Process

You’ve got an idea or something you need help with – a writing project, or a need for a communications system or strategy. You may know exactly what you need to do but you might know the results you are looking for. Either way, you contact us through our website, or by phone or email and give us an idea about what you need help with.

We’re super happy to hear from you and respond within 2 business days. If your project is something we can help you with, we set up a time to talk.

The first time we talk, we’ll need about half an hour. During this time, you tell us about the project you have in mind. You also tell us a little about yourself, your organization, what you struggle with and what you are hoping to achieve. We’ll ask you a bunch of questions too as we want to understand the big picture as well as the current situation. 

Depending on how this conversation goes, we will proceed. Maybe we’ll go with your original idea. Or maybe we’ll uncover a bunch of other opportunities or potential projects and communications tools and strategies that would really benefit your organization. Then you’ll probably have to decide what you want us to help you with. 

After you’ve decided what you want to go ahead with, we will create a short proposal that outlines the scope of the work and how much it will cost. If we talked about different ideas, and you weren’t sure which one you wanted to go with, we can provide a few options (different work scopes and different prices) in the proposal. Then you choose the one you want.

Once you’ve made a decision and approved the proposal, we’ll invoice you for a 50% deposit. That means you pay 50% of the total cost of the project before the work begins. This guarantees our time and commitment, and shows us you are committed too.

Before any kind of writing happens or major decisions are made, we need to discover everything possible about you and your organization. We need to know what you are all about, your values, what you do best, what your hopes and dreams are, who you serve, and what their hopes and dreams are. For real!

We need to clarify your voice and key messages so they can consistently be part of every single piece of writing and communications piece you put out.

During this stage, Sarah will research everything possible about your organization – online, on paper and in some of your people’s brains too. And we’ll need copies of  promotional materials you’ve created and used to date.

We’ll also want to know about any current opportunities, challenges and trends in your industry. So depending on how our research goes, we’ll probably need to have one or two more in-depth conversations where we ask even more questions. (We like to ask questions!)

At this point, we’ve got what we need. Depending on the size of the project, we may provide you with an initial outline that you can provide feedback on. Or we may just put our heads down and start working. We’ll keep you in the loop of where we are at with the project as we proceed, and we’ll be in touch if we need your input. Once we’ve got some good stuff, we’ll send it to you by email to review, or we’ll meet to go over it.

Now it’s up to you to review what we’ve created. This is your chance to take a good look, provide feedback and ask for changes. If required, one major round and one minor round of revisions is included in every project. These will need to be done in a reasonable amount of time.

At this point, we’ll also invoice you for the 50% remainder of the project total, as most of our work is complete. But of course, we are still here for you to do revisions and finalize the project. 

You send us your feedback and any changes you want made. We make those changes and provide you with an updated copy. This might happen a couple of times. Once all the changes have been done, and you are happy with the final product, we provide you with the final copy of what we agreed to in the proposal.

You did it! We did it! And your organization is going to benefit big time because of this hard work. 

A lot of our clients become long-term clients. We hope you will too.