Social Value for bidders

In our Win More Bids toolkit, we discuss all the essential components of winning a Social Value bid. It contains some of the top tips that we share with organisations through our strategic bid support offer including our ‘six steps to pro’ list.

It is not enough to simply report something you already do. Social Value is about additionality: what else you do in addition to core contract requirements, or normal industry standards. It must also be specific to that contract, meaning you wouldn’t be doing it had you not won the business.

One exception is if you demonstrably extend an existing program for a particular contract, because doing so creates additional more Social Value.

It is also important to remember that the Social Value commitments in your tender response must be proportionate to the contract value and related to the goods or services you are providing.

Strategies for SMEs to compete with larger organisations in the realm of Social Values include:

• Using your connections to the community. SMEs often have better knowledge of local needs, organisations, and community hubs. Target these in your Social Value strategy.
• Optimising the qualitative elements of bids. The qualitative elements of a Social Value response go beyond the what, delving into the how and why of your Social Value commitments. For instance, don’t just say that you will hire five apprentices and take one into full time employment – detail the groups and areas they will come from, the partners you will work with, and why you have made these decisions. This is an opportunity to tell a powerful Social Value story – also, quantitative targets are marked down by evaluators if they are not backed up a robust supporting narrative.
• Prioritising specificity and targeting. One impactful approach SMEs can take is to leverage their specialisms. An SME might be able to provide more innovative and specialist Social Value initiatives for bids than larger multi-disciplinary companies can. How can your core offering, skills, and expertise support the local community?
• Building relationships in the supply chain. Many tier one contractors have targets and programmes in place to work with SMEs. If you are an SME, you can gain access to a wider range of opportunities by connecting with these tier one contractors and showing your Social Value capabilities.  

A project is the activity against which you measure your Social Value. For example, this may be delivery of a successfully tendered contract, delivery on a specific project site, a real estate asset or business unit.

Social Value can be measured across different departments or customers as their own unique entities, as a roll up of projects managed by those departments or customers, or as a combination of the two. We encourage  you to think about how you want to ultimately extract your Social Value data throughout onboarding and deliver a setup that ensures compatibility with  the desired reporting outcomes. Best practice to maximise reporting granularity is to enter data at the level you wish to report on.

There is a difference between ‘asset’ and ‘non asset’ projects. Asset projects are real estate such as offices, retail, and housing. Non-asset projects include contracts, business activities (product lines), services, divisions, individual clients or business divisions.