Bids, Tenders and Proposals: Winning Business through Best Practice (Bids, Tenders & Proposals: Winning Business Through Best)

'Challenge funds', 'partnership funds', 'new opportunities funds' and similar schemes are some of the funding streams used by government departments to support local authority projects and business initiatives. The funds are normally distributed on a selective basis following the submission of bids in a process analogous to bidding for research funding. Applicants prepare their bids in response to guidance from the department; panels of experts assess the bids and recommend which projects should be accepted for funding and how much they should receive; the final decisions on funding are taken by the department.

Points to remember

• Departments may set a limit on the funding available to an individual bid, or they may indicate that bids over a certain threshold will need to put forward robust and convincing arguments. In any event, it is important to be realistic about the amount of money you are asking for.

• Your bid will have a better chance of success if you can show that the project will not go ahead without the support of the fund. At the same time, it can be useful to indicate that you have finance committed to the project from other sources of funding that recognize the value of what it is trying to achieve and are prepared to invest in it.

• Departments like bids that are linked to the fulfilment of government strategies, programmes and targets, that can add value to other initiatives and that can mobilize jointly the efforts and resources of different sectors of the community.

• They will expect you to set the elements of the bid in a logical order of priority and to show the extent to which particular elements are dependent on the scale of fund support: in other words, if you were to receive only say 50 per cent of the funds you are seeking, what would you be able to achieve and would this damage the viability and value for money of the project?

• Proposals for pilot or demonstration projects must show that what they are seeking to demonstrate is genuinely innovative, and that the results are likely to be useful to others.

• Departments will want to see a breakdown of total estimated costs and will assess whether the expected outputs of the project represent good value for money. Set out in the bid your plans for monitoring, measuring and reporting progress. Departments need information about the benefits achieved through the use of funding so as to be able to make a case for the fund schemes to continue in the future. You may be asked to provide a business case in support of your figures.

• Will the work of the project carry on after funding support comes to an end? If so, you will need to explain how you intend to make the project sustainable.

• Show that you have made a realistic assessment of the required funding profile and the risks to the success of the project, and that you understand the need to manage risks (Chapter 11). How far will the outcome of the project depend on factors outside the control of the applicants? If there are substantial risks, are they justified by the potentially high value of the outputs?

• There appears to be a positive relationship between bids that win project funding and bids that open with an eye-catching statement. ('A place where people succeed. This is Middletown. An area of achievement but also an area with problems that can be tackled only through a strategic approach to regeneration.')

• Never forget that you are in a contest. Your job is to stake an undeniable claim for funding support. To do this, you need to make sure that your bid stands out among all the dozens of competing claims. It has to be technically sound, well thought through and businesslike. It has to show how your project will make a difference. And in an environment where so much writing is bland and characterless, it has to be presented in a way that seizes the attention of the people charged with assessing its merits and wins their enthusiasm.