Unity Support Services is a trauma-informed supporting living service which supports looked after young people 16+ and care leavers. Unity was co-founded by Jodi Price and Freya Snart in 2021, and as a new start-up company, they had never tendered before. They therefore requested support from Hudson Outsourcing to ensure they submitted a compliant bid for the West Sussex Framework for the provision of Accommodation and Support for 16+ Older Looked After Young People and Care Leavers.
The tender involved the completion of 10 method statements which equaled 11 A4 pages of content. The tender was assigned to Senior Bid Writer, Robyn Crawford, and her team. Robyn therefore completed both the bid plan and initial conversations with Unity’s dedicated point of contact, Jodi and quickly identified that Unity did not have any service users or accommodation at the time of bidding.
Robyn advised Jodi that the lack of organizational experience would be a risk to the success of the tender, and that this would lose her marks against her competitors. However, as Jodi is a qualified social worker, Robyn advised her to delve into her own experiences with trauma-informed services and working with young people 16-18 years of age.
As part of the tender, a Health and Safety Questionnaire was also required to be completed. As Jodi was new at tendering, Robyn worked closely and transparently with her to advise her on how to complete the questionnaire, ensuring it was fully compliant prior to submission.
After initial communications and getting sufficient information from Jodi, method statements were appropriately scheduled and distributed between Robyn and her team to complete.
Robyn then underwent multiple calls with Jodi to extract further information and supported her with additional forms that needed to be completed.
Through ongoing and transparent communications with Jodi at Unity, Robyn and her team managed to complete the tender to an extremely high standard. The team successfully managed to develop the narrative incorporating Jodi’s individual social worker experience to strengthen responses. Unity was successful on the framework and were very impressed with the support provided by the Hudson Outsourcing succeed team.
“Hi Robyn, I just wanted to inform you that our tender has been approved by the Council and passed. We are so happy with this result. I want to say a massive thank you to you. You worked hard on this and made it look and sound amazing. Just how we wanted it to be. You were easy to work with and always got back to me quickly making the whole process less stressful. You worked to a good timescale and checked the process for us too. Explaining things well to me and helped me understand different sections and gave great advice. I am amazed with the service you provided.” – Jodi Price, Co-Founder and Chief Quality Officer.
