GM Foster Carer Recruitment & Marketing Platforms

The GMCA are looking for a partner / partners to provide a Digital Marketing Recruitment Service to help us increase the number of approved foster carers in Greater Manchester’s LAs, to meet current and future sufficiency requirements for our looked after children.

The objectives of this Service are to:

• Develop and deliver a marketing and engagement strategy, utilising a range of content and media channels to reach a larger population of potential foster carers for the GM LAs.
• Generate high-quality leads, at appropriate volumes in line with the GM’s recruitment target, which are passed to the LAs seamlessly, who will then take forward the enquiries.
• Provide marketing and data insight and expertise to support the LA Fostering Teams, supporting the development of a high quality foster carer recruitment journey.

To achieve this, there are three main strands of work:

1. GM-wide Foster Carer Recruitment Campaign
2. Shared Foster Carer Recruitment Website
3. Customer Journey Support including a shared CRM

More details are provided in Section 4: Requirement / Specification. We reserve the right to award a contract just for items 1 and 2, and remove item 3 from the scope of work.

Each GM LA will continue to have their own local marketing campaigns, so the service provider(s) will also need to work with LA partners to ensure that the GM-wide marketing complements and strengthens local activity, as well as draw on local marketing expertise.

This project will be based on strong partnership working, and bids from consortia as well as individual organisations are welcome.

The budget available for this project is £250,000 and we expect tenders at this value, and at least £100,000 should be reserved for actual marketing activity / media buying. Tenders exceeding a total value of £250,000 and that have less than £100,000 allocated to media buying will not be considered.

The contract is expected to commence on 1 July 2022 and last 18 months. There is provision to extend the work by two 6-month periods, in case there are delays, but there would be no change to the budget. The GMCA reserves the right not to award the CRM element of the offer as it is undergoing a review of existing internal systems that may also have been invested in that may give the project more longevity. All documentation is available via the chest e procurement portal https://www.the-chest.org.uk/