Who are Migrant Help? 

Migrant Help exist to protect people affected by displacement and exploitation. They offer asylum support, support to survivors of slavery and human trafficking and refugee resettlement advice on the EU settlement scheme and the eVisa programme. Their vision is for a global society that protects survivors of exploitation and displacement, treats them with respect and enables them to thrive.

The Challenge

Their challenge was around the competitiveness of the fundraising market when writing funding bids. They wanted to get themselves into the best possible position to be able to diversity their income, learn, improve and ultimately be able to take their knowledge and expertise and enable themselves to help more people. 

Why they chose Winning Tenders?

They heard about Winning Tenders and our training workshops through LinkedIn. They attended all our online workshops and these sessions made them think about their internal processes and how they could improve these to win more bids. As a result they realised that they would benefit from all sitting round and discussing how to improve their bids; they chose us to deliver our more substantial tailored bid strategy training in-house to their full team. 

The Solution

Following discussions, Winning Tenders designed a bespoke training day for everyone at Migrant Help who has anything to do with their bid process. The training day took place in their offices, allowing their team to get together and take the time to have a really good look at their bidding strategy and how they might improve it. The day included a number of practical scenarios designed to focus their minds on their unique features and benefits.

The Result 

Our training was designed to help Migrant Help with their strategy and approach. They learnt how to improve their bid planning and preparation and the benefits of developing case studies of each of their services to help strengthen their bids and have everything ready to go in their bid library. They were also advised to get feedback after every bid from the buyer, whether or not the bid had been successful and to continuously update their bid library.

The Migrant Help team took the learnings back to their internal continuous improvement group. They shared all the resources internally and had a follow up meeting. One of the key areas identified for improvement was at the very start of a bid opportunity when it arrives via the main portals. During the training session, the team identified that it can take time internally to gather feedback from key stakeholders as to whether to proceed / not proceed. Given short deadlines with bid opportunities, they knew they would benefit from making improvements in this area and as a team, they were able to relook at their internal processes. Since the training, they have now tightened the decision making process to be within 48hrs of receiving the opportunity.  This gives more time to focus on getting the right bid team in place, setting up a robust project plan and beginning the writing process. Taking time out for face-to-face training enabled their team to take a fresh look at their processes and find solutions to help them. It has helped to highlight the importance of the collective bid approach and the benefits gained by working together, especially as bids and tenders often have challenging timescales from announcement to submission. They have already put their new processes into practice and shared their learnings as part of their continuous improvement approach.

“We wondered why, even if our bids were scoring well, we weren’t always winning. We learnt from Phil and Karl through their online and face-to-face workshops that building relationships was key. You have to be proactive to win.”

Mandy Lloyd, 
Head of Partnerships and Income, Migrant Help