teamwork Archives | The Better Fundraising Company

My last post gave you a helpful, proven process to follow to write and design direct mail fundraising.

One of the steps in that process is the writing of a Creative Brief – a step that’s unfamiliar to many smaller organizations.

If having an example creative brief would be helpful for your organization, at the end of this post I’ve included a link to an example Creative Brief you can download for free.

And if you’re not sure why you’d want to start making Creative Briefs for your projects yet, here’s why a Creative Brief is so helpful…

To review, a Creative Brief is a document that contains all the details for a piece of fundraising (and often for an entire fundraising campaign). These details include who the package will be mailed to, the mail date, the offer, the specs, the creative approach, which story to tell, which photo(s) to use, the production schedule for the project, etc.

Creative Briefs are so helpful because they work for you.

When you write and share a good Creative Brief, you instantly create what amounts to an “External Brain & Project Manager” whose only job is to save you time and help you succeed:

When the copywriter doesn’t remember what to do, they look at the brief.
When the data person wonders which donors to pull for this mailing, they look at the brief.
When the Boss wants to know what the plan is for the April Appeal, you show them the brief.
When you wonder what you did on this project last year, and what the thinking was, you look at the brief from last year.
When you’re teaching a new staff member what you do for fundraising and how you do it, you show them the briefs.

All of which gives you more time to get other stuff done.

And when everyone is working from a brief, you end up with fundraising that’s more cohesive and on-target. You also avoid out-of-left-field situations like “the brochure for the capital campaign looks like a video game” because the freelance designer thought that would be cool. (True story.)

We use briefs for direct mail, email, campaigns, events, radiothons, you name it.

So if it’s helpful to you, here’s a link to download a sample creative brief that I created years ago. I’ve been using some version of this document for over 25 years. Some are 6 pages, some are 1 page, depending on the project and the organization. I’m sure you’ll want to customize it for your needs.

There’s nothing magic about this particular format or the exact info it contains. But what is magic is “thinking it through in advance” and then letting the Creative Brief work for you!

What’s your process like for creating direct mail fundraising? Does your process help or hinder your organization?

To (perhaps torturously) borrow from the famous first line from Anna Karenina,

“All organizations that have a successful process for creating direct mail are alike; each organization that has an unsuccessful process for creating direct mail is unsuccessful in its own way.”

After helping a couple organizations improve their process recently, I thought I’d share the process that I’ve seen be the most successful in case it’s helpful to you.

Creative Meeting: this is where the goals of the project are confirmed, the offer and audience decided, the creative approach is determined, and which story to tell is decided. The more details thought through at this stage, the better.
Creative Brief: all the details for the project are written down in the Creative Brief. The Brief then becomes the roadmap for the project.
Copywriting: the copywriter follows the Creative Brief and writes the copy. The resulting “copy package” includes everything needed to design the package, including suggested art direction as well as copy for things like the outer envelope and reply card.
Copy editing: the copy package is circulated, to as small a group as possible, for edits and feedback. One designated person makes the edits and resolves conflicting opinions. Additional rounds of edits are done only when necessary.
Copy approval: the Project Lead gives final approval on the copy and it is sent to be designed.
Design: the Designer designs the package, following the Creative Brief and the copy package.
Design Review: the package is circulated for edits and feedback. Again, one designated person decides which edits will be made. The Designer makes the changes.
Design approval: the Project Lead gives final approval on the design.

Then you’re off to the races…

Of course, there are all sorts of tweaks and changes that can be made. For instance, smaller organizations tend to have one person doing most or all of the steps, and the steps sometimes get combined. Larger organizations tend to have teams of specialists doing just one or two steps each.

But the most successful processes tend to follow the same principles:

Think it all the way through at the beginning
Follow the plan
Keep approval teams small
Empower one person (ideally someone who has experience with direct response fundraising) to make all final decisions, because decisions made by committees result in fundraising that doesn’t work well.

I hope this helps with your process. If you have any advice to share, or improvements to this process, mention them in a comment.

In my next post, I’ll show you the power of having a Creative Brief, and include a sample brief you can download.

Tag: teamwork

Free Sample ‘Creative Brief’ [download]

Sample Direct Mail Process