Welcome
This 3Mind Writing® course is designed for people within the Social Care Sector who provide services to Public Sector organisations. It includes worked examples for Homecare, Supported Living, and Learning Disabilities Support. It is also suitable for Extra Care, Care at Home and Domiciliary Care, and Community-Based Services.
This is a unique online training course. Unlike traditional e-learning this programme takes learners through nine deliberate reflective practice learning cycles. As such, at the end of the course, your competence to write tender responses will have improved dramatically.
Who is the course designed for?
It is aimed at all grades of people, from Administrator to Chief Executive. Even experienced Bid Managers and Writers will benefit tremendously from the programme.
Your time commitment
The course is not for the faint-hearted. It will require at least 40 hours of your time to complete the exercises and reflective practice activities. You can try to cram the programme into 1 week, however we would suggest you take it more slowly, doing 1 or 2 lessons each week.
Impact
If you fully engage with the programme and the reflective practice activities, you will transform your ability to not just write tender responses, but any form of persuasive proposal.
Once you have signed up, start by following the ‘Introduction and Course Overview’ link below where you’ll find a full explanation of how the course works.
Money Back Guarantee
If after completion of the Introduction and first two lessons, you decide, for whatever reason, you do not wish to continue with the course, we will cancel your subscription and provide a full refund.
In assignment 7 reflection, the comments regarding the example statements provided mention the six honest serving men approach. What is this?
Thanks
From the stories vs logic cycle, the learning point I will take forward is from the example provided in ‘final thoughts’; the way that the learning disability example provided more detail (how, who, why) regarding the legislative frameworks the question was asking about. I do this in my writing, but perhaps need to do this more, and spend more time discovering who does what within the organisation I work for.
Another learning point is the storyline idea – combining both ‘once upon a time’ (showing empathy and organisational values) alongside logic chains (statistical data, black and white evidence that we’re meeting specification requirements).
From cycle 2, understanding the reader, I will bring the following learning forward with me into my future writing:
* Consider the audience that the answer is for (e.g., commissioner from LA, someone in management who doesn’t understand detail, or operational management who does) and respond using language they will understand/explaining key terms in more detail for audience who doesn’t necessarily understand commonly used social care terminology.
For the second lesson, 3SC2, how can we know what type of reader we have? e.g., Commissioned service/framework that is being submitted through a portal to a specified deadline? How can we know who the evaluation panel are and whether or not they are the same people who wrote the specification? Any top tips please?
Hi Helen. Good question. Firstly, if you are bidding to a local authority the panel is likely to consist of someone from procurement, a service lead and finance. Sometimes the buyer will be using a consultant to run the process, this is often clear from the tender documents. The tender documents sometimes also state who will be evaluating the tender.
For social care tenders the buyer may also involve service users in the process. This is a really important point because the content and the language you use needs to bridge both the professional and lay persons knowledge and experience.
And finally, you can always ask a clarification question. The worst that can happen is they say no, but they might give you the names so you can then go and do some research around the individuals.
Hope this helps.
That’s useful, thank you.
Executive Attention reflection – the one thing I will do now is break down the questions into separate sub-headings. ( I always start with them in but they often get removed to save word count)
Hello, For the first cycle, Executive Attention, does our response need to address everything on the ‘ Your buyer’ information provided or just the bits relevant to the organisation I work for? (I’m used to writing from specifications where we have to answer all bits). I’m assuming that the spec is so wide in order to accommodate all parts of ASC organisations? Thank you.