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An opportunity to support Lancashire's digital and technology communities

Manufacturing technology BANNER

Lancashire County Council is seeking suppliers to deliver support for some of our work to engage and shout about businesses in the digital and technology sectors across the county.

A number of small packages of work are on on offer for the financial year April 2021 to March 2022. The Council is looking for brief proposals from organisations or individuals who feel they could deliver a great quality service.

This work sits within the remit and funding of Lancashire County Council and their company Lancashire County Developments. It is also being supported strategically by the Lancashire LEP (Local Enterprise Partnership)'s new Digital Sector Group. It is intended to work alongside and complement existing support in the region including Boost, Lancashire's Business Growth Hub, and the Lancashire Skills Hub, including the Lancashire Digital Skills Partnership.

Project briefs for 2021-2022

Events programme: £10,000

We are keen to support events across the county to build a community where digital and technology businesses can learn from each other, share ideas, resources and support, and find partners for collaboration. We are open to this funding being used by an individual or organisation who can co-ordinate and filter this money to different existing communities to support them to hold public events.

We are equally open to those existing communities to pitch for a small amount of this funding. Feel free to come to us as an existing consortium, or individually and we will try to ensure coverage of all areas of the sector. We expect that given the current pandemic, the format of these events are likely to start as online networking events, but would expect those delivering to also incorporate in-person events as and when possible.

Actions and costs we would expect to be included as part of delivery include:

  • Co-ordination time for setup, registration process, marketing, feedback gathering, content/speaker sourcing and managing
  • Where online: meeting software license
  • Where in person: catering, venue hire, speaker travel costs

You are welcome to seek additional sponsorship for these events but this should not be relied upon to operate them to the minimum standard as outlined above.

State of the nation report: £20,000

Production of a 10-20 page report summarising the digital and technology sector(s) in Lancashire to act as a showcase and inward investment tool to encourage more investment, businesses and talent to the region. Actions and costs we would expect to be included as part of delivery include:

  • Scoping of needs from stakeholders (Including Lancashire County Council, Lancashire LEP, Department for International Trade, Lancashire businesses)
  • Collation of existing research and data
  • Some original research where gaps exist
  • Design of brochure with outcome of sharable pdf, sharable Powerpoint, individual assets / infographics, limited hardcopy run.

Roundtable events: £5,000

Recruiting for, hosting, facilitating and writing up of 6-10 roundtable events with Lancashire businesses from across the digital and technology sectors. Our aim with these session will be to gather regular insight from business leaders from different parts of the digital and technology sector (machine learning, cyber security, advanced engineering, marketing & design, language processing, etc).

We want to know what their main challenges are, how they've overcome them (approaches we can share with other companies), where we should prioritise government spend where possible, etc. Actions and costs we would expect to be included as part of delivery include:

  • Working with our team to design what insight we need from each session
  • Recruiting businesses
  • Facilitating the roundtable event to get the best insights possible
  • Writing up insights from the events into a sharable report
  • Where online: meeting software license
  • Where in person: catering, venue hire, participant travel costs

We expect most of these events to be online, but can discuss in-person options if and when that becomes possible. You would be ultimately responsible for sourcing an adequate number of businesses to participate, however it is likely that we will be able to suggest a number of these to you, possibly all for certain themes.

Ecosystem building: £20,000

Working with partners in key local areas across Lancashire to support the creation of / building up of the local ecosystem, by bringing best practice and approaches from how this has worked successfully in other areas.

The person or team delivering this work would need to have proven experience, knowledge and processes for how they have delivered this successfully in similar local areas (towns, local rural areas etc). We envisage this role requiring a commitment of on average 2-3 days per week, and welcome proposals around this range. We would expect over the course of a year for this work to deliver 2-4 successful established / strengthened ecosystems.

The aim of this work is to be able to leave the towns/areas to continue to build their ecosystem organically and / or with newly established local support, and not be dependent on the continued resource of our project.

Promotion of business support to digital businesses: £5,000

A year-round campaign to ensure our existing business support programmes are reaching digital and technology businesses. We expect this will mainly be through targeted Facebook and LinkedIn paid advertising, but are open to considering other strands where recommended. Actions and costs we would expect to be included as part of delivery include:

  • Costs of all advertising
  • Creation of simple design assets where needed
  • Campaign plan for the year (timings, targeted groups, numbers, outcome aims).

Create case studies of digital businesses: £5,000

We are ideally looking for a freelance journalist to be on hand to create case studies throughout the year to build our portfolio of case studies. We would need you to meet with the company, interview them, and produce a written up profile along with any additional key notes or insights. You would not be required to source the companies.

The value of this contract may be up to £5,000 but this is dependent on demand from our teams and so not guaranteed. Please supply a day rate and / or cost per case study in your proposal.

Applications

To apply for any of the above pieces of work, please submit a PDF PowerPoint of between 5-10 slides demonstrating you or your organisation’s ability and experience in delivering similar projects, and a brief indication of how you would approach delivery within the parameters laid out above. Please send this to maya.ellis@lancashire.gov.uk by Sunday 14th March, 2021.

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