Survey of Yemen

THIS IS A COMBINED SYNOPSIS/SOLICITATION FOR A COMMERCIAL ITEM PREPARED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FORMAT IN SUBPART 12.6 AS SUPPLEMENTED WITH ADDITIONAL INFORMATION INCLUDED IN THIS NOTICE. THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION; PROPOSALS ARE BEING REQUESTED AND A WRITTEN SOLICITATION WILL NOT BE ISSUED. (ii) Solicitation No. BBG50-R-10-0013 is issued as a Request For Proposal (RFP) and a commercial item contract will be awarded using the contracting by negotiation procedures in FAR Part 15. (iii) This solicitation document and incorporated provisions and clauses are those in effect from the Federal Acquisition Regulation, FAC No. 2005-43, dated 8/2/10. (iv) This is a full and open procurement under NAICS 541910. (v) The Broadcasting Board of Governors, International Broadcasting Bureau (BBG/IBB), Office of Contracts (CON) located in Washington, D.C. has a requirement subject to the availability of funds, for a contractor to obtain quantitative data of the media habits of the adult population of the country of Yemen. (vi) STATEMENT OF WORK: 1) NATURE OF SURVEY. Audience data shall be obtained through a survey of Yemen that is designed to obtain the most accurate possible information about: (a) the size of the audience for BBG's Arabic language TV channel, Alhurra, and the Arabic language radio channel, Radio Sawa; (b) the size of the regular and occasional audience for other international and domestic television and radio broadcasters (c) demographic characteristics and geographical distribution of these audiences; and (d) general patterns of media use. In addition, a small number of questions concerning respondents' views on various social and political questions may be included in the survey. The interview shall be face-to-face and they shall be conducted in the home of the respondent by a trained interviewer. IBB will require demographic information on each respondent including, gender, age, and education. 2) GENERAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF CONTRACTOR. The contractor shall be responsible for the project design and execution, including the following specific tasks: a) translation, formatting, pretesting, adaptation, and printing of questionnaires; b) development of Sampling Plan, based on consultation with IBB, Office of Research; c) training interviewers; d) arranging and supervising all aspects of fieldwork; e) entering and processing the survey data, including data cleaning and encoding survey responses; f) ascertaining the representativeness of the sample and weighting the data, if necessary; 3) SAMPLE DESIGN. Interested offerors are requested to submit a price proposal for a total sample of 1,000 adults, age 15 or older, that is representative of the population of the survey universe. While a national survey covering the entire population would be desirable, BBG recognizes that logistical and other constraints may affect the extent to which all portions of the Yemeni population may be covered in a sample survey, as well as the sampling methods that may be employed. Offerors are therefore encouraged to submit proposals offering various levels of survey coverage, with accompanying pricing for each. Proposals should include a precise definition of the population(s) to be covered, including estimates of the size of that population and a description of the sampling frame(s) to be used. The sample shall be drawn using recognized probability methods, all the way down to the selection of the individual respondent at the household level. In the event that any departure from probability sampling methods is recommended by the bidder for all or any part of the survey, the sampling methodologies to be employed shall be described in detail and a rationale for their use shall be provided. A detailed sampling plan shall be submitted including a description of the survey coverage, allocation of the sample, description of the sampling frame, description of any stratification criteria to be used, description of the stages of selection and the selections methods to be used at each stage, a definition of the PSUs and approximate number of interviews to be conducted within each PSU, the method to be used for selection of the respondent at the household level, and call-back rules to be employed. It is assumed that the sample will be distributed in proportion to the population of each region or other geographic unit to be surveyed; in the event that the bidder wishes to propose a sample design departing from this principle the proposal should describe the allocation to be used and the reasons for doing so. 4) QUESTIONNAIRE. IBB will supply a set of questions for an interview of approximately 45 minutes consisting of approximately 70 questions (in English), up to 5 of which may be open-ended. Questionnaire will be provided in draft form for suggestions and comments by contractor based on contractor's knowledge of local cultural or political sensitivities. Following receipt of contractor's comments, IBB shall prepare a final version of the questionnaire for translation by contractor into Arabic. 5) PRE-TEST. The questionnaire shall be pre-tested by the contractor prior to the commencement of any fieldwork. At least 15 pre-test interviews shall be conducted. The contractor shall provide IBB with a written report of the results of the pre-test, along with details of any problems encountered and suggested remedies, prior to the commencement of any fieldwork. 6) FIELDWORK. Interviews shall be conducted by experienced field workers who shall be thoroughly briefed by contractor prior to commencement of any fieldwork. The contractor shall ensure that interviewers are thoroughly familiar with household and respondent selection procedures, call back procedures, and the structure of the questionnaire, including routing and filtering. Interviewer training shall include practice sessions in administering the questionnaire. A minimum of 10% of interviews shall be back checked and 5% of the interviews shall be accompanied by a team supervisor. Offeror's responses to the RFP shall include a description of the professional qualifications of the proposed interviewers and a description of the training that shall be provided to interviewers to ensure proper understanding of the survey instrument. 7) DATA PROCESSING. The contractor shall be responsible for data entry, cleaning, and processing, including development and implementation of a coding scheme for all open-ended questions. The contractor shall supply data to IBB as a clean, fully labeled SPSS "*.sav" file with a complete data dictionary of variable names and value labels. There shall be one data record for each respondent and records shall be of fixed length. The contractor shall be responsible for deriving and applying any post-stratification weights required to bring the sample into conformity with the demographic profile of the population, as well as any additional weighting factors required to correct for disproportionate allocation, if use. Each record shall include a unique respondent ID number, interviewer ID number, PSU ID number, and codes for precise location and date of interview. Each record shall include demographic information about the respondent, including: gender, exact age, and education level. 8) TECHNICAL APPENDIX. When delivering data, the contractor shall provide a Technical Appendix which shall include the following: (a) A complete Sampling Plan, including list of PSUs and individual sampling points and number of interviews conducted at each sampling point; (b) Details of response rates, including tabulation of unsuccessful interview attempts by sampling point, with reasons for non-response (i.e. respondent refusal, proxy refusal, inability to locate selected respondent, etc.); (c) Interviewer instructions; (d) A brief report on survey operations including any practical difficulties encountered in carrying out the survey; (e) Estimated sampling error; (f) A complete explanation of the weighting scheme including details of how weighting factors were developed and applied, as well as the demographic data on which weights were based (i.e., age, gender, and education distributions in the population) 10) SUMMARY OF DELIVERABLES. The Deliverables to be provided to IBB by the contractor under this contract are as follows: (See preceding paragraphs for detailed description of requirements for each deliverable). (a) A complete data set formatted as SPSS file (see description above under 7( Data Processing); (b) A copy of the final questionnaire, as fielded, in English and Arabic and (c) A Technical Appendix (see description above under 8) Technical Appendix). 11) Delivery Schedule. It is anticipated that the fieldwork for this survey shall take place in October-November, 2010, with the deliverable listened in Section 10 above to be submitted no later than 8 weeks after the conclusion of fieldwork. (vii) The contract terms will begin with service starting on or about September 1, 2010 through December 31, 2011. (viii) The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) provision FAR 52.212-1 Instruction to Offerors-Commercial Items, applies to this solicitation. FAR provisions and clauses may be obtained from the Internet Web address at: http://acquisition.gov/far/index.html. Interested contractors who are capable of providing these services should submit a quote identifying capabilities as noted below. The contractor shall demonstrate the ability and experience in providing the required services as stated in the SOW. Interested contractors must provide in their quote a listing of similar projects with the same or like requirement, budgetary estimates, and the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses of references who have direct knowledge of the contractor's skills and experience. Offerors responding to this solicitation shall submit their written response to the contracting officer, and a firm fixed price (FFP) for the contract terms in English and in Dollars. (ix) The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) provision FAR 52.212-2 Evaluation-Commercial Items, applies to this solicitation The Government will award a Commercial Item, Firm-Fixed-Price contract resulting from this RFP to the responsible offeror whose offer conforming to the RFP will be most advantageous to the Government, based on A) the Offeror's Technical Capabilities/Experience (for which there are seven (7) equally weighted sub-criteria); and B) the Offeror's Price Proposal. Of the selection criteria, Technical Capabilities/Experience is the significantly dominant criterion over the price criterion. price, technical, past performance, and other factors in the solicitation. The following factors shall be addressed in the Technical Capabilities/Experience proposal and shall be used to evaluate proposals: 1) Demonstrated experience in conducting quantitative research on broadcast media; 2) Demonstrated experience in conducting survey research in the Arab world; 3) Quality of the proposed sampling technique; 4) Quality of the proposed procedures for data collection, entry, and verification; 5) Overall quality control measures proposed, especially for survey fieldwork; 6) Professional qualifications of proposed project managers; and 7) Ability to complete the project in a timely manner. Offerors are cautioned that failure to address each of the above factors may deem their quote unacceptable. Each offeror's response to this RFP shall include sufficient quantitative/qualitative information on the following technical items to enable IBB to objectively evaluate the offeror's Technical Capabilities/Experience to successfully perform the work specified in the RFP: (a) A detailed description of the proposed research methodology, including specific listing of organizations the offeror shall use for performing fieldwork (if subcontractor are to be used by the contractor); (b) Current information on the qualifications of offeror's office and field staff who will participate in performing the work specified in the RFP; (c) Specific information on offeror's past experience in conducting media research and survey research in the Arab world; (d) A detailed description of the proposed fieldwork plan, including Sampling Plan and procedures, number and type of sampling points and manner in which interviews shall be allocated across the population of the cities included in the survey; and (e) A schedule showing the time required for each phase of the project. For offeror's interested in submitting price quotations on the survey, this would include (1) translation, pretest, reporting of pretest results and printing of final questionnaire, (2) completion of fieldwork, (3) completion of data verification, data entry, and codebook, (4) delivery of data files and technical report. Offerors are encouraged to seek potential co-sponsors for this survey to minimize cost to IBB. In addition to specifically addressing the above-stated technical items, an offeror's response to this RFP shall also provide technical details on any proposed subcontractors who would be engaged to work on this project. Omission of any of the above-requested information pertaining to the offeror and/or any subcontractors proposed by the offeror in performing this contract, will weigh against the offeror during the Contracting Officer's evaluation of the offeror's proposal to this RFP. The price proposal submitted shall be a separate proposal from the above requested Technical Capabilities/Experience proposal. The price proposal shall include a total contract price and the following component prices: a) preparation work; b) fieldwork c) data processing; d) report preparation; and e) miscellaneous. Following an initial evaluation of the Technical Capabilities/Experience Proposal and Price Proposal submitted, discussions may be held with firms within the competitive range. (x) Offerors shall include a completed copy of the provision FAR 52.212-3 Offeror Representations and Certifications-Commercial Items with its offer. Proposals must also include contractor's DUNS Number, prompt payment terms, and correct remittance address, if different from mailing address. The contractor must be registered on-line with the Central Contractor Registration (CCR) Web site at: http://www.ccr.gov/Start.aspx. The successful Offeror will be required to complete and submit an ACH form, for Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), to the Contracting Officer before submitting their first invoice. (xi) The FAR clause 52.212-4 Contract Terms and Conditions-Commercial Items, applies to this acquisition with no addenda to the clause. (xii) FAR clause 52.212-5 Contract Terms and Conditions Required to Implement Statutes or Executive Orders-Commercial Items, applies to this solicitation by reference and proposed subsequent contract as well as the following clauses contained within FAR clause 52.212-5: 52.203-6 Restrictions on Subcontractor Sales to the Government with Alternate I (41 U.S.C. 253g and 10 U.S.C. 2402); 52.204-10, Reporting Executive compensation and First-Tier Subcontract Awards (31 U.S.C. 6101 note); 52.225-13 Restrictions on Certain Foreign Purchases (EOs, proclamations, and statutes administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Department of the Treasury) and 52.232-33 Payment by Electronic Funds Transfer-Central Contractor Registration (31 U.S.C. 3332). (xiii) Additional FAR provisions and clauses incorporated by reference and applicable to this solicitation and the proposed subsequent contract are: 52.209-6 Protecting the Government's Interest When Subcontracting with Contractors Debarred, Suspended, or Proposed for Debarment and 52.233-4 Applicable Law for Breach of Contract Claim; (xiv) A Defense Priorities and Allocations System (DPAS) assigned rating is not applicable to this acquisition. (xv) There are no additional contract requirement(s) necessary for this acquisition other than those consistent with customary commercial practices. NOTE: See government-wide numbered notes 13 and 25. (xvi) Failure to provide any of the above-required CLIN may result in the rejection of your proposal. Full text of all FAR clauses and provisions are available electronically at the following Internet address: (http://www.arnet.gov/far). Proposals shall be in writing and must be signed by an official authorized to bind the organization. Oral proposals will not be accepted. Questions must be submitted in writing to the contract specialist at the email address or facsimile number provided at the end of this notice no later than 12pm EDST on Thursday, August 19, 2010. Proposals shall be submitted in an original and three copies and must be sent via courier or overnight delivery prior to the deadline not later than 2:00PM EDST, August 27, 2010 to the Attn; Myria Carpenter, BBG, Office of Contracts, Switzer Building, Room 4007, 330 C Street, SW, Washington, DC 20237. NO FAX OR EMAIL SUBMISSIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED. (xvii) Contact: Any questions related to this proposed acquisition shall be submitted in writing and shall be sent directly and only to the Contract Specialist, Myria Carpenter via e-mail at contact@example.gov of fax at +1 (555) 000-0000 no later than 12pm EDST on Thursday, August 19, 2010. All responsible sources shall be considered by the BBG. All written requests for information regarding this requirement shall include company name, mailing address, point of contact, telephone number, email and facsimile number.