INSIGHT: Budgets are often unclear
(and sometimes deceptive!)
All of our pitches and proposals end with the same words:
Effective Creative is committed to entirely transparent budgeting and procurement.
And we mean it.
We’ll share our rate card, and show what we’ll do in the hours you buy.
We’ll break down any costs on the project and justify their value.
We’ll explain to you where every penny in our budgets goes if you want to know.
We can be this transparent because we have nothing to hide. And that’s how we think it should be!
IMAGINATION: Basic is best
(and clearest)
When preparing a quote, we simply cost out the project. That’s it. No secret formulas, no calculating % of overheads to weave in, no analysis of what we think you might be willing to pay or how much we could make. We just list what will be required and add up what that will cost. End of sums. No adjustments, or embellishments.
Effective Creative budgets are comprised of just three main elements:
- In-house creative time
- Freelancer time
- Project costs
The last is the simplest. All project costs – that’s printing, media spend, travel, and anything except people’s time – is charged at cost. We don’t charge margin on any of it. It’s not work we did, so it’s not stuff we should profit off.
Items one and two – that’s in-house and freelancer time – comprises the vast majority of most of our budgets. On most projects that’s basically what you buy – expertise, imagination, and effort.
In both cases, we work from an entirely transparent rate card. And when we say you need two days of Senior Creative time or four days of a Midweight Strategist, we can (and will) tell you exactly what we’re going to do with every moment of that time.
We believe we have an obligation to treat freelancers fairly and compensate them accordingly. Determined by specialism and level of experience, we offer our freelancers fixed and standardised rates. We then charge a 20% margin on all freelancer’s fees – to cover the time we spend maintaining our freelance roster. This ensures that whether you need a Digital Campaign Manager with a wealth of specific LinkedIn experience, a Video Editor who knows what wins on TikTok, or an Art Director with a particular passion for your cause – we can always staff your project with the person who will maximise your results.
We charge for our time in much the same way – we have a transparent rate card and the rate itself is determined by the type of work you require from us. So even though copy produced in-house might be written by a Creative Director, we’ll charge the hours it takes them at our Copywriter rate. Because you should pay based on what we’re doing, and the hours spent doing it, not who we are!
IMPACT: Value
(it’s that simple)
Most agencies have a lot of costs which don’t directly benefit the client. We’ve been built from the ground up to avoid these.
We don’t have an office, and we limit project management costs significantly by standardising processes, project models and embracing the technological solutions now available. That means there aren’t any unnecessaries or inefficiencies to hide in Effective Creative budgets!
And we actually do the work. When you hire Effective Creative, you’re hiring the people who actually lead, work on and co-deliver all projects. We are creatives first, and we founded a company to do the work in the way we believed it should be done, not to avoid doing it! The company is us. Nobody else claims a salary. And if your project only needs one of our expertise, only their hours will be on your budget.
All you pay for is the work you receive. Because that’s all you need and, frankly, all we really want to do!