Our charity client provide advocacy services for a wide range of disadvantaged people including people with learning difficulties, physical disabilities and those for whom English is not their first language. The charity had been approached to consider tendering for a number of five year regional contracts with the Department of Health to provide the ICAS services in respect of health service for those regions.
Each regional contract would require roughly the same income as the current core activities of the charity. This would also require a considerable amount of time and effort by the charity’s management team, both to prepare the tender and to mange it if it were won in due course. There were also issues in respect of the transfer of existing employees and databases from the current providers to the charity. It was decided that the charity would prepare a tender for three of the regional contracts.
We were asked by the charity’s executive director to create the financial parts of the tender document, based on the information provided by the Department of Health and the current providers. This required creating a start up costs budget, a one year forecast for each region and then extending this forward for the next four years of the contract. A separate budget also had to be prepared for the increase in central overheads that would result from these contracts, showing the effect is one, two or three contracted were won.
We completed this work in consultation with a number of the charity’s staff including their book-keeper, facilities manger and the executive team. Particular emphasis was placed on ensuring transparency of the financial information, so we prepared detailed documentation showing how the figures were arrived at, which was not required as part of the tender documentation. Following submission of the tender the charity was advised that they had been short-listed for two of the three regions they had tendered for and asked to tender for a fourth. We then revised the existing tenders to comply with the revised requirements and completed the fourth tender’s financial information.
The charity won all three tenders for which they had been short-listed and this has had a huge impact on its profile within the sector, as well as allowing it to bring in high level expertise that it would otherwise have been unable to afford, benefiting the core activities as well as supporting the regional work.
If you would like to speak with our Charity & Not for Profit Group about tenders, please contact us.