Alternatives to Social Value Portal

Social Value Portal is a software platform used primarily by public sector buyers — local authorities, housing associations, NHS trusts, and central government bodies — to measure and report on social value delivery across their supplier base. It is commercially associated with the National TOMs framework (Themes, Outcomes, and Measures), which provides the underlying measurement structure that many buyers use to aggregate and compare social value data from different contracts and suppliers.

In practice, buyers using Social Value Portal typically ask awarded suppliers to log their social value delivery during the contract — recording activities such as apprenticeships created, training days delivered, volunteering hours, and local employment — so that the buyer can track progress against the commitments made at tender stage and report aggregate social value figures across their procurement spend. The platform is designed to give procurement teams visibility and accountability over post-award delivery, and to produce the portfolio-level reporting that organisations increasingly need for ESG disclosures and Cabinet Office returns.

Social Value Portal also has buyer-side tools for configuring social value requirements within procurement processes and, in some implementations, connecting those requirements to the National TOMs measurement structure from the specification stage. It is a well-established platform with a large buyer-side user base in the UK public sector.

The critical distinction is timing. Social Value Portal's primary function is post-award: once a supplier has won a contract, the platform helps record and report on delivery against the commitments already made. A supplier sitting down to write a tender response — trying to work out what commitments to make, what proxy values to use, and how to structure a compliant narrative — is at a different moment in the process entirely.

At bid-writing stage, a supplier's questions are different from those Social Value Portal is built to answer. Which framework is this buyer actually using: National TOMs, PPN 06/20, SROI, or a bespoke local approach? What proxy values are appropriate and citable for the commitments we can genuinely deliver? How do we structure a response that aligns with the buyer's specific scoring methodology? How do we generate a written narrative that is credible, specific, and proportionate to the contract value?

These are pre-award, bid-writing questions. A reporting platform is not designed to answer them — and in practice, suppliers often find that having access to a buyer's Social Value Portal account tells them relatively little about how to write a stronger tender response. The frameworks, proxy values, and evaluation criteria that determine how a response is scored live in the tender documentation and the referenced frameworks — not in the reporting tool.

Suppliers who bid regularly for UK public sector contracts often need a different kind of tool: one that helps them read and interpret the social value requirements in the ITT, build a costed commitment schedule using recognised proxy values, and produce a written response aligned to the buyer's framework and scoring criteria. That is a distinct use case from post-award measurement and reporting.

HelpMeBid is designed specifically for the bid-writing moment, before contract award. It is a supplier-side tool, not a buyer-side reporting platform.

The workflow starts with the tender documents. Suppliers upload their ITT or specification, and HelpMeBid identifies which social value framework the buyer is referencing — whether that is PPN 06/20, National TOMs, SROI, or a bespoke local authority approach. This framework detection step is consequential: a response written to the wrong framework structure will score poorly even if the underlying commitments are strong.

Once the framework is identified, suppliers build a commitment schedule using proxy values drawn from published datasets — National TOMs, the HACT Social Value Bank, and HM Treasury Green Book figures. Every figure is cited against its source, so evaluators can verify the basis for each number. The social value calculator illustrates how these proxy values work in practice, using real published figures rather than estimates.

The final output is a written bid narrative: a structured document that aligns each commitment to the buyer's evaluation criteria, uses the correct framework terminology, and presents proxy value calculations in the format evaluators expect to see. Where the buyer uses SROI methodology, HelpMeBid handles the deadweight, attribution, and displacement adjustments that SROI requires — factors that affect how gross proxy values translate into a net social value claim.

The result is a response built for a particular buyer's framework, not a generic social value statement — and one that a supplier can deliver to an evaluator with the proxy values fully traceable to recognised published sources.

The two tools serve different stages of a supplier's relationship with public sector buyers. Social Value Portal is primarily useful after a contract has been won, as a way of recording delivery against commitments and supporting the buyer's reporting requirements. HelpMeBid is useful before a contract is won, as a way of building and writing the response that describes what those commitments will be.

Many suppliers working across a portfolio of public sector contracts may find a use for both: HelpMeBid to strengthen bid responses at tender stage, and Social Value Portal or equivalent reporting tools to manage delivery obligations once contracts are awarded. The two functions are complementary rather than competing — they address sequential problems in the procurement lifecycle.

The question of which to prioritise depends on where the pressure is. If social value responses are costing your bid team time, producing generic narratives, or failing to score competitively against rivals whose responses are more structured and better evidenced, the problem is in the bid-writing stage. If you have strong bids but struggle to evidence delivery and report to buyers post-award, the problem is in the measurement stage. A clear-eyed diagnosis of where the gap is will point to which type of tool to look at first.