The devil’s in the detail…but…

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had my first experience of bidwriting. I wanted to take the opportunity with this blog post to share how my thinking has changed.

At first, I thought the main challenge was detail. Before you write, you need to have a firm grasp of what requirements need to go into the bid, have your solution ideas to hand, keep in mind any references to legislation you want to make and so on. To get to that point, you have to quickly become an expert on a topic like Welsh environmental policy, able to work out whether the Environment Wales Act (2016) has a sneaky provision which undermines the solution you’ve just written. Needless to say, government documents are not neatly laid out, or designed for easy reading; in other words, control-find is a lifesaver. 

The result is, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. I decided the solution would be to spend a lot of time getting the detail right and then move onto writing. 

But as I started to write, I realised that I was missing the wood for the trees. To write a good response, you have to strike a balance between getting the right level of detail and not losing the thread of your argument. After all, a bid is fundamentally a sales pitch. We’re not just saying that our client will meet the terms of the contract or relevant legislation – the minimum expected of them – we’re trying to show how they’ll do that better than their competitors and bring added value, above and beyond what the commissioner requires. I’d put too much focus on the detail and not enough on the message.

Applying this to research and bidwriting, I’ve found that the best approach is to always have a clear focus on your high-level goal: make thorough notes that you can come back to, but keep in mind the underlying message you want to put across in your bid. Every bit of detail needs to serve a purpose. When you’re in the middle of researching a topic, it’s all too easy to go down every rabbit hole and lose sight of why you’ve spent the past hour reading a Local Biodiversity Action Plan. It’s a similar process when you’re writing the bid itself. You need to fit the requirements and solutions you’ve prepared during your research into the larger narrative, making it clear for the assessors what differentiates our client from the competition. 

This balancing act is particularly difficult as a trainee. There are a lot of demands placed on you. In no particular order, you have to develop your writing style, familiarise yourself with everything from prison education to labour market analysis and more, all while maintaining that balance between message and detail. After the last few weeks, however, with a lot of patient help from my colleagues (thanks Mark and Andy), I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Matt Harris