Most corporate event briefs arrive as a paragraph in an email: annual day, around 400 people, Bangalore, December, please send a proposal. Three agencies then reply with three completely different documents at three completely different prices, and the person who has to choose between them has no way of knowing whether the cheapest one is efficient or simply missing half the scope.
That is not an agency problem. It is a brief problem. A structured request for proposal, an RFP, fixes it in about forty minutes of your time and typically saves several lakh rupees of scope creep later. Below is our full template, free to download and reuse, along with an explanation of why each section exists and what a good response to it looks like. We have quoted on several thousand corporate events since 1991, and the briefs that produce the best events are almost always the ones that answered these questions up front.
Download the corporate event RFP template
Download the Zeroin Corporate Event RFP Template (Word document)
No form, no email address required. It is an editable Word file covering all eleven sections described below, with blank fields you can fill in and a scope checklist you can tick through. Use it for us, or use it for agencies we will never meet. A better-briefed industry is good for everyone in it.
When an RFP is worth the effort, and when it is not
Running a formal RFP costs you time and it costs agencies time. It is worth it when the event is large enough that scope differences between quotes will be expensive, or when your organisation requires a documented comparison for procurement.
As a rough rule for the Indian market: above roughly 25 lakh rupees of total event spend, or any event with statutory permissions, multi-city logistics or board-level visibility, run a structured RFP with three or four agencies. Below that, a single well-written brief sent to a shortlist of two, followed by a conversation, is faster and gets you to the same answer. What is never worth it is sending a vague brief to eight agencies. You will get eight incomparable documents and spend a fortnight normalising them by hand.
What goes in the brief, section by section
1. Who you are, and who decides
Name the primary contact and, separately, the person who will approve the budget. Agencies plan their timelines around your approval speed, not their own. If a decision needs three sign-offs, say so now, because that fact changes the reverse timeline more than almost anything else in the brief.
Also state whether a purchase order and vendor onboarding are required. Onboarding at a large Indian corporate can take two to three weeks on its own, and an agency that learns about it in week four of a six-week timeline cannot book anything.
2. The event at a glance
Type, date, city, duration, expected headcount, and venue status. Venue status is the one people forget: an agency needs to know whether it is sourcing the venue, negotiating a venue you have shortlisted, or simply working inside one you have already contracted. Those are three different scopes at three different prices.
Give alternative dates if you have any flexibility. In Bangalore, moving an event off a peak December Saturday can change your venue cost materially, and you will only find that out if the agency knows it is allowed to ask.
3. The objective, in one sentence
This is the section that separates a good proposal from a generic one. An annual day meant to recognise long-service employees is a different show from an annual day meant to launch a new operating model to a sceptical workforce. Same format, same budget, entirely different creative direction and run order.
Write the objective in plain language, then write what has to be true at the end for you to call it a success. If you cannot articulate that, the event is not ready to be briefed yet, and no agency can rescue it with production value.
4. Audience
Numbers, seniority, whether guests are travelling in and who pays for it, whether spouses and children are attending, and any dignitaries who bring protocol or security requirements with them. Dietary, language and accessibility needs belong here too.
Attendance numbers should include a confirmed minimum as well as an expected figure. Catering, seating and transport are priced on guaranteed numbers, and a brief that says “400 to 700” is asking the agency to quote for 700 and then argue about it later.
5. Scope of work
The template gives you an eighteen-line checklist covering everything from stage fabrication to post-event asset handover, and asks you to mark each line as required, optional or not required. This single page removes most of the ambiguity from the whole exercise.
Pay particular attention to the lines that are easy to forget and expensive to add late: permissions and licences, insurance and medical standby, guest registration, travel and accommodation management, and the post-event edit. On more than one occasion we have seen a client discover in the final week that nobody had been asked to handle registration for 800 arriving guests.
6. Budget
Share a range. Withholding the budget feels like negotiating leverage and is actually the opposite: agencies that do not know the envelope either over-scope, which wastes a week, or under-scope, which wastes the event. Say whether the figure includes GST, and name which costs you will pay directly rather than routing through the agency, because venue and food and beverage paid direct versus paid through an agency changes the quote structure completely.
If you want a sense of what the realistic ranges are before you write a number down, our guide to corporate event management costs in India sets out indicative figures by event type and scale.
7. Timeline
Six dates: RFP issued, questions deadline, proposal deadline, pitch date, decision date, event date. The gap between decision and event is what actually determines what is possible. Six to eight weeks is comfortable for a straightforward corporate event; three to four months is realistic for a large conference or anything needing a premium venue in season.
Be honest about the decision date and then hold to it. Agencies hold provisional venue and artist options against your stated decision date, and every week of slippage quietly costs you choices.
8. What the proposal must contain
This is where you make the responses comparable. The template asks for a line-item budget rather than a lump sum, an explicit list of exclusions, the named on-site team, three comparable events from the last twenty four months, two contactable references, a reverse timeline with your approval deadlines marked, the vendor list with in-house versus subcontracted flagged, a risk and contingency plan, and the payment and cancellation terms.
The two items agencies most often skip are exclusions and the named on-site team. Both are the ones that predict how the event will actually go. Our post on the ten questions to ask before signing with an event management company goes deeper into what a good answer sounds like on each.
9. How you will score it
Publish your evaluation weights inside the RFP. Agencies pitch better when they know what is being measured, and you protect yourself from a late internal argument about whether price or experience should have won.
Our suggested starting split is experience 25 percent, on-ground team 20 percent, creative and strategic fit 20 percent, commercial value 25 percent and risk management 10 percent. Note that commercial value is not lowest price. It is scope per rupee. A quote that is 30 percent cheaper is usually 30 percent less event.
10. Commercial terms
Payment schedule, confidentiality requirements, insurance cover and its minimum value, ownership of photography and video, and your cancellation and force majeure expectations. Settling these in the brief rather than in the contract round saves a fortnight at exactly the point in the timeline when you can least afford one.
11. Submission and attachments
Say where proposals go, in what format, and who answers questions before the deadline. Ask for a PDF deck plus the costing in a spreadsheet: you cannot compare four decks side by side, but you can compare four cost sheets in ten minutes. Attach brand guidelines, venue floor plans and photos from the previous edition if you have them.
Four mistakes that spoil otherwise good RFPs
Sending it to too many agencies. Four is the practical maximum. Beyond that your own evaluation time becomes the bottleneck and good agencies, who can tell when they are one of nine, put their B team on the response.
Hiding the budget. Covered above, and it remains the single most common and most costly omission.
Asking for free creative. Detailed theme concepts, renders and full scripts represent real cost. Asking four agencies to produce them unpaid means you get shallow work from all four. Ask for creative direction and a draft show flow at proposal stage, and commission detailed creative only from the agency you appoint.
Leaving no time between decision and event. An RFP that awards on the 20th for an event on the 30th has not really run a procurement process. It has run an auction, and you will pay premium rates for compressed lead times.
A workable RFP calendar
For an event twelve weeks out: issue the RFP in week one, take clarification questions until the end of week two, receive proposals at the end of week three, hold pitches in week four, and award at the start of week five. That leaves seven full weeks for delivery, which is enough for a substantial corporate event without paying rush premiums on venues, production or talent.
Send it to us as well
Fill in the template and send it to four agencies. We would like to be one of them, but the template works just as well if we are not. If you would like to see what a complete response looks like, see what we handle on our corporate events page, or send us the brief below. You do not need to have finished the template first, and there is no obligation attached to asking.