The Opportunity

Your role will be to help us win work which changes lives. In your first six months you would expect a mix of:

·       Leading Bids – running the process, keeping the team excited (but organised!), reviewing text, and coaching non-specialists to understand how they write winning answers.

·       Writing Bids Yourself – ranging from a 5 page proposal for a small consultancy project, to a 100 page opus going into a major aid agency. We want someone hands-on, spending a couple of days a week writing themselves as well as coaching others and developing our approach.

·       Refining and Owning Our Bidding Process, and Training the Team to Use It – we have c.100 excellent staff, but few are experienced bid writers so we would like you to develop a Social Finance approach which they can use in all bids, and to build the training program which enables them to learn it.

·       Designing Knowledge Management Infrastructure to Support Bidding - We don’t yet have a good database of past projects, of past responses (or scores), or frequently required datapoints. We know we need those and we would like you to help design our knowledge infrastructure. Other staff, including our CTO and our data and digital team, can help you.

This is pretty green-field – you’ll have scope to design and build the process and tools that work.

You’ll work most often with teams who focus on:

·       Services for Vulnerable People in the UK (e.g. homelessness; children’s social care)

·       International Development Worldwide

·       Tech for Good (digital services; data science)

About You

Ultimately, we’re more interested in what you can do then how you learned it. If you think you could do the role above then please apply! You don’t necessarily have to have held a ‘Lead’ type role already – if you’ve got good bidding experience and are excited about helping others do it well, then you might be the perfect fit.

We do need experience of bidding though and would expect most candidates to have at least three years’ experience of it. You will need to have experience of reviewing others’ bid text and coaching them to do better.

You’ll also need to work across multiple projects simultaneously – juggling the short-term demands of bids with the longer-term demands of building systems, tools, and competencies.

Desirable but not essential are experience of:

·       Bidding for contracts with local government, the NHS, Whitehall, major foundations, and international aid donors.

·       Creating bids for complex consultancy projects

·       Running bids in partnership with multiple partners or subcontractors

·       The policy domains we work in

·       Delivering consultancy services

·       Building knowledge management assets like databases of projects

·       Building up a team’s approach, and training others to use it well.

To view the full job advert please visit: https://www.socialfinance.org.uk/careers/vacancies