There’s two things I will never shut up about. That charities should be the first choice for delivering contractual social value, and that charities should be educated on this, and any other fact, that shows them the power they now hold in the social value economy
If you followed the social value in my perfect world, not the promise in the bid. The delivery. The person who runs the session, opens the door, sits with the kid who won’t come to the free swim because they’ve got nothing to wear and won’t say so. Trace it far enough and it would always ends up in the same place. A local charity. Someone who was doing the work before the contract existed, and will be doing it after the contract ends.
But in the real world, in more than a few cases, the prime won the contract. The charity did the good. The prime reported the outcome, banked the track record, and folded it into the next bid. The charity got a thank you, if it was lucky, and a small cheque, if it was luckier.
We’ve built a market where the value runs through the charity but the money and the credit run straight past it. And the reason, no one told the charity how much they’re worth now.
So let me tell them. And everyone standing near them, because the whole market needs to hear this, not just the charities. The two things I’ll never shut up about both come down to the same thing: power the charity holds and isn’t spending.
The first thing. Charities should be first choice, not last resort.
A company bidding for a public contract now needs social value the way it needs a quantity surveyor or a solicitor. It’s marks it can’t win any other way, and most of them haven’t the first idea how to actually deliver it.
A charity does. It’s the thing it breathes. For a lot of them it’s the only thing they’ve ever done. Doing good isn’t a department a charity had to build or a policy it had to write, it’s the whole reason it exists. A business has to be talked into caring about the thing that isn’t its product. A charity was founded to care about it.
Which is what makes it daft that the charity is so often the last call instead of the first. In the real world the prime wins the work, then goes looking for a charity to hang the social value on, about a fortnight before mobilisation, for whatever’s left in the budget. In a perfect world that’s the wrong way round. The organisation that can actually deliver the good is the reason the bid was worth backing at all, so it would be sourced first, named in the bid, and credited for what it delivers, not remembered in a panic once the contract’s already won.
The second thing. Nobody’s told the charity what it’s worth.
This is the one that actually keeps me up.
The charity is delivering the most valuable thing in the room and behaving like it’s lucky to have been let in. So do the sum nobody does. If a charity partnership adds ten points to a bid worth two hundred grand, that partnership isn’t worth a certificate and a mention in the annual report. It’s worth twenty grand of contract value, at the very least. The charity delivered that, and more often than not got a cheque that wouldn’t cover the petrol.
Nobody’s robbing anyone. The table just got flipped a couple of years ago and nobody sent the memo. For most of its history a charity applied, waited, hoped, and said thank you when something turned up. Grateful is the muscle the sector has spent thirty years building. But a company needs the charity to win now, and need is a very different thing to bargain from than hope.
What no one has taught them is the commercial half of what they already do. To turn up as a supplier with a product, a price, and evidence a procurement officer can read, instead of a good cause with a story and a tin. The difference between begging and trading isn’t what you do. It’s how you present it, price it, and position it. Suppliers, not supplicants.
So here is the perfect world in one breath. The charity is the first call, not the last. It turns up as a supplier and prices the work properly. Somebody other than the charity has paid for it to be ready, because a sector told to arrive already equipped, at its own expense, out of money it hasn’t got. And the contractor, or the commissioner should pay because a charity with a contract that renews doesn’t need a grant next year.
Where the ideal meets the real
Now the part I say before someone in the comments says it to me, because none of that is as tidy as I’ve just made it sound.
Start with the law. You can’t simply decide to hand contracts to charities, or mark a supplier up for being one. Equal treatment doesn’t allow it, and it shouldn’t. The lawful version is narrower and better: you buy the outcome, you let anyone show they can deliver it, and you build the charity’s capability so it can genuinely compete for it. First choice earned, not first choice gifted.
Then the money. In a perfect world the funder, or the commissioner, or the prime, pays for the charity to get ready, because they’re the ones who profit the day it wins. In the real world nobody has stood at a podium and allocated that money, and until somebody does, “fund the readiness” is a lovely sentence with no budget line under it. I won’t pretend I know who wins that fight.
And there’s a risk buried in the idea even where it works. A charity taught to win contracts, but never taught when to walk away, stops being a charity and turns into a delivery arm of whoever’s paying. Swap grant-to-grant for commission-to-commission and all that’s changed is who holds the lead. The lesson has to include the word no, or it does more harm than the problem it set out to fix. Size cuts the same way. A big public contract drags cashflow, risk and compliance behind it that would sink a small charity, and no amount of confidence fixes a balance sheet. The answer isn’t for a charity to carry what it can’t hold. It’s to go in through a consortium, or to make the prime carry the risk while the charity carries the delivery it’s brilliant at. Let the prime sweat the contract for once.
I should be straight about my own hand in this. I get paid to teach charities to do exactly this, so take the man selling the lesson with the pinch of salt he’s earned. But the sum doesn’t care about my motives, and this is why it matters to everyone and not only the charities. The commissioner who wants real delivery instead of a promise, the prime who needs a partner who can actually do the work, the funder wondering where their money goes furthest, all of them are better off when the charity knows what it’s worth. A sector that stops underselling itself is a better deal for the people buying, too.
So I’ll keep telling charities, and everyone standing near them, for as long as it takes. Charities should be in charge. It’s one of my two things, and I did warn you I’d never shut up about it.
Two questions, and I’ll read every answer.
For anyone running a charity: what’s the one thing that would let it walk in as a supplier tomorrow, priced properly, without losing the thing that made it worth hiring in the first place?
And for the people on the other side of the table, the commissioners and the primes: what’s stopping you paying for that readiness, when you’re the ones who profit the day the charity turns up ready?
Lewis English is the founder of Underpin Consultants, working on social value, strategy and stakeholder engagement across the UK. If any of this is sitting on your desk, you can book a free 30 minute conversation here.
You can read previous episodes here.
