Tender News & Insights

Innovation is one of the most requested — and most poorly scored — criteria in public bidding. Suppliers reach for the word, sprinkle in “cutting-edge” and “transformational,”...

If you bid for public contracts in Ireland or the EU, almost everything you write is marked under one framework: MEAT — the Most Economically Advantageous Tender. Understand what MEAT actually rewards and you understand why some bids win on more than price. Misunderstand it and you’ll keep losing to suppliers who aren’t cheaper, just better positioned against the criteria.

The fastest way to understand how your bid will be marked is to see the instrument that marks it. A scoring matrix is no more than a structured way of turning a written answer into a number — but most suppliers never look at one closely, and so they write blind. This article walks through the components and gives worked examples you can hold your own responses up against.

Most bids don’t lose because they’re weak. They lose because they leak marks — a point here, two points there — across answers that everyone on the team thought were fine. The losses are quiet, predictable, and almost always fixable before submission, if you know what to look for.

Most suppliers picture tender evaluation as a careful, generous read — an expert sitting with your response, weighing its merits, appreciating the work. That picture is comforting, and it is almost entirely wrong. It leads teams to write for a reader who does not exist, and to be quietly baffled when a strong, compliant bid comes back with a middling score.

Social value in tenders is now a standard component of public sector procurement – but how it counts depends heavily on where you’re bidding. In the UK it’s usually a weighted, scored award criterion worth 10–20% of the quality marks.

A perfectly written generic bid is built to lose. It will pass every compliance check, read smoothly, and finish third.

Tender evaluators have to justify every mark in written notes that could be audited or challenged.

Most bidders don’t know how tender scoring works, or what separates a good answer from an exceptional one.

The average submission scores 70–80%. Winners score around 90%. The last 48 hours, used on the right fixes, is very often where that difference lives.

There’s a category of tender failure that has nothing to do with the quality of your writing, your methodology, or your team – and it kills strong bids every month.

Almost everyone now drafts tenders with AI – making evidence gaps even harder to spot.