"Government Supports" aims to do two things:
- Highlights that federal agencies are supporting local small businesses everyday.
- Encourage and help small business owners earn the government's business.
The federal "Micro Purchase" plan allows Purchase Card Holders to quickly purchase goods and services if the amount is small enough. While the SBA helps small businesses, there is a formal process and the contracts are fairly large in size. However, everyday, federal agencies need small things like office supplies and landscaping. There is little exposure on how to earn this type of work.
To address this gap, I've built a site that highlights these kinds or purchases and instructs "Mom and Pop" businesses on how get involved. The site also tweets these purchases so folks can easily follow updates.
To create this website, I combined the data from the Federal Procurement Data System that shows contract award information for jobs under $25,000. These contracts are sized perfectly for small businesses who are getting into the government contracting space.
These smaller contracts will help meet the 23% small business goal that the Federal Government is required to achieve (Small Business Act). In addition to the data, the site provides information on how to contact agencies and Purchase Card Holders. While there is not a comprehensive list of Purchase Card Holders in the federal government, collecting this data can prove very powerful to the small business community.
The site itself is built using Google AppEngine, integrates with Twitter using OAuth and uses bit.ly as its URL shortner. The Federal Procurement Data System (fpds.gov) is queried every hour for new awards and tweets are sent out every 15 minutes. The design of the website is mobile friendly and, of course, there are a variety of mobile twitter apps to allow small business owners to follow this website.
Main Site: http://govtsupports.appspot.com/ Twitter Page: https://twitter.com/#!/govtsupports
Thank you for taking a look!!
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