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Commission professionals to help deliver your project
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Plan and manage commissioned support with practical guidance on writing a brief, finding and assessing contractors, agreeing a contract and evaluating the work.
What is commissioning?
Commissioning means contracting people with specific expertise to help deliver your community’s ideas. They do the work, freeing you up to focus on the bigger picture or other parts of your community work. You might commission a facilitator for community engagement, a fundraiser, a marketing expert, an artist, a gardener or a researcher to evaluate a project.
What should a commissioning brief include?
Keep it to two or three pages. Explain who you are and what your area is like, then set out the aim of the work and who you want to reach. Include the outcomes you expect, your timescales, local partners and your budget, saying whether it includes VAT and allowing 5 to 7% contingency. Say how you’ll manage the work and assess responses, and what insurance, DBS checks and permissions you need.
What is this guide and who is it for?
This community action plan from Take A Part and Local Trust explains how to bring in outside expertise to deliver a community project. It takes you through writing a clear commissioning brief, attracting and assessing good responses, setting up a contract that fits the size of the work, managing the relationship, and evaluating the project together at the end. It includes an example brief for a youth engagement project and a case study from Sompting Big Local, which commissioned two local youth organisations to find out what young people want.
This guide will be useful to community groups, partnerships and community organisations that need extra capacity or specialist skills to deliver a project, whether that’s a community festival, a new youth service or an evaluation of your work.
What will I learn?
- What commissioning is and what you could commission
- Writing a short, clear commissioning brief
- Setting outcomes, timescales and a realistic budget
- Insurance, DBS checks, risk assessments and permissions
- Advertising your brief and handling questions fairly
- Assessing responses, running pitch meetings and giving feedback
- Paying applicants for their time with an honorarium
- What to include in a simple agreement or a standard contract
- Managing the work and keeping communication on track
- Evaluating the project with a “wash-up” meeting
- An example commissioning brief
Attribution
Produced by Take A Part and Local Trust as Commission professionals to help deliver your project: a community action plan. It includes a case study from Sompting Big Local. Adapted by Locality for MyCommunity. Photo credits appear alongside images in the PDF.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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