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Register early—members get 20% off when enrolling 60+ days before courses start.
Boost efficiency, transparency, and accuracy in proposal management to improve contract outcomes.
Charting Your Course to Success
From foundational knowledge to advanced leadership skills, NIGP offers a wealth of tools and resources to help you navigate your professional journey and achieve your leadership goals.
Your step-by-step guide to a successful career in public procurement.
Get 20% off by registering 60 days prior to the course start date.
All the tools to help you successfully prepare for certification.
NIGP and Sourcewell are dedicated to lifelong learning and professional development for every member.
Start your job search in the field of Public Procurement.
A Network of 18,000+ Professionals working in the field of Public Procurement.
As volunteers serve the Institute, the Institute serves the profession, and the profession serves society.
Each year, NIGP recognizes members who have achieved hallmark status in the eyes of their peers.
The federal Cooperative Purchasing Program allows eligible entities to use available funds to purchase from pre-approved industry partners across jurisdictions. This program enables local, tribal, and state governments, along with public educational institutions, to purchase products for security, law enforcement, and IT through cooperative purchasing agreements. These purchases must be made through Schedule contracts.
Cooperative procurement can be beneficial for buyers, who may benefit from lower prices, lower administrative costs, and more favorable terms and conditions. Suppliers can also benefit from cooperative purchasing agreements.
At its most fundamental level, cooperative practice takes two forms: “joint solicitation” and “piggybacking.”
Joint solicitation happens when two or more agencies aggregate their individual product and service needs into a single solicitation effort. Each agency is bound to the contract that results from the singular effort.
Joint solicitation is a forward-looking, collaborative approach to cooperative practice that can provide clearly defined requirements. It gives prospective suppliers a clear understanding of the volume and service level requirements necessary to support the committed agencies. In general, joint solicitations occur with a relatively small number of agencies putting forward a greater – though shared – level of effort early in the procurement process to improve their negotiating position.
Piggybacking happens when an agency uses another agency's contract, even though it was not a party to the original solicitation and contract award. Agencies that piggyback on another agency’s contract are bound by the terms, conditions, and pricing set in the contract.
In contrast to a contract established through a joint solicitation process, a contract that allows for piggybacking does not inform the awarded supplier(s) of what the actual purchasing volume will be over the life of the contract. As a result, suppliers may not be in a position to offer the most aggressive pricing. Thus, the piggyback approach to cooperative procurement is a more retrospective approach to cooperative procurement than joint solicitation because suppliers can only improve their pricing and terms after the contract has been utilized multiple times.
The principle of piggybacking is fundamental to the growth in number of cooperative programs and the use of the contracts they promote.
REFERENCE: NIGP Global Best Practices - Use of Cooperative Contracts for Public Procurement
We offer the following list of cooperative purchasing programs in the U.S. and Canada for the convenience of the practitioner community. Program inclusion is provided at no charge and DOES NOT indicate endorsement by NIGP.