In a recent article written by Ian Evans, Director of Bids, Funding and Tenders (BFT) Consultants the 10 golden rules of bid writing success were revealed. In the first of a series of follow up articles, Golden Rule Number 1 The Early Bird Catches the Worm is explored to determine whether tender alert services are likely to ensure you higher bid writing success.
If you are a small to medium enterprise (SME) particularly in the not for profit sector resources available for bid writing and searching for funding opportunities are likely be limited. The biggest advantage you can give yourself in any bid writing and tendering process is time. Get notified of tenders as soon as they are published through online tender portals or specialist websites. For example register free with OJEU or pay to be with a notification site such as Tenders Direct and get tender opportunities delivered to your email.
The alert services are not without their difficulties however. For the inexperienced the sheer volume of tenders that are published each day across Europe can make searching for your bid writing opportunity a daunting prospect. It is advisable to use the search facilities to narrow down your search criteria as much as possible however it still takes a reasonable amount of skill, experience and good fortune to locate tender opportunities that are an exact match to what you are looking for.
Are fee paying services any easier? These services may offer more support in terms of finding a better match to your tender requirements however this benefit has to be balanced against the cost of subscription. Paying for searches that produce no results or results that you could have obtained for free does not make good business sense. The best option is to try before you buy. Most tender notification services offer free trials for a month. Test them out and see if you get the results you are looking for. At the same time carry on looking for tenders yourself and compare the results from the notification service with your own efforts. You may be surprised to find how many opportunities you can find under your own steam.
But are these the only courses of action you should take? Many tendering opportunities do not get submitted to the European Journal (OJEU) because the contract value is too small. Supply2Gov is a useful website to subscribe to in order to find many lower value public sector tendering opportunities. The Guardian newspaper publishes public sector tendering opportunities and specialist publications and websites should be researched as many advertise tender opportunities related to their specialist area.
If you are considering using a bid writing consultant to develop your tender submissions then it may also be worthwhile using their skills to research and locate tendering opportunities for you.
Whichever options you use remember, the early bird catches the worm. Get in early and give yourself plenty of bid writing time to submit a high quality tender.
