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This article is only relevant if you have purchased a group of FOIA credits from Starbridge. If you are interested in collecting custom FOIA info, contract expirations, or competitor proposal responses, reach out to your Starbridge CSA or Account Manager.

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What Starbridge Can Request

We send FOIA requests to all types of buyer entities to obtain purchase information. There are 3 main genres of information we request:
  • Starbridge requests individual line items of all transactions over a period of time.
  • Valuable for uncovering broad spend and vendor presence.
  • These are made by Starbridge, not on behalf of any specific customer.
  • Starbridge requests specific contracts of your competitors with a dedicated campaign that anonymizes your request (i.e., it is Starbridge that requests the information, not you).
  • These requests contain denser, more actionable information, including contract start/end dates and pricing details.
  • Contract details are often synced to customer CRM systems to enrich existing or potential buyer data.
FOIA for information pertaining to a specific, named RFP.
How We Do It As we launch FOIA campaigns, it is important to understand what we can and cannot request. Broadly, Starbridge issues 2 main types of requests:
  1. For a given agency or municipality or public institution, we can request contracts for a certain set of competitors over a specific period of time.
  2. FOIA for information about a specific, named RFP.
    1. The RFP process must be complete at the time of the request and deliberative material may be exempt, depending on the State’s law.

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Details for Providing a Request

We will FOIA for a maximum of 8 competitors in a FOIA campaign. You can still request more competitors, but we will need to do it in multiple waves.
  1. 1 buyer, 8 competitors —> 1 FOIA request
  2. 1 buyer, 10 competitors total: 5 competitors in wave 1, 5 competitors in wave 2 —> 2 FOIA requests
Reason for the hard cap: larger requests take far longer per institution, with some indicating that the scope of the request is too wide and therefore return nothing where they would have returned back detailed contracts if the request was smaller. When sending a FOIA request, it is important to be as detailed as possible in order to receive timely, complete responses. Many vendors have large suites of products, so specifying a category, a product name, or a description of the product will yield targeted contracts more accurately.
  1. Example:
    1. Request: Contracts with Ellucian, specifically the CRM product CRM Advise.
  2. FOIA verbiage options (most to least favorable): CRM Advise (Ellucian); Ellucian - CRM Solutions; Ellucian recruitment and advising software.
Without detail, a request for Ellucian, may yield only an overall contract/master service agreement with no specificity to a product line.

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Return Rates

Return rate (timeline) overall minimum expected returns:
  • 25% in first 30 days
  • 50% by 3 months
  • 75% by 6 months
  • 100% within 9 months
We generally see a faster timeline, but this is a ‘safe’ assumption of return rate average. Agency response times can vary due to many factors such as legal review of responsive documents, amount of information requested, and agency backlogs to name a few.