As funding has tightened up, social enterprises are being encouraged to seek work through competitive tendering for public sector contracts.
Funded by a social enterprise support agency, we helped a social enterprise working in abuse reduction services to start tendering.
The social enterprise’s management team found the whole prospect of “tendering” daunting so we used their background in preparing funding applications as a starting point. And, once the team found the process of tendering shared much common ground with the process of funding applications, their confidence grew. They realised they already had the knowledge: the difference with tendering was applying that knowledge to the tender process.
As well as helping them with understanding the tender process and its complex documentation, we helped them to manage issues around it not being “enough” that they were a social enterprise for them to secure business in a competitive bidding process – they had to be competitive as well.
With their confidence having grown, they are now competing much more effectively for, and winning, business.