BEFORE the pandemic hit in 2020, Tenders-UK was a thriving Bid Writing business in rural Melton Mowbray with around 20 staff. They worked with hundreds of small companies around the UK, winning them billions of pounds of public sector contracts.
BEFORE the pandemic hit in 2020, Like many other companies around the world, lockdown stopped everything.
No bids to write meant the staff were furloughed, and the company began to deplete its savings. Things looked bleak.
However, though trading had ceased, it didn’t mean that these enthusiastic people couldn’t do something meaningful, so while the pandemic continued to decimate the economy, Tenders-UK got creative.
Led by their Managing Director Mark Frost and Creative Director Chris Martin, they used the time to train instead of stagnating. In the process of thinking deeply about how they teach themselves to write better, they found a new way to teach others.
Tenders-UK combined the latest academic research with their own practical insights from the last decade that led to a process called 3Mind Writing®, a transformative way to teach people to write or rather think about their writing.
Due to COVID-19, Charities in the UK have lost around £11 billion in funding. To see if this training might help, Tenders-UK tried it out with their longstanding partners, Age-UK, and found it can dramatically improve the writing ability of charity staff, helping them put in stronger funding bids and secure more contracts to enable them to recover from COVID-19.
Recognising the potential of this idea, Innovate UK funded research to turn this into self-directed online learning – taking the teacher out completely. That research project has now been completed and has proved that learners achieve on average a 99.1% increase in confidence and knowledge in their tender writing skills.
Tenders-UK now has an online course that can teach charities to write effectively, at exactly the time they need to get it right.
This course is available to charities at a 50% discount to enable them to help themselves. Age UK is already rolling out the course nationally to their local partner organisations as a key aspect of their recovery strategy.
