The advantage of frameworks is the medium-term strategic perspective client and contractor can develop and implement. If each individual job was tendered out there’d be no strategic consistency, as was the case in the 90s before FWCs. The admin costs for the EC would also be huge.

The biggest problem is the one you mention – previous work is not evaluated. This is the only reason some companies in this sector bid using ridiculously, unrealistically low offers; win the job; deliver terrible work and rip off the EC; and still keep going.

The problems with the framework contracts in my few are:
- The total budget and length of the contract (making it only interesting for big, specialised “EU contractors”)
- The fact that individual contracts within the framework contract are subject to little or no rules at all
- No feedback loops: there are no built in processes that guarantee feedback about the contractors performance to the contracting authority
- No evaluation of past work for future bids: this is indeed tricky as the incumbent would be partly evaluated on past work while others not. But somehow the past performance should be able to taken into account.

Somehow the EU Commission needs to find a better balance between the very strongly regulated tender procedures and the rather flexible framework contracts (once won). It can not be in the interest of the Commission to support the creation of such parallel universes.

BTW, not all campaigns are stodgy and bland. But as I said earlier, the Commission gets the suppliers it deserves. They’re the market maker. And they hate taking risks.

Also, in political processes it is often very, very difficult (and very expensive) to identify what or who were the actual drivers for change (in legal terms or in citizens’ attitude). Most large NGOs (the WWFs of this world) are very experienced in online outreach, but also they will mainly measure how many people they reached and thus how much awareness they raised; they will hardly ever be able to evaluate what impact their campaigns had on potential issue change.

So to sum it up, campaign objectives should be defined in a way to allow measurement of their achievement; if and what ‘change’ they brought is a lot more complex.

What’s interesting is the self-selection going on: most of these companies only do EU work; whereas most comms consultancies, working elsewhere in this sector, generally don’t bother tendering for EC contracts (although there are exceptions).

Why? Well, handling the EC’s procedures is too much for most companies (given what the EC pays), so the ones that do this work consider EC project management as one of their core competences. Sad but necessary. Even sadder: some of them specialise in winning contracts at impossibly low rates, and delivering predictably rubbish work. One of them is paying the price right now – after over a decade of poor delivery, they’re now losing over half their staff. Ten years is too long.

But it’s simply unfair to blame most of these companies: the colour of the ocean is not the responsibility of the fish that evolved to swim in it. What I find encouraging is that so many of the people in these companies go Above and Beyond to deliver the best possible result, despite all the obstacles put in their path. Most of the people I know in this sector forgo more technically interesting work because they want to be a part of the European project.