A bid file can hold twenty-seven documents. You open one first, and one alone should decide what follows: the terms of reference. In a five-minute survey, without reading the other twenty-six, you often already know whether to say no.
The most common reflex does the exact opposite. You rush to the budget, look at the amount, picture yourself winning. And you miss the essential, which is never the amount alone. The ToR is the rules of the game. You read the rules of Monopoly before placing the first piece, not after buying the most expensive street.
The survey before the dive
Surveying does not mean skimming out of laziness. It means going after, in order, the information that can justify an immediate no-go, before you invest an hour in the detail. Five of them decide most of it.
- The evaluation criteria. What will you be scored on? If the criteria reward experience or means you do not have, there is no point going further.
- The technical and financial weighting. How much for the technical, how much for the price. It dictates your whole writing strategy, and sometimes reveals at once that the contract will be won on ground that is not yours.
- The budget ceiling, if given. Not every donor publishes it. When it is there, it tells you in one line whether the effort is worth it.
- Eligibility. Turnover conditions, references, status, location. This is the binary filter: one unmet criterion and the rest no longer counts.
- The place of execution. The hidden gem, and the classic trap.
The place-of-execution trap
The fifth point deserves a pause, because it costs those who ignore it dearly. A notice published by a head office in the capital can concern a real execution zone in a remote region, days of road away. You think you are bidding for an accessible urban contract; you are in fact committing to a heavy logistics mission in an area you do not cover.
The place of execution changes everything: the cost, the deployable staff, the feasibility. It is often buried in the middle of the document, not on the first page. Surfacing it during the survey spares you from discovering, three days later, that the contract takes place where you cannot go.
Why doing it by hand costs so much
Running this survey properly on a 50-to-200-page file takes half an hour of sustained attention. Multiply by the number of calls landing in a busy week, and the sorting becomes the real bottleneck. As a result, many teams skip the survey and dive straight into writing the first file that comes along, without having checked the rules of the game.
That sorting cost is exactly what AI compresses.
What Coco surfaces, and what it does not do
Coco, the AI assistant in ICOpedia, runs this survey automatically. It reads a 47-to-200-page ToR file in three minutes and surfaces precisely these decisive items: the evaluation criteria, the weighting, the budget ceiling if present, the eligibility conditions, the place of execution. It also computes a match score against your profile, so you can see at a glance whether the contract is within reach.
The division of labour is clear. Coco sorts and surfaces the facts; you make the go or no-go call, and you write. It does not respond to the call for you: it stops you from starting a two-week file on a contract the survey would have ruled out in five minutes. Same upstream logic as for tender monitoring: see the call, then know quickly whether it is for you.
What to take away
Before reading the other twenty-six documents, open the ToR and surface five things: criteria, weighting, budget ceiling, eligibility, place of execution. That single document is often enough to decide. Doing it first spares you days of work on calls that were never for you.
The survey is not a lazy shortcut. It is reading the rules before you play. Whether you do it by hand or with an assistant that does it in three minutes, it is the first move of teams that do not waste their time.
Want your ToRs surveyed in three minutes, criteria and place of execution surfaced? Try ICOpedia free, seven days, no credit card.
