How to evaluate Trust & Safety vendors

I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that Trust and Safety professionals need to know about to do their job.

Many of you have told me you want T&S Insider to offer more practical, day-to-day advice — the kind of content you can actually use at work, not just commentary on where the industry is headed. Ben and I have been listening. This issue kicks off a regular, hands-on series focused on how Trust & Safety really works in practice. Today: running a RFP process for T&S vendors.

Get in touch if you'd like your questions answered or just want to share your feedback. Here we go! — Alice

My guide to running an RFP process that works

I get asked about vendor evaluations and RFPs a lot — and with good reason. The Trust & Safety vendor landscape is constantly shifting: major players are rebranding, others are expanding their product suite, and many are positioning themselves as core infrastructure for the next generation of online platforms.

I’ve been on both sides of the process, first as a platform leader evaluating vendors and then at a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and tech vendor looking to sell into platforms. This experience has given me a unique insight into the motivations and processes on all sides, and I wanted to share some insights that aren’t just generic procurement advice. So, today we’re going to talk through what a good T&S vendor evaluation looks like and the pitfalls to avoid. 

Why RFPs matter

Whether Trust & Safety teams are evaluating software or a BPO, the decision will have serious repercussions on how your team works. It can affect things like legal compliance and reporting, user safety and experience, and the well-being of moderators.

Because of this, the stakes are high, and teams need to be extra thoughtful about how to approach the process. When I look back, there are several ways that teams tend to struggle, some of which are unique to Trust & Safety:

• Internal misalignment: Because T&S processes touch the whole business, different stakeholders (T&S, engineering, legal, finance, privacy, customer support, etc) will each have strong opinions. This is different to, say, an RFP for a marketing tool, which only marketing and perhaps finance will care about.
• Build vs. buy tension: This is unusually fraught in T&S. T&S teams often want to keep legacy internal tooling because they’re comfortable using it, whereas engineers may want T&S to buy so they can stop maintaining old systems. Or it’s the reverse, where T&S is excited about new vendor options but engineering insists they can build something similar because it’s new and shiny tech ("just give us a year..."). Either way, the RFP can become a proxy war for this unresolved debate. The same dynamic applies to BPO vs. in-house content moderation: different teams will have different ideas about what's best.
• Apples-to-oranges comparisons: Vendors solve problems differently, price differently, and measure success differently. There’s a risk of comparing fundamentally different approaches, which means you have to get creative with your decision-making process. This is especially complex for T&S, because every platform has unique circumstances and userbases that could require custom solutions.

What good looks like

You know your RFP went well when the final decision feels obvious to all of the stakeholders involved. In a perfect world, you should be genuinely excited to start working with your new vendor of choice.

The real proof of success comes when it’s actually time to implement. Ideally, it has the following characteristics: