Contract management

Get your organization or company fit for grants and contracts

There are many good reasons to aspire to service international donors as your client:

• They offer sizeable grants and contracts that run for several years
• Once you managed to deliver an acceptable project or contract, your chances of being succesful in the next call or tender increase substantially
• Once you have established a track record of compliance, impact and accountability - in short as a good contract manager - you build up a competitive edge that can also help you to win grants and contracts in other sectors and public funders
• As you implement your projects and contracts, the donor develops a certain dependance on you, in terms of knowledge and expertise, and, if you play it right, may actually not really be able to do without you anymore
• Donors rarely go bankrupt and generally pay quite predictably
• There may be a lot of interesting spin-off - even of grants and contracts that do not look so attractive in first instance
• Having a sizeable donor-related cash flow, may allow you also to build up enough resources to enter into other areas that you find important or strategically interesting but that the donors do not prioritize. It may also make you more creditworthy - you may use existing projects and contracts to negotiate additional contracts that require proportional own contributions with other donors or charities.
• You can get some of your research and development get funded through the grants and contracts.
• You may get involved in new calls and tenders before they come out and may be able to influence the tender documents, specifications and criteria. This will increase your chances of gaining follow-up grants or contracts.
• Let us face it, there are a lot of things we want to achieve that can only be funded through international donors, especially now that the charity donotions nad private sponships are structurally declining. Now that the international donors are making us compete more openly against each other, and insist on project-based accountability, we really have very little choice but to follow suit.

So, it is not so hard to see that you have to make serious work of winning international donor grants and contracts. Before applying for international donor projects or tenders you most likely need to prepare your working organization and re-organize your working routines to accommodate the donors' demands and conditions, and serve this client well.

Tenders2Go can assist you at this. We have substantial experience in all sorts of sectors and can advice you on how your planning, procurement, accounting, monitoring and management functions may need to be adapted at strategic, middle management and operational level. If so requested we can also actually take over the contract management responsibilities. We have done so for a couple of major and institutionally complex infrastrucure projects. 

It depends a lot on the specific donor's call for proposals or tender, and the nature of your organization or company, which changes will actually have to be put in place. They mostly entail results-based management, strict budget-based accounting, social accountability and far-going compliance in procurement, accounting, monitoring and reporting. We have therefore developed a contract management development toolbox, with a quick scan, that alows you to quickly (within a day) assess what might be involved, which challenges lay ahead and how they can best be approached. We can then also assist you plan the roll-out of these changes, and actually stage them. Often you may also need quality mangement, environmental management and social responsiveness certificates, with the corresponding protocols and work descriptions.