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

by Henrik Rydén
COO and Co-founder of Impactpool

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it is not an easy task to come up with a financial proposal when applying for a consultancy at any multilateral organization.

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:

'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 important difference for you as an applicant, if the financial proposal is requested upfront you may think about 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 do when calculation the Daily Rate, an error that can lower your monthly compensation with as much as 28.3%.

Given the ongoing financial turmoil, there is also one sentence that you must include in your financial proposal.

Last but not least, I will also explain what you can do to effectively fit your skills with the requirements/desires in the ToR and where you can go to look for pricing benchmarks when defining your financial proposal.

The feeling when you get your first consultancy paycheck much lower than expected and realize that you have made a common calculation mistake. Photo by Siora Photography at Unsplash.