TERRIBLE experience for Innovate UK application

For the love of all that is good, do NOT engage Christine Clarke of We Write Tenders to be involved in any sort of tender, bid or grant application you might have. I first contacted her via People Per Hour to help me apply for the Innovate UK Inclusive Innovation Award. Everything from our first contact was a red flag - from the fact that she didn't have any jobs on that platform from within the past 2 years, immediately took the conversation off PPH, I couldn't find any reviews for her or her company (except a Companies House listing for a previously dissolved company, etc.) We were really short on time and I didn't want to take chances, so ended up contracting two separate writers just in case something went wrong. Thank goodness I did this! Within the first day, Christine (or Jean, as she goes back on PPH) had really started to sound alarm bells. We were meant to sign an NDA, and she said she would draft one up for me to sign. She sent me something that was clearly a copy and paste from several different documents. My company name was in the beginning of the first sentence, but by the time you got to the end of the sentence there was a registration number for a completely different company (I assume one of her previous clients). The contents also made no sense for the purpose. I ended up finally having to pay a lawyer to draft one up. The next few weeks followed in this vein - her sending me templates of things downloaded from the internet without gearing it to our company, asking me to do things that I had hired her to do as the expert. I gave her all the background info, she never asked me follow up questions to gain any deeper understanding of the company or project. Two weeks after she was sent all our initial information she couldn't even describe what the project was that we were applying for funding for - I had to completely pull apart every single thing she had written. At one point I called her up on this and then asked her point blank what her Innovate UK success rate was (I had asked her in the past if she had had successful applications and she said yes). She claimed she had won 80% of applications submitted to them. I then asked her for some references from former clients, and she sent a name and phone number of someone she claimed she'd written a bid for earlier this year. On further the company had only launched a couple of months ago, and didn't even have a website. Considering she claimed to have an 80% success rate it's laughable that she could only proffer up one fake testimonial. I only carried on the charade to see where it would go (and because I knew I wasn't going to get our deposit back) - by this time we just fully committed to the other writer. However the last straw for me was when she sent through a "risk register" that was a complete joke. Her excuse was that she wanted me to send through project plan - she had already been sent the budget, list of collaborators, project timeline, etc, but wanted me to do the actual work plan. I looked at the risk register she had sent me - a generic one downloaded from the internet, expect for where she had added in a couple of items - choc full of titles. And then she put each staff member's name (spelled wrong) against each of the lines, regardless of whether they were actually related to that task or not. It was an actual nightmare. We decided at that point just to go with the other writer. When we logged into the IFS portal to view the application we realised she had done absolutely nothing. The only entries were a copy and paste from our previous UKRI application, and on one question she had tried to describe the project in her own words but it was complete gibberish. We had to discard everything and start from scratch. Literally not one thing she did was used. She might come back with a bunch of excuses about how things turned out the way they did (her speciality - talking in circles) but if you know what's good for you, I would implore you not to use this company if you actually need to win the bid you are applying for. I would have given zero stars had the site allowed.

N Lawson - 10/11/2022 | report this review