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Festival Tenders – The Ultimate Guide

Posted on by wpengine

Learn all you need to know about festival tenders

Festival tenders represent a milestone in our recovery from the pandemic. With the summer coming up, and restrictions lifted there are viable opportunities for festival tenders. This is where we come in. In this blog, we’ll walk you through where to find these tenders, and how to win them. By the end, you’ll be ready to respond to festival tenders.

Where can I source festival tenders?

When most businesses begin their search for festival tenders, they’ll likely use a search engine. For example, they’ll use Google to find countless websites that may have opportunities available.

They will then have to scour each of these websites individually for contracts that are suitable. Remember, Google will also pull up anything that mentions the words ‘festival tenders’.

This can take hours and a lot of the time the opportunities may not be relevant. Or the deadline date may be very close and so you won’t have time to complete the bid. This tedious practice can quickly become frustrating. Thankfully, there are solutions available…

Via our Creative Tenders portal, you can easily find live festival tenders. You can use filters to narrow down your search for festival tenders. This way, you can select a budget, location, and keywords to locate the right contract for you.

Our portals are updated daily by our Opportunity Trackers. They manually search for opportunities to upload to the portal. They don’t use CPV codes to find contracts either. This means that there’s no risk of missing opportunities that are listed incorrectly with the wrong code.

Examples of festival tenders we have previously sourced on our portal include:

Provision of a Professional Conference Organiser for the Delivery of One Young World, Belfast 2023
Belfast City Council – Northern Ireland – Budget: £250,000

Grimsby Creates: Festival Director – ‘Grimsby Festival of the Sea 2021’

North East Lincolnshire Council – East Midlands – Budget: £10,000

Specialist Curator for The Good Business Festival

Liverpool City Council – North West – Budget: £20,000

Halal Food Festival

City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council – Yorkshire and Humber – Budget: £24,999

The Provision of Infrastructure & Services for a Summer Festival Event

Tamworth Borough Council – West Midlands – Budget: £140,000

Kew Summer Festival 2023 – 2025

ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW – London – Budget: £1,500,000

3 tips for securing festival contracts

1.    Researching the event!

Festival tenders can run rather tight with sharp margins, so ensuring that you’re running a tight ship is highly important. How many people are expected at the festival?

Calling the local licensing office can put you in good stead for figuring out the average attendance. What if you’re providing a service, such as catering? For example, the event has 5,000 attendants… how many hot food units are there? Let’s say it has 10…that provides your potential share to be around 500 people.

If you don’t know how much competition you’ll have on the day, how can you make an informed tender response?

2.    Zeroing in on the target audience

Your buyer will have a specific target audience in mind, and in your tender response, you need to recognise this. Your product/service needs to fit the buyer’s needs.

Let’s say you’re selling food/drink. Can you quantify how many breaks the crowd might have between acts? The closer your equation is to reality, the better your grasp on the potential profit will be. You can then utilise your potential profit to create a good pricing strategy.

The target audience will have different spending patterns, so the sooner you recognise this, the better. Ultimately, a competitive price will pique the buyer’s attention in your festival tenders.

3.    Qualifications, accreditations & experience

Depending on the contract, festival tenders require a fair number of qualifications. If you don’t scope out the requirements, it can be incredibly difficult to succeed.

With that in mind, check out the requirements. What if they need specific lighting operation qualifications? Do they need a minimum number of years of experience in filming live events?

Some of these requirements can weigh heavily in the buyer’s evaluation criteria. The sooner you know and are confident in meeting the requirements, the higher your chance of success.

Summary

So here we are, at the end of this blog on winning festival tenders…What if you need a summary? Creative Tenders has your back.

Where can I source festival tenders? – How to find festival tenders in your geographical remit on Creative Tenders.

3 tips for securing your festival tenders

  1. Researching the event – Checking in the local registry to research the average attendance. Spending time structuring your bid around this. If you’re providing a service, looking into the potential competition.
  2. Zeroing in on the target audience – Understanding the demographic’s spending patterns. Ensuring that your bid suits the buyer. Ensuring you closely fit the buyer’s needs.
  3. Qualifications, accreditations & experience – What do the buyers require? Is there a minimum limit for experience? The sooner you’re confident in meeting them, the better.

Need help writing your next tender?

If you don’t have the resources or time to write a winning bid, why not outsource it? Our sister company, Hudson Succeed, boasts an 87% success rate and have over 60 years of collective bidding experience. They offer four bid writing support packages to help you on the path to success. Whether you’re new to tendering, or simply need someone to proof your written response before you submit – we can help.

Tender Ready

Our Tender Ready programme is designed for those who have never tendered before. This 4-week programme works with you to ensure you have everything in place to tender successfully.

Tender Improvement

Tender Improvement can help if you’re already tendering but aren’t seeing success from your current efforts. Our Bid Writers will assess your previous submissions and supporting documents. They’ll give you feedback and guidance on how to improve, helping you to secure your next tenders.

Tender Mentor

If you’ve written a tender and need someone to proofread it – Tender Mentor is for you. A Bid Writer will double-check it’s in line with the specification and free of any grammar or spelling mistakes.

Tender Writing

If you’ve found the perfect tender but don’t know where to start – we can help. Send the specification over to us and our Bid Team will do the rest. They’ll let you know what they need from you and provide you with a full breakdown. They’ll even submit it on your behalf, leaving you more time to focus on your business.

Get in touch to find out more information.

Want to save even more time?

Upgrading to Discover Elite will ensure you never miss a tendering opportunity even when you’re busy!

The Ultimate Time-Saving Tool offers your business:

  • An annual subscription to a maximum of two Discover portals of your choice.
  • Up to five bid breakdowns per month to help you make your bid or no-bid
  • Weekly phone calls with your Account Manager to discuss viable leads and tendering opportunities.
  • Award and pre-market engagement notices monitored on your behalf.
  • Public and private buyer portal management including registering, password management, downloading documents and assessing viability based on your bid strategy.

We also source opportunities for sectors including:

Book a free live demo with Creative Tenders to see how we can help your business grow.

The Rules and Regulations when Tendering!

Posted on by John Hudson

The Rules and Regulations when Tendering

Procurement: – The aspect of a business that many organisations wish was easier.

Buyers in the public sector, such as housing associations, councils, and other relevant government departments are dealing with public money. Our taxes! So, therefore, all that is procured must be done so in the fairest and most transparent ways possible.

If any conflicts of interest and/or other bias proceedings occur when tendering, there can be serious consequences to this. Especially with buyers paying massive fines and/or representatives facing prison time. The way in which procurement departments procure all works in the fairest way possible is called ‘sourcing the most economically advantageous tender’ (MEAT). This is usually established via an open process:

Open Process

 Open to all organisations to submit a tender. On large projects, this may involve a pre-qualification process (PQQ) that results in a list of suitable suppliers who will be invited to tender (ITT). This open approach usually results in a large number of responses of varying suitability (i.e. both large companies AND SMEs).

It has been noted that more needs to be done to ensure ALL organisations are familiar with the ‘open process’ of tendering and the rules and regulations behind it. Hudson Procurement Group are here to do just that! Our aim is to improve the nation’s understanding of the broad term that is Procurement and eliminate the worries and qualms of managing tender processes by providing lucrative guidance and advice to ALL.

Our focus here is purely based on how the rules of public sector tendering via an open process can affect you and what can be done to ensure you’re at the top of your game:

Each UK public sector buyer is obliged by EU law to:

  • publish the contract opportunity in the public domain – our industry-specific portals (incl. Creative Tenders, and Technology Tenders to name a few) are the first of its kind to have manual daily bulletins processed/disseminated by an efficient team of people, rather than [mostly] flawed algorithms via automated systems used by ALL our competitors;
  • inform all suppliers of how tenders are to be evaluated – 95% of the time this is split between a quality and a commercial ratio (sometimes including a presentation stage too) – outline your tender strategy/focuses here – is 80% of the mark purely based on cost – are your rates competitive?
  • ask for whatever they feel is relevant to the opportunity – this could be method statements, evidence of past work, policies and written procedures – are you up to date with all background content – you don’t want to spend another 2 whole days creating a new policy from scratch- this minimises time from your actual tender response;
  • not discriminate against businesses registered in another EU country– so currently you may be up against your French competitors or other EU companies that are trying to make their mark in the UK – know your market – how do YOU stand out?
  • clearly, state all deadlines – this includes deadline to ask clarification questions & deadline for submission etc. Organise your time wisely based on this!
  • provide at least a 10-day standstill period – this is the period between contract award notification and actual contract award, allowing other suppliers the opportunity to contest/dispute the decision[s] made;

What will change in the coming years?

As we all know, some sort of changes may likely occur over time due to the whole Brexit saga and we will be the first to update you on how this affects you! For now, there has been no immediate impact on the legislative position in the UK and all the provisions listed above continue to apply!

These are just a few regulations in a very large pond filled with procurement jargon. Our upcoming Tender VLE service will ensure this jargon is broken down and shared via understanding methods and practice. The days of wishing procurement were easier are now over! Watch this space!

NHS Digital Tenders & Public Sector Tenders in one place | Creative Tenders coming soon

Posted on by John Hudson

Creative Tenders was launched to support the growth of the UK’s creative sector.

Continue reading “NHS Digital Tenders & Public Sector Tenders in one place | Creative Tenders coming soon”