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How to define your financial consultancy proposal - read our tips for consultants at the UN and in multilaterals

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by Henrik Rydén
COO and Co-founder of Impactpool

Have you ever applied for a consultancy at the UN or a multilateral organization, you know that it is not an easy task to come up with a winning financial proposal for the consultancy work you commit to do?

In this article, I have gathered some creative ideas on what you can do to price your services.

The procurement process for hiring a consultant looks different both within and between agencies.

I am not going to elaborate on the differences; however, if you are interested in different procurement procedures, you can ask ChatGPT for any of the following:

  • 'Request for Quotation (RFQ)',
  • 'Expression of Interest (EOI)',
  • 'Invitation to Bid (ITB)' or
  • 'Request for Proposal (RFP)',

When applying for a consultancy, you are either asked to submit the financial proposal at the time of application or as in most cases, later in the process when shortlisted.

This is an essential difference for you as an applicant; if the financial proposal is requested upfront, you may need to consider a proposal in the lower range to remain competitive.

If the proposal comes later in the process (meaning that the organization has primarily evaluated your skills and shows an interest in your services) you may look towards a higher range of your financial proposal.

Further down in this article, I will give you tips and methods on how you can come up with a price for your consultancy.
 
I will also share a common mistake that consultants make when calculating their Daily Rate, which can lower your monthly compensation by as much as 28.3%.
 
Given the ongoing financial turmoil, there is also one sentence that you must include in your financial proposal (that was not as important before).
 
Last, I will also explain what you can do to effectively fit your skills with the requirements/desires in the ToR and where you can look for pricing benchmarks when defining your financial proposal.

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