Business Support for the Third Sector

The Scottish Government has a requirement to place a contract with an external service provider for the provision of tailored Business Support to the Third Sector. The Scottish Government is seeking a supplier to work with them to market and deliver start-up, business support, and leadership development services to the enterprising third sector in Scotland.

The Service Provider must deliver the following components to service recipients through the contract:

• Start-up support which considers a range of potential business models, and makes effective referrals if social enterprise models are not the most appropriate based on sound legal understanding of each business model.
• Support for organisations post start-up moving to trading and becoming established enterprises
• Business skills and competencies, for example, strategy and business planning and income generation
• Planning for growth and achieving financial sustainability
• Leadership training, coaching and development
• Business recovery and resilience, with early intervention where possible
• Pre-investment support, financial planning and an independent brokerage service to assist the enterprising third sector to access the most appropriate social investment products across a spectrum of levels of investment
• Procurement and technical tendering support to both individuals and consortia (tender training and development, bid writing, bid review) with effective signposting to existing resources like the Supplier Development Programme
• Support for marketing/communications and digital/online services and ecommerce with effective signposting to existing resources such as Digital Boost
• Sector-specific support for just transition to Net Zero
• Raising awareness of the service across equality and diversity groups and capacity building and pipeline support for ethnic minority and disabled social entrepreneurs, working with specialist partners where necessary, and in a way that is mainstreamed across all service areas.
• Support for the sector to enhance its impact reporting of and approach to equality and diversity including effective equality data collection and monitoring
• Social impact measurement advice with a focus on smaller organisations, providing one to one support for the enterprising third sector to improve their impact measurement practice based on available tools and methods, ensuring a balanced approach to demonstrating value
• International awareness raising and capacity building to identify and unlock the potential of the enterprising third sector to trade internationally prior to referral to Scottish Development International. This must interface with the work of the International Social Enterprise Observatory which acts as a hub for knowledge and best practice for social enterprise and seeks to make international connections. It must also cross-refer to Challenges who are funded by the Scottish Government to set up a pipeline of support for organisations looking to internationalise their social enterprise
• The new service provider will resource and initiate a series of knowledge exchanges in partnership with social enterprise delivery partners and mainstream business support agencies as part of its stakeholder relations, service promotion, horizon scanning and staff development