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Expressions of interest sought for a National Business Support Evaluation Project

The Office of the Third Sector is looking for expressions of interest for a three-year evaluation project. The project seeks to measure the impact of funding OTS is making available to Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) to improve business support for social enterprises.

OTS will lead on the project in partnership with all 9 English RDAs. SEEDA (South East England Development Agency) leads on overall enterprise policy on behalf of the RDAs and will subsequently play a key role in helping steer the project, as well as acting as a conduit in seeking consensus and feed back from the other RDAs.

Project aims and objectives

This three year evaluation will seek to assess both the quality of the customer experience through Business Link and the impact of the OTS funding on the mainstream business support environment.

Objectives:

1. To undertake a longitudinal survey to capture trends and impacts within the social enterprise sector; based on analysis into the customer make-up of the programme across the regions and their business support needs
2. To provide a quantitative assessment on the impact of the additional OTS funding on business support for social enterprises
3. To determine whether, over the lifetime of the project, more social enterprises are accessing and engaging with Business Link (relative to the baseline position)
4. To determine whether, over the lifetime of the project, there is an overall increase in satisfaction levels being reported by social enterprises in using Business Link (relative to baseline position)
5. To produce a methodology and subsequent assessment of the extent of mainstreaming of social enterprise business support requirements across the Business Link Network post-OTS funding.

Key requirements

A key requirement of your bid will be to produce a robust and suitable methodology that will deliver the outputs and outcomes consistent with the project's aims and objectives. Therefore the successful bid will need to have:

1. a clear understanding of the project requirements and subject matter
2. innovation and practicality in proposals
3. robustness of methodology
4. relevant professional experience, including the analysis of complex data sets
5. relevant staff expertise and qualifications
6. proven track record in multiple-stakeholder management
7. references for similar work undertaken
8. appropriate allocation of resources to meet time and quality thresholds
9. risk assessment of project.

Timetable

If you are interested in bidding for this work, please email veronica.johnson@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk by close of business Wednesday 9 July 2008.

Please include your organisation's full contact details and give the name of a main contact. Please also include background on your organisation (no more than two paragraphs). Please note that this information will not form part of the assessment.