Cooperative Purchasing

Cooperative purchasing (also called "piggybacking") works because most state and local procurement laws allow agencies to use contracts that were competitively bid by another entity, as long as the original competition was fair and open. This saves agencies the time and cost of running their own RFP process.

For vendors, cooperative contracts are powerful force multipliers. A single SourceWell contract win can give you access to over 50,000 member agencies across all 50 states. BuyBoard serves Texas and other states. TIPS-USA focuses on education and public entities. PEPPM specializes in education technology.

Getting on a cooperative contract typically requires responding to an RFP from the cooperative organization, negotiating pricing, and maintaining compliance with the contract's terms. The effort is similar to a single government RFP, but the market access is orders of magnitude larger.