?

Software has become integral to the mission of many government offices. Leaders need to make technology decisions but may not be technology experts, and tool offerings is constantly evolving. Low-and-no-code tools can level up your team, but it can be difficult to know what to ask for and to wade through the buzzwords to select the right service.


We believe that the right toolset starts with your requirements. U.S. Digital Response (USDR) volunteers can work with your stakeholders to understand what they each need from a solution, use this to inform a requirements document, and help evaluate whether available options meet your needs.

We believe there is a tool out there for everyone - and often one that doesn’t require pricy custom contracts. If you need to source a software tool for your team and aren’t sure where to start, get in touch.

Selected case studies

Community Alliance with Family Farmers
Bringing User-Centered Design into the RFP Process

The Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) wanted to build a software tool that could help schools in California purchase more nutritious, locally farmer-grown food. Yousef Buzayan, CAFF's farm to cafeteria program manager, reached out to USDR for help.

USDR provided a surge of technical expertise to complement CAFF’s experience by introducing CAFF to agile software development, product thinking, and user research, executing 18F's De-risking Guide created by USDR staff members Waldo Jaquith and Robin Carnahan when they worked together at 18F.

Read the full case study »Read more about this project »
Team members
Waldo Jaquith
Government Delivery Manager
,
US Digital Response
Marin County Behavioral Health & Recovery Services
Journey Map to inform new Electronic Health Records System for Marin County

Marin County’s Behavioral Health & Recovery Services reached out to USDR to partner on the overall digitization effort across their office. After learning more about their workflows, the team chose to focus on the Electronic Health Records system that the fiscal team uses to administer payments for Medi-Cal, Medicare, and Medicaid.

USDR volunteers reviewed the team's workflow, interviewed team members, documented their existing data workflow, helped them identify their weak links, gaps and sources of missed communication. From this discussion, we helped them derive a wireframe of the specification for an EHR system that they can procure to integrate the various modules and entities sharing and consuming information.

Read the full case study »Read more about this project »
Team members
Charles Gunyon
Senior Software Engineer
,
Paladin
Carol Whang
Senior Program Manager
,
Partners in School Innovation
Peer Power Foundation
Enabling virtual tutor training to support Tennessee’s public school students

The Peer Power Foundation is a Memphis area nonprofit that hires, trains, and pays college students to mentor and tutor middle and high school students. To counteract an estimated 1 year of learning loss among Tennessee’s 1.1M public school students, Peer Power sought to ramp up their tutoring capacity by enrolling and training tutors online.

USDR worked with the team to identify their top needs from a learning management solution and surveyed the field for the best fit.

Read the full case study »Read more about this project »
Team members
Anna Hoffman
UX Researcher
,
Instagram
Ashish Arte
CEO & Co-Founder
,
SURGERi.ai
City of Milwaukee Health Department
Scoring No Code Databases

In early 2021, the City of Milwaukee Health Department asked USDR for help replacing their Quickbase system. Due to licensing issues and cost, they knew that they were not getting the full utility of the tool and wanted to identify another platform that better fit their needs and budget.

In collaboration with the team, a USDR volunteer scored 8 different no code database platforms across 45 possible criteria. They ranked the tools and landed on a top choice that met the department’s HIPAA compliance and pricing requirements with high scores on user friendliness and documentation.

Read the full case study »Read more about this project »
Team members
Bindu Gakhar
Head of Products
,
Paystand
Janita Chalam
Software Engineer
,
Uber
Left
Right

Meet the team

Anna Hoffman
Anna is a Senior UX Researcher at Instagram, and previously worked at SiriusXM, Vox Media, and The Atlantic. In addition to conducting user research, Anna helps the governments team at USDR by scoping new projects with partners and program leads.
Janette Fong
Janette co-founded USDR and led the Projects Team. She was previously a Product Manager at Lyft and Director of Product at LendUp.
Matt Dragon
A USDR volunteer, Matt Dragon is the Head of Global Publishing at LiveRamp. He has a background in business development.
Waldo Jaquith
Waldo advises the UI team on how to effectively meet our partners' needs. He previously served as Senior Advisor to the Administrator at the U.S. General Services Administration.
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