What charities can learn from competitive bidding

There are plenty of things charities should never have to learn from competitive bidding. Most have enough paperwork without borrowing fifty-page governance plans, colour-coded spreadsheets and meetings at which somebody says “gold team review” with a straight face. We can spare them much of the machinery. Somewhere underneath it, though, is a useful discipline: learning to explain why someone should choose to support your work when they could choose something else.

That can feel like an uncomfortable place to begin a conversation about charity. The work matters, the need is real, and the people doing it may already be stretched well beyond what their salaries or working hours reasonably cover. Having to construct an argument for supporting something so plainly worthwhile can seem faintly insulting. Surely the case makes itself?

From inside an organisation, it often does. You know the people who depend on the service, the gaps it fills and what happens when it cannot reach everyone. A prospective funder has none of that accumulated understanding. They have an application, perhaps a conversation, and a pile of other requests from people whose work also deserves to continue. Everything that feels obvious to you must somehow become clear to them.

Competitive bidding makes this problem particularly visible. A business can have excellent people, relevant experience and a sound solution, then submit a proposal that leaves the reader struggling to understand what any of it will achieve. The organisation has described itself accurately and still failed to make its case. Charities can fall into the same habit, giving careful accounts of their history, values and programmes while leaving the connection between a contribution and its consequences largely unexplained.

Lost in the detail?

Consider a charity seeking funding for a community transport service. It could describe its fleet, its volunteer network and the number of journeys completed last year. Those details have a place, but the reason to support the service lies in what those journeys make possible: attending an appointment, getting to work, seeing another person in a week that might otherwise pass alone. A convincing funding proposal connects the two. It explains how the service reaches people, what prevents them from travelling now, and what an additional contribution would allow the charity to do. The reader can then understand both the human purpose and the practical means of achieving it.

That is what bid writers mean when they talk about writing for the evaluator. At its best, it involves taking another person’s decision seriously enough to help them make it. Someone considering a grant needs to understand whether the proposed work fits their aims, whether the organisation can deliver it and whether the amount requested bears a sensible relationship to what is promised. They may also have to explain their recommendation to trustees or colleagues who have never met the charity. A clear argument gives them something they can carry into that conversation.

This requires some judgement about what makes the organisation particularly well placed to do the work. Charities can understandably be wary of this territory. Claiming an advantage may feel uncomfortably close to suggesting that another organisation is less deserving, especially when it is a partner or a fellow traveller in an underfunded field. But a charity ought to be able to explain the value of its own contribution. Years spent earning the trust of a particular community might make a service possible where a newly arrived provider would struggle. A partnership might allow people to receive support without having to negotiate several disconnected systems. These are useful reasons to fund an organisation, provided the proposal explains how they help the people it serves.

Evidence gives those explanations weight. If a charity says that its relationships help it reach people who have previously avoided support, the reader should be able to see some basis for that claim. Depending on the work, that might come from participation records, independent evaluation or carefully gathered accounts from the people using the service. The evidence needs interpretation, too. A large number of appointments tells us something about activity; understanding whether people received useful help takes us further. Good writing makes that distinction visible and resists the temptation to promise more than the evidence can support.

There are limits to what charities should borrow from bidding. Competitive processes can reward organisations with the money to employ professional bid teams, and a polished application is no guarantee of worthwhile work. Nor can every valuable outcome be reduced to a tidy figure. A charity should be able to acknowledge uncertainty, explain what it is still learning and make a case for work whose effects may take years to emerge. Funders have a responsibility to read intelligently, just as applicants have a responsibility to write clearly.

Even within those limits, there is considerable value in making the argument easier to follow. Readers should be able to see why the problem needs attention, how the proposed work addresses it and what their support would make possible, without having to assemble the case themselves from scattered facts and expressions of enthusiasm. The people delivering the service have already done the difficult work of understanding the need and developing a response. Their proposal should let that understanding travel.

We would happily leave most of competitive bidding’s rituals where we found them. Charities already spend too much time proving they deserve the resources to get on with their work. But while those decisions still have to be made, the quality of the explanation matters. A reader who has never visited the service or met the people it supports should be able to finish a proposal understanding why it exists, why this organisation can deliver it, and what could happen with their help.