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Social Value

Social value is the positive change that you create in the local communities within which you operate.

Services

Our range of social value practice services are designed to help meet our clients’ desired level of support and individual requirements.

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Resources

Our resources are designed to improve your knowledge of the social value.

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At The Social Value Practice, our specialists are here to support your social value bid writing needs across all industries.

Social value is a key requirement that often carries a high weighting in tender submissions and can be a differentiating factor when it comes to winning public sector contracts. In line with the central government social value model that emphasises the growing importance of social value, our experienced bid writers are providing specialist social value bid writing services. It is now a requirement for social value to be explicitly evaluated in all central government procurement, and a minimum weighting of 10% of the total score applied to ensure it has a sufficient influence to be a differentiating factor in the evaluation process.

Social value can take many forms, and it is important that the commitments organisations make are aligned to the overarching social value priorities of the purchasing authority and the needs of stakeholders. Our bid writers are experienced in identifying key themes and aligning your commitments to these, for example:

  • Employment opportunities – such as job creation for people in the local community where the contract is being delivered including targeted initiatives to support people from disadvantaged backgrounds into the workplace.
  • Protecting the environmental – initiatives for reducing your carbon footprint, such as using low emission vehicle fleets or using virtual meetings to reduce the need for site visits.
  • Working with charities and voluntary organisations – to support local community projects such as regenerating green spaces or providing befriending services.
  • Providing work experience – delivering a programme of work placements, paid for internships and employment taster sessions for residents in the local community.

Whatever the size of your organisation, we can provide dedicated social value bid writing support for the social value elements of your tender, either as a standalone service or as part of an end-to-end bid writing package covering all elements of the quality responses.

You will receive a fixed fee, no-obligation quotation for all our writing services, so that you know exactly what you are paying in advance, with no hidden costs.

How it works

Our expert team will support you to understand what the purchasing authority is looking for, respond more effectively and ultimately be more competitive with your bidding, in terms of social value. Support can be tailored to your needs, but will typically include:

  • Initial consultancy – we will help you to identify and develop a strong understanding of what the purchasing authorities’ goals are with respect to social value and any contract or community-specific priorities that they are looking to address. Based on this, we will explore with you workable social value initiatives, taking into account your operating space and the size of your organisation.
  • Drafting of responses – based on a consultative approach with your team, we complete the narrative responses based on the decisions you make following the initial consultation, supplemented by our bid writing expertise. All responses are quality assured and proofread by our team in line with our UKAS ISO 9001:2015-certified quality management system.
  • Support – depending on the approach adopted by the purchasing authority, there may be a requirement as part of the submission to complete a social value matrix or social value calculator. We recognise that navigating and completing a social value matrix or calculator can be daunting, especially if it is your first time, and we are here to provide support and walk you through the process.
  • Monitoring and reporting of the social value you deliver will be a key requirement of contract management. Keeping track of multiple initiatives across a range of contracts can be a challenge, and to support you we can provide access to our social value tracker tool if the tender is successful.

Whether you are a large multinational or local SME, have a track record of delivering social value activities or are completely new to it, our writing support – offered alongside our social value training and consultancy – will help you to put forward a compelling and competitive social value offering.

Other Services We Offer

Why it works

The approach we use for all bid support is structured and systematic and it works. Over 75% of our work comes via repeat business, a testament to our focus on winning tenders and on client service. By combining our knowledge of social value with our proposal writing knowledge and writing skills across sectors, we can advise on best practices, industry standards, and most important of all ‘what good looks like’.

For larger companies we can help to identify winning themes, bid writing strategy, and core competence; smaller companies may just require assistance translating their existing practices into a narrative which the evaluator will score highly.

Find out more about our bid and tendering process in how we work. At The Social Value Practice, we also provide social value training courses to provide your team with the skills and knowledge to understand the topic of social value and how to implement it.

 

Training Support

Our social value training courses will provide your team with the skills and knowledge to understand the topic of social value. We help to uncover the principles, motivations and drivers behind the adoption of social value across the public sector. Most importantly, we help you identify how to approach and implement social value in your own organisation.