Does your association have a formal bid document?
How often do you review it?
Have you ever had the opportunity to have a look at another associations’ bid document?
Have you ever let an outsider read your own bid document?
A fresh set of eyes can provide many useful tips on elements which are ambiguous or need further elaboration.
Louise Friis-Hansen from the International Federation of Surveyors shares her experience:
“The International Federation of Surveyors, FIG, is dependent on national member associations to submit a bid for a future FIG conference. The bidding material must therefore be appealing, not too complicated to approach, and yet to the point including all important details. After having worked on the bidding material for a long time it was difficult to judge whether we were actually sending the right signal, had included the right information and were asking the questions we wanted answered in the bids. We were not sure what to do, until I thought of ICCA. ICCA immediately took up the challenge to review the bid, and we are very grateful for this. Having fresh and very qualified eyes on the text helped us a lot. The response and comments guided us to make the bidding text easier to understand and the final bids easier to compare. The review pointed out ideas on what could be useful to include (e.g. we had not included information on WI-FI which is extremely important these days), formulations that could be misinterpreted or were difficult to understand, and hints on what information would be useful to include as mandatory. The very qualified and thorough review from ICCA helped us to publish a bidding document that has afterwards resulted in more comparable bids and has made it easier for us to evaluate whether the bidder fulfills our requirements.
Louise Friis-Hansen
FIG Manager”
Through the ICCA Association Portal you can also receive advice on your bid document. Register or login now via: http://associations.iccaworld.com