The wonderful world of bid response limits

Pages? Words? Characters (with or without spaces)? What’s your favourite?!

Personally, I prefer a word count of the three. You don’t have to worry so much in terms of formatting as you don’t need to fit the text into a specific space, and one of my favourite jobs (as you may know from my previous blogs) is cutting out the superfluous “that” in a response.

With page limits, it can be a nightmare to try and reshape paragraphs to lose a line and get it on the maximum pages – it’s like trying to get a suitcase to close! YOU WILL FIT!!!! Clients have also started to wise up and we’re seeing more restrictions in the formatting – it used to be just the font style and size perhaps, but now set line spacing and margin sizes are coming into the mix. Won’t be able to do that times new roman size 9 narrow margin response any more then! If you think I’m joking, I’m not… on one pitch to a University, many moons ago, my colleague used just that formatting to fit everything into the page limit. It clearly still gives me nightmares!

We’re also seeing more clients saying you can’t use images – “but don’t they know images can tell a thousand words?” I hear you cry! Literally sometimes, and if you paste in the image, the words don’t count, right?! But no, that’s being stopped too. I do worry for the evaluators, having to read through pages and pages of plain text with no images to break it up a bit. It really can’t be a great experience.

But nothing is as evil as the portal character count fields. Why do they never (ever, ever) count the same way as in Microsoft Word? 2,000-character limit (including spaces, they’re not total Barbarians after all). 2,000 characters in Word – sorted! Paste it into the portal, and we’re 20 characters over. How is this still an issue and across multiple operating platforms? It just puts additional pressure on drafting, and certainly at upload stage! Again, it can’t be great for the evaluators either – especially when you are told to split answers across boxes.

I get that clients don’t want 500-page responses to wade through, but they do need to be sensible about page and word counts and particularly what they’re asking bidders to cover within that count. If their question equates to half the limit, they surely should realise something isn’t quite right? That’s my personal “favourite” – answer these 20 sub-questions in 500 words. Feedback two weeks later – response needed more detail… Ya think?!

I'm not sure what the future holds, as it seems to be only getting more restrictive. Maybe, one day, we'll have to answer questions in two words. Easy - pick us!