Expectations and Responsibilities

What We Can Expect From Each Other

Below are a few guidelines learned through the years that will help us make sure we reach our project goals in the time we work together. These are tried and true policies that have worked with other clients and are likely to work with you too.

1. Trust Yourself

Trust that you have made the right hiring decision and help us do the job you hired us to do. A lack of trust will derail the project almost immediately. So if you do have worries, get them out into the open as soon as possible. Letting something fester will only make things worse.

2. Respect The Process

Relinquishing control is really hard to do! We get it—especially if you have been doing everything in your business by yourself up until now. But we (kindly) ask that you allow us to do our job when it comes to the design work.

We can save a lot of time and effort by avoiding this situation altogether.

We need your participation in the process—your participation is critical to making sure we achieve our project goals—but this is something that only works when we stick to our roles throughout the project. We need to do this together with us as the design and marketing experts and you as the nonprofit expert in your service area.

3. Practice Honest Communication

Although you should trust and have confidence in us to do our job, it doesn’t mean you should blindly say yes to everything we present to you if it doesn’t sit well with you. Instead, ask questions. A design consultant should have a thought process for making design decisions. If you ask, we’ll always explain our reasoning. Then we can decide together if that reasoning makes sense. If you feel something is not working, please tell us.

Honest communication is the way to keep our relationship and the project healthy.

4. Stick To The Strategy

Think of the project as a canyon. You are on one side. Your destination (project goal) is on the other side. From our point of view, we can see down into the valley, and we chart a course down and then up the other side. But once we get down there, inevitably there are things that we couldn’t see from the top. Brush is blocking our path, the river is deeper than expected, etc. So we change course a bit, but your destination stays the same.

Small course corrections are natural and to be expected, but a change in destination means regrouping and re-charting the course. If you change your strategy, that means our destination is no longer the other side of the canyon. It’s somewhere else. When that happens, the entire course needs to be reexamined—

and there is a cost involved with that.

Sometimes that’s what is necessary. We completely understand that, but it also means that we will close out this project, and start over with a new project.

Client Responsibilities

Content

We’ll need you to set aside approximately 5-7 hours per week to devote to this project. A good chunk of that time will go towards answering questionnaires, writing copy (with help, we promise!), tracking down photos and videos, and working together to develop marketing strategies that feel authentic to your organization.

To be perfectly honest, the only launches that get delayed are because the content wasn’t delivered on time.

Please plan for this.

Feedback, Revisions, and Approvals

The rest of the time will go towards giving us feedback so we can make any necessary changes. We ask you to contain your feedback and change requests to the forms in your client portal or in the video walk throughs, as these help us eliminate any confusion that could lead to a delay.

Staying on Schedule

One of your responsibilities as a client is to communicate with us in a timely fashion. We pledge to do the same with you. What we are looking for is communication in a reasonable amount of time. It doesn’t have to be set in stone what that time frame is, but if you disappear for more than 10 business days without letting us know you’ll be out of town or unavailable, the project will be put on pause, and all work will stop. We don’t want that to happen. If the project is paused, re-activating it will be at our discretion, and it could be weeks before we can get you back into our work flow.

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