Interactive bid material, like a clickable microsite or a dashboard built around the buyer's own estate, can be a brilliant way to make an FM bid stick. It can also get you into trouble if it's used in the wrong place. Here's a plain-English guide to where it works in a facilities management tender, and where it doesn't.
Start with the ITT, always
Every procurement has its own rules, and the invitation to tender is where they live. Before anyone builds anything, read what it says about format, links, attachments, word counts and page limits. If it's unclear, ask a clarification question. It's far better to ask than to find out at evaluation that something was set aside.
Where it doesn't belong
On public sector tenders, only what's uploaded to the portal gets scored. Plenty of ITTs rule out links and extra material in written answers, and evaluators are told to mark what's in front of them. So interactive material doesn't belong:
- Inside scored written answers on public sector portals
- As a way round word counts or page limits
- Anywhere the ITT says no to links or additional material
Trying to sneak it in rarely ends well. At best it's ignored; at worst it undermines the credibility of the whole submission.
Where it really earns its place
There are plenty of stages where a buyer is happy, often keen, to see something more engaging than a PDF:
- Presentations, interviews and demos. This is the big moment. Presenting from a microsite, and letting the panel click through their own sites, KPIs and mobilisation plan, shows you've understood their contract rather than telling them you have.
- Clarification meetings and site visits. Being able to pull up the estate map or the mobilisation timeline and answer a question on the spot beats "we'll come back to you on that".
- Private sector and corporate bids. Where the format is open, the whole response can be interactive, with a matching PDF for the record.
- Leave-behinds, where the buyer's happy to receive them.
- Before the tender. A short microsite showing you understand a target client's estate can open doors long before an ITT lands.
It has to be about their contract
A generic, glossy microsite about your company isn't much better than a brochure. What makes interactive material land is that it's built from the tender itself: the buyer's sites, their KPIs and SLAs, their mobilisation dates, their social value priorities. When a panel sees their own estate on a map and their own service levels on a dashboard, it becomes much easier for them to picture you running it.
Keep it private and keep a record
Bid material is commercially sensitive, so it should sit behind a password, stay out of search engines and never include personal data such as staff names or salaries. It's also worth freezing it at the deadline, so there's a clear record of exactly what the panel saw, with a PDF version for anything that needs uploading or filing.
And after the bid?
The best interactive material doesn't stop being useful at award. A mobilisation timeline can become the plan you track against, and a day one dashboard can be connected to real data and become the live contract dashboard. If you don't win, the building blocks are still yours, and the next bid starts further ahead.
Got an ITT in front of you? Send it over and we'll tell you honestly where interactive material is allowed, and where it would make the biggest difference.
See where it works