Requesting Pre-Bid Conference Attendees Lists

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Attendee lists to pre-bid conferences are important for subcontracting and teaming. We currently have 3 views and a 3 automations on this workflow:

1) Finding the Pre-Bid Attendees List

Most opportunities post their pre-bid attendees lists on the opportunity hosting site. However where, when, and how it is posted can vary widely per agency or bid hosting site. Below is a non-exhaustive list of some of the places where pre-bid attendees lists are posted:

  • City of Chicago Opportunities have a page for all pre-bid attendees here.
  • Illinois Procurement Bulletin will sometimes have a document called:
  • More will be listed as time goes on...

If you don't find it there and the opportunity is hosted on highergov, ask the AI chat if:

Is there a pre-bid attendee list posted on a document, and if so, which document? If not, is it mentioned where the pre-bid attendee list will be posted?

2) Contact the Opportunity Client Email

If you are unable to find the contact list on the site, after more than a 5minute scan.

Subject: Request for <Opp Name> attendee list

Hi <Title> <Client Name>,

> If you attended the meeting.
I attended the pre-bid meeting and wondered if you could please publish the attendee list with contact information? This will help facilitate networking and MBE outreach.

> If you didn't attended the meeting.
Can you please publish the pre-bid meeting attendee list with contact information? This will help facilitate networking and MBE outreach.

Thanks,
Sam Celarek
Nerevu Group
[email protected]

After 2 business days, send a follow - up email requesting the contact information.

3) Finding the Download List

If the pre-bid conference contact list is not available from the source or opportunity contact doesn't respond/declines to publish the contacts, you can also use the document downloaders list. Two things to note though:

  • This list of potential partners is not nearly as good as a pre-bid contact list as it is a much more noisy signal of parties who are actually interested in the opportunity.
  • If users have to pay to get the download though, then this is a much better signal.

This is also posted in a variety of ways, below is some of them:

  • Bonfire postings have the 'Document Takers" at the bottom of a bid page. However you have to click on each Document Taker profile to get their contact information.
  • Naperville Project have a Followers tab where you can see all the companies following the opp.
  • Cook County Opps just lets you click the download list, and even lets you export it to a csv! Easy.
  • More will be listed as time goes on...

4) Automated Incumbent and Partners List

If there was a previous winner of an opportunity Highergov will record the Incumbent ID associated with that opportunity and expose that in its API calls. Currently this is not hooked into any incumbent ID storage on our Airtable, but it might be one day.

There was also a partner's list functionality that was in the pipeline at some point in the past, but has since been deprecated. It would scrape all the company's following the opportunity on highergov, then put it into the partners table on Airtable. But it hasn't been run in a long time and is deprecated.

5) Recording the Pre-Bid Attendees/Document Downloader List in Airtable

After you have the contact information, you will need to record it in this Airtable View.

  • Opportunities: Link the record to the specific opportunity associated with the project. Doing this will automatically fill in the Full Name of the Opportunity associated with it
  • Contact Person: Enter the full name of the individual attendee.
  • Contact Email: Input the direct email address and skip the record if the field is empty.
  • Contact Org: Enter the company or organization name for the contact.
  • Contact Position: Record the professional job title of the attendee.
  • Contact Phone: Input the business phone number provided.
  • Contact Org Website: Paste the full URL for the company's official website.
  • Notes: If company seeks to be a subcontractors or prime, or has a BEP or other certification, and other details. Include typo fixes mentions here.
Full Name Opportunities Contact Person Contact Email Contact Org Contact Position Contact Phone Contact Org Website Notes
VM Software RFP VM Software John Smith [email protected] Better Dogs Lead Consultant (123) 456-7890 https://www.betterdogs.com BEP Certified

Only extract what is present in the pre-bid contact list, no need to fetch the data from the internet or research individuals.

The pre-bid list is usually formatted as a PDF. To get this in table format, do one of the following:

  1. Open the pdf in Word. It will use OCR + programmatic cues to put this pdf into a table format.
  2. If that fails, copy and paste the text into a text editor then do find and replace clean up. Here are some useful replace tips
    • find end of line text spacing and add a new line
    • add commas for between text spacing
    • convert to csv then open or import to excel as csv/text
  1. AS A LAST RESORT. If you can't copy the text and word can't read the pdf, use AI. You will have to check every line of this output to make sure it is correct. Open Chatgpt, submit the file, then give it this prompt:
I am uploading an image or PDF of a meeting sign-in sheet. Please extract the attendee data and organize it into a Markdown table with these exact headers: Contact Person, Contact Email, Contact Org, Contact Position, Contact Phone, Contact Org Website, and Notes.
Please apply these extraction and formatting rules:
- Data Mapping: Map the form's names to 'Contact Person', emails to 'Contact Email', company/business names to 'Contact Org', and job titles to 'Contact Position'.
- Handle Missing Data: If a field is not present on the form (like phone numbers or websites), leave those columns in the table completely blank.
- Clean Output: If the form contains 'N/A', 'None', or is left empty by the participant, leave the corresponding table cell blank.
- Phone Number Format: Format phone numbers as (xxx) xxx-xxxx ext xxx... or blank ofc
- Exclusions: Do not include any metadata columns such as Project Title, Reference Numbers, or Time In/Out.
- Notes: These should include information about the companies sought contractor status, certifications, or other information that doesn't fit into the other columns. Include typo fixes mentions here.

After that, clean up weird formatting, misspellings, and other human data entry errors using AI. Have it report all the suggest changes in this format:

  • Name of column fixed: what was the typo, what it should likely be, why it was okay to change.
  • Name of column with typo kept: what was the typo, what it should likely be, why it was kept.

Put these notes on typos into the Notes column.