CORPORATE WRITING
I hear a lot of writers say they’re averse to corporate writing, and I’ll be honest with you—I don’t get it. Corporate assignments can be fun, stimulating, and rewarding on a number of levels. They come in numerous forms, so they’re great for expanding your range and your repertoire. They normally pay well. One assignment frequently leads to others. And more often than not you get the opportunity to work with bright, passionate people who truly appreciate your talent.
I suppose most writers instinctively take umbrage with corporate writing because they feel it isn’t true writing. Again, I don’t get it. When someone asks what defines me as a professional writer, I say this: I know how to tell a story. Sometimes the story is one of my own making—that’s fiction. Sometimes the story is someone else’s—that’s corporate work. But the two aren’t mutually exclusive; there’s more overlap than one would think. Companies are trying to tell their story, or parts of it, all the time—to customers, prospects, stakeholders, investors, even their own employees. But the people who work at those companies have typically been hired because they’re good accountants or good engineers or good assistants or good strategists—not, for the most part, because they’re good writers.
Organizations everywhere are sorely in need of those who know how to communicate well on their behalf—in short, those who know how to tell a story. That’s you, and you ought to take advantage of the unique ability you’ve been blessed with. Not everyone has. So don’t think of corporate work as a departure from real writing; just consider it a different type of writing. Once you get a taste, you might you love it for the same reasons you love writing a short story: When you start to put words together in just the right way, that certain magic takes hold, and it is,find I’m sure you’ll agree, the greatest feeling in the world.
Putting Yourself
OUT THERE
If you’re just launching your freelance business, there are a few things you need to take care of. At the top of the list is getting business cards and letterhead printed. When you do start to tell people about your practice, the last thing you want is to be stuck without a card to hand over.
The second thing is having your elevator speech at the ready. This is the thirty-second description of your business that provides someone enough information to get a good sense of what you do and also hopefully piques her interest so she contacts you to find out more.
The third thing is letting people know you’re in business by sending out an introductory letter and/or e-mail. When I launched my practice, I sent out hundreds of introductory letters—to those I knew, those I didn’t know, people, businesses … just about everyone whose address I could get. I discriminated little in this initial blitz, though naturally with each letter I dropped into the mailbox I became even more nervous that all the money, time, and effort I was expending might lead nowhere.
Then I received a phone call. One of my letters had gone to a high school acquaintance working at a company that manufactured and distributed musical compilations on CD. She had received my letter just as her boss was looking for a writer to help write snappy liner notes. Years later, this company remains one of my biggest corporate clients.
Another of my letters went to an old colleague. He had become the head of an executive degree program at a local university and was preparing to design that year’s program brochure, for which a writer was sorely needed. I won the assignment, which led to another three.
The lesson? You never know where work is going to come from. More important, you can’t count on finding yourself in the right place at the right time; you have to create the possibility of being there.
The Landscape
Corporate gigs will fall generally into three categories—Big Dogs, Small Fish, and Lone Wolves—each of which offers certain advantages to the astute freelancer.
Big Dogs are large companies with lots of employees, multiple divisions, and, frequently, offices in various locations. Such companies have constant writing needs in the form of memos, presentations, and reports. Though they usually have in-house communications departments, they also have managers and executives who oversee large budgets and sometimes choose to outsource specific needs. Sometimes an executive will come to you to request a minor writing project, like taking a few PowerPoint slides and “making them sound better.” The immediate need may seem small, but consider that if you pass this test with flying colors, the same executive is more likely to think of you the next time she has a document in front of her that she senses could be improved.
Because Big Dogs are large operations with multiple layers, heavy politics, and plenty of red tape, they can be harder to crack—but once you’re in, they can become serious and steady income sources. Do good work for one department and your name gets passed along to the next. Satisfy the needs of one important decision maker and you might end up doing ten different projects for that same individual. Work well with a project team of half a dozen people on one assignment, and there sit half a dozen individuals from whom you might just get tapped for a big contract down the line.
The best way to approach Big Dogs is with a well-written, professionally presented, one-page letter clearly laying out your credentials and your specific services, including examples. For instance, I offer writing and communications consulting services, so I let prospects know that I’m happy to edit an internal memo, design and implement a comprehensive integrated communications program, or anything in between. Always try to indicate the entire range of what you do without going on too long about it.
Don’t send your letter to the communications department. Those are the people who don’t want your existence to be known by the people they are, after all, supposed to be serving. And don’t send it to the attention of reception or the company’s general mailbox. Get the name of a specific high-ranking individual either by visiting the company Web site, checking their annual report (if it’s a public company), or simply calling and asking—and then send it to that person directly.
The vast majority of businesses today are Small Fish, successful but modest operations employing fifty people or less. Small Fish can be excellent clients for several reasons. First, they tend to make decisions quickly because there’s minimal bureaucracy hindering the process. Second, hard work and good service are truly appreciated because those employed by the company have to work hard to make money and stay in business. Third, the sense of collaboration and partnership can be highly rewarding, since you’ll often be dealing with the same one or two people on various assignments.
If you want your existence to be known by Small Fish, get in their faces. Don’t simply send them a letter; it’s likely to get lost in the shuffle. Employees at Small Fish often carry out multiple duties beyond their specific job descriptions, so they’ll have little time to pay attention to any unsolicited letter that crosses their desks, no matter how polished.
Here’s what you do instead. First, study the company and its objectives and list a few ways your services might be applied to assist them. Refine those ideas into concrete points. Find out the name of the company president or CEO—John Jingleheimer, let’s say. Then, in a crisp professional outfit, walk right into their offices. Tell the receptionist your name and, with a smile, ask if you might speak to Mr. Jingleheimer’s assistant about an important matter.
When the assistant comes out, introduce yourself and, again with a smile, briefly mention your services and ask when you might grab ten minutes on Mr. Jingleheimer’s calendar for an introductory discussion. The assistant might invite you in on the spot; have your discussion points ready in case that happens. More likely, the assistant will offer you time on another day. Accept it, present her your letter, ask her if she could kindly give it to Mr. Jingleheimer when time permits, and say thanks.
Before you leave, get either the assistant’s card directly or get her e-mail address and phone number from the receptionist. Within two days, confirm the appointment. If the assistant calls to cancel at some point prior to the meeting, ask immediately for an alternate time. Keep at this until you get that meeting. Those ten minutes represent an opportunity for you to present yourself and communicate why your services are valuable. This isn’t a hard sell, however; it’s simply an introductory meeting to let the prez know who you are, what you offer, and a few ways in which your talents might benefit the company given its objectives. There won’t likely be the offer of an assignment then and there, but don’t be surprised if one comes along sooner than you think.
Lone Wolves, the entrepreneurs and sole proprietors largely responsible for keeping the economy chugging, are constantly overwhelmed because they wear multiple hats—president, bookkeeper, administrative assistant, legal counsel—in order to keep their businesses profitable. On one hand, those in business for themselves are naturally more cautious about where and how they spend their money, so they might devote a seemingly agonizing amount of time to thinking about, say, a $500 contract before pulling the trigger. On the other hand, Lone Wolves eventually embrace the idea of delegating specific needs and are thrilled by a good return on investment.
Translation: While Big Dogs may send a lot of referral work your way from within their own walls, when you do a great one-off assignment for a Lone Wolf, the positive ramifications are threefold. First, you become an immediate preferred vendor—their go-to person, the one they turn to whenever a major writing need comes up. Second, they start to think you should maybe have a look at everything they write or circulate, since, if every time you work on something it comes out sounding better, how could they not pass everything by you? So you start to get notes asking you to just “have a look” at this memo or that presentation. A few hours here, a few hours there—it adds up. Finally, the great work you’ve delivered generates invaluable word of mouth, and the ripple effect from this can continue for years.
Connecting with Lone Wolves is largely a passive exercise; once you send your blitz letter or e-mail, they’re more likely to find you than you are them. Referrals will likely come initially from family or friends. Knock every project out of the park, and, as the word-of-mouth ripple begins to expand outward, the Lone Wolves among your clients will become a larger, increasingly diverse group, each one counting on you to help sustain their livelihoods. I don’t know about you, but I consider that a pretty special responsibility.
Three Critical
BITS OF INFORMATION
Once you blitz the market letting everyone know you’re in business, you’re going to start getting inquiries, possibly faster than you expect. To keep the momentum going, you’ll need to have three crucial pieces of information constantly at hand.
1. Your rate. When your work is accepted by newspapers, magazines, or literary journals, you’ll have little say about what you’re paid. Once you become established, you’ll earn a bit of wiggle room when it comes to negotiating rates upward, but only a bit. For the most part, rates are set. But when you write for the corporate market, it’s you alone who determines what to quote for a given assignment or project, and this will be based on the hourly rate you determine for yourself. Writer’s Market lists low, high, and average rates for every type of writing you can think of. Base your hourly rate on this data. When people ask what you charge, don’t be sheepish. Answer quickly and firmly. The more you sound like you believe in the value of your services, the more potential clients will believe it, too.
You’ll see under the What Do I Charge? sections that I talk in terms of hours, not dollars. This is because (a) every writer’s rate will be different, so it isn’t fair to assign a blanket dollar amount to a specific type of project, and (b) within the same type of project there will be different sizes of projects. A presentation might be five slides long or fifty; a speech might be three minutes long or thirty. So when you quote on a project, do it based on a fair assessment of how many hours of your time you think it will require. Don’t approach a project thinking “How much money do I want to make off this?” because you’ll inevitably skew your own estimates according to a number of factors, including how much money you do or don’t have flowing in at a given point. That will lead to inconsistency in your quoting, which clients will come to recognize. But quote according to a true projection of the hours you’ll need to do the project and do it well, and clients will come back again and again.
2. Your contract. Develop your own standard freelance agreement so you’re never in danger of doing a project without having something in writing. (No pun intended.) Companies are often rushed to complete their projects, and the last thing the middle manager assigned to find a writer wants to do is go through the extra step of having to prepare a formal agreement just to allow you to edit his marketing brochure. Send him your own agreement instead, outlining clearly the nature of the project, the expectations on your part, the agreed fee and deadline, and the set number of rounds of revisions before extra time kicks in. This document doesn’t have to be long—mine is barely two pages. The important thing is that you get a signature. You may be reading this and thinking it’s a giant pain in the rear end to create a contract every time you get a corporate assignment. Consider this scenario: The manager who’s contacted you to write a long marketing piece, along with Web site copy, for a total fee of $3,500 has bolted from his company for a position elsewhere. The marketing piece has been handed off to someone else, and this person doesn’t feel that the expense of a writer is worthwhile. If you had only a verbal agreement with the previous person, you’ve just lost $3,500. If you got it in writing, you’ve made $3,500.
That’s the more elaborate scenario. The much simpler, and more frequent one, involves your having to chase a client for payment. It would be nice if this never happened, but any veteran freelancer can tell you more stories than she’d like about delinquent clients. Without signed agreements, getting them to pay is like trying to précis Hemingway. Get all your corporate assignments in writing and you’ll never have to worry.
3. Your range of services. When someone asks, “Do you write ?” say yes, even if you presume the thing he’s referring to may be a form of writing for which you have no inclination. Give it a shot anyway, because there just might be a lot more work hidden behind that first offer. You’re a writer, and that means you can (a) write whatever people need written, and (b) enjoy the writing no matter what you’re writing about. So when they ask if you write speeches, the answer is yes. Edit annual reports? Yep. Adapt a company profile from print to the Web? Absolutely. Start out by being a bit indiscriminate in the assignments you take. It will help you build a diverse profile and broad client base so that, as your career progresses, you can pick and choose more often.
PRESENTATIONS
Visit just about any corporate office today and it’s a good bet you’ll find at least one person cobbling together slides for a PowerPoint presentation. Presentations make the corporate world go round, and virtually every organization welcomes the person who can make them sound good and flow smoothly.
People in business make a lot of common mistakes in their presentations that will prove easy fixes for you—like jamming too much text onto every slide, using punctuation inappropriately at the end of bullet points, and employing different parts of speech to lead off points within the same list (for example, starting the first four bullets with verbs and the last with a noun. Or, as I saw on a bus stop bench ad taken out by a real estate broker last week: “Passionate. Innovative. Experience.”).
Executives often find it easy enough to put together impressive individual slides or pages but struggle to find the thread that pulls them all together. I admit to getting a little thrill whenever a client contacts me mired in frustration because she can’t figure out (a) what she wants to say in her presentation, (b) how she wants to say it, or (c) both. In general, I take her out of the presenter’s shoes and place her in those of the audience. (How much or how little do they know going in? What’s the most important message you want them to take away—the bottom line? What part of the content do you think they’ll find most powerful, unusual, or surprising?)
Then I ask her to send me all the material she has. Clients, I find, are often reluctant to send along the whole ball of wax because they don’t want to bury you with irrelevant information. I prefer the opposite. I want it all, because I never know where the true story, the theme, the anchor, is going to come from, and I’ve found that, just as often as not, it comes from somewhere the clients didn’t expect it to, since they were already too close to it to see the forest for the trees.
Once I’ve identified what I believe is the thread, I build a proposed storyboard that has as its goal the bottom-line message I asked the client about previously. I also ask the presenter at the outset whether he likes to be highly scripted, hardly scripted, or somewhere in the middle. Then I prepare notes accordingly—in the client’s voice, not mine—and try them out on the client. Usually he’s relieved and grateful, and also a little pleasurably mystified.
| 44 PRESENTATIONS | “Great presentations are remembered; weak ones, too. That’s why it’s always worth recruiting the right person to help nail it.” —George Georghiades, Associate Principal, McKinsey & Company |
Get This Gig: Presentations
Where Do I Start?
Ask friends of yours employed by companies if they’d mind giving you copies of presentations that cross their desks. Then practice with those presentations, figuring out where you could improve language, story, structure, and flow. Companies also frequently publish presentations online these days. Do a random Google search of companies in your region, then go to their Web sites and see what you can find.
In your introductory letter, make specific reference to your presentation expertise. If you can provide a few concrete examples based on one of the company’s own presentations, all the better. (“As a professional communicator, I help add a measure of focus and impact to both internal and client-facing presentations. In the attached, for example, I’ve made half a dozen suggestions that I thought might enhance the presentation’s overall effectiveness.”)
Who Do I Contact?
Often, presentations published by a company will include the author’s name, usually on the title page or at the end. There’s nothing wrong with contacting these people directly. If you can’t get a specific name, determine who to send your letter to based on the size of the company. If it’s a Small Fish or Lone Wolf, send it straight to the president or CEO. If it’s a Big Dog, send it to the manager of the local office. Always call and get an individual name.
What Do I Charge?
For slides that aren’t too text-heavy, fifteen minutes per slide is a fair rate; for denser ones, thirty minutes per slide. So, for example, if you’ve decided your corporate rate is $60 per hour, for a twenty-slide presentation your quote will be $300 for a text-light presentation (20 slides × 15 minutes per slide), $600 for a text-heavy one (20 slides × 30 minutes per slide).
MARKETING MATERIALS
Every company needs to promote itself. For the vast majority of organizations, this self-promotion occurs in the form of print materials consisting of words and images intended to communicate a particular story about a product or service to potential customers. The difference between hiring a professional writer to help tell the story and assigning someone internally to do it is the difference between focused copy that pops and aimless language that amounts to little more than a flat sales pitch. The decision makers within most companies don’t always recognize this difference readily, but once an example of it crosses their desks, they tend to become permanent endorsers of the importance of investing in professional communicators like you.
The most common types of marketing materials are the brochures and flyers you receive in the mail every day. They come in myriad formats and styles, and they can look ultra-slick thanks to the fancy graphics and high-quality paper stock the marketing team has opted for, but that means a whole lot of nothing unless they also contain the right words. With the amount of such material most people receive every day, companies get exactly one shot to grab the attention of potential customers, and this they know all too well. That’s why they’re willing to invest whatever it takes to get it right.
| 45 MARKETING MATERIALS | With the amount of brochures, flyers, leaflets, and e-mail blasts most people get every day, companies know they have only one chance to seize customers’ attention. That’s why they’re willing to invest in a professional wordsmith to get it right. |
Get This Gig: Marketing Materials
Where Do I Start?
For a month, save every piece of direct mail you find in your mailbox. That will give you a healthy cross-section of brochures, flyers, and other types of marketing materials to practice on. Decide how well they tell the story they’re trying to tell, how clearly they communicate, how consistent they sound. Then try to improve them.
In your introductory letter, call out marketing materials as one of your areas of expertise. Specializing in more specific areas, like speeches, can be a good way to distinguish yourself, but never cut yourself off from the broad panoply of marketing pieces all companies produce.
Who Do I Contact?
The companies sending you this stuff. If they can make unsolicited contact with you, there’s no reason you can’t do the same in return. If the mail pieces themselves contain names and contact information, target those people directly. If they don’t, target according to the size of the company, as for presentations.
What Do I Charge?
Since marketing materials differ widely in tone and layout, use a general guideline of about one hour per every 250 words of writing or 500 words of editing.
Selling Yourself
(THE RIGHT WAY)
Almost all writers share an aversion to self-marketing because they feel the superficial selling part undermines the authentic writing part. Here’s the thing about that: There’s no room for shyness in freelancing. Modesty, yes; shyness, no. Take a moment to think about it and you’ll realize all businesspeople must market themselves just like writers do. A restaurateur needs to do more than just open his doors to generate traffic. An investment broker must go beyond merely getting a license if he hopes to succeed. A psychologist wanting to build a practice ought to take a few steps in addition to simply hanging a shingle. And a writer needs to do more than just write. “This job is about sales as much as it is about writing,” says Toronto-based freelancer Ian Harvey. “One of the simple rules guiding my practice is this: Hustle, hustle, hustle.”
So how does a writer generate buzz? There are several ways: letters, flyers, brochures, newsletters, blogs, samples, cold calls, and so on. Don’t stop at your initial blitz. These days it’s perfectly acceptable to let people know about things happening in your practice—new services you’re offering, exciting projects you’re working on, awards you’ve won—through social networking channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. People have become accustomed to receiving frequent updates from others. Use this to your advantage.
WHITE PAPERS
Just as companies need to promote their products and services, they also need to demonstrate that they know what they’re talking about. So they often write and circulate white papers, reports, or guides that show off the company’s smarts about a certain topic, issue, or problem. White papers take their name from the fact that they stand distinct from high-gloss marketing brochures. They’re used ostensibly to educate readers and help people make decisions—though of course their ultimate purpose is to win customers. A white paper, for example, might focus on the benefits of a new product or technology. Or it might help elucidate a business process or concept for a lay audience. Or it might articulate a specialized solution to a pressing business need.
Regardless what they’re attempting to market—manufacturing expertise, design brilliance, sales strategy, plain old intellectual capital—companies will often go to great expense to publish their white papers, since these documents must be accurate, authoritative, succinct, and forceful. They’re meant to generate sales leads, establish thought leadership, make a business case, or educate customers. With such important goals, companies need a professional writer to get the job done properly.
| 46 WHITE PAPERS | The name may sound plain, but don’t be fooled—white papers can be worth their weight in gold. |
Get This Gig: White Papers
Where Do I Start?
Since they’re created for the purpose of public consumption, white papers shouldn’t be difficult to find. Google “white papers” and the name of your city or region and see what comes up. Or call your local chamber of commerce and ask for a listing of businesses in your area, then search based on that list. Go straight to the company Web site and start to dig; if that doesn’t turn up anything of use, try doing a general search using “white papers” plus the company name.
It may be a good bit of strategy to include in your introductory letter an offer to write a white paper pro bono for prospective clients. Remember, you must adopt a long-term, big-picture mentality when thinking about your freelance career. Of greatest importance is to merely get a foot in the door. Once you’ve shown your stuff—even if it’s for free the first time—the company knows it has a reliable resource for a long time to come.
Who Do I Contact?
Published white papers almost always include the author’s name. That’s who should receive the letter outlining your services and providing specific examples of how you can make an impressive piece even better.
What Do I Charge?
An hour per page is your goal. To get your foot in the door, maybe a half-hour per page.
SPEECHES
A great speech can be a career-maker; a dull speech, the opposite. A good writer takes the time to frame a speech within a specific structure, impose upon it a certain voice and tone, pace it according to a deliberate rhythm, and punctuate it with subtle moments of contrast or humor. Exceptional speeches are like superb pieces of music: They have great lyrics and a great melody.
It is to every writer’s advantage that no one ever forgets the towering feeling of delivering a speech and knowing it made a lasting impression. In other words, write one speech that sings, and the person you wrote it for will tell everyone else on his team, or in his department, or around his executive conference table, that you’ve got the goods. And it isn’t just the person who delivered the speech from whom you might get valuable recommendations. Just as often, those in the audience want to know who wrote those wonderful words, too.
| 47 SPEECHES | “A professional communicator can transform the story you’re trying to tell into something powerful and memorable.” —Gord Forfar, Senior Vice President, Personal & Commercial Product Operations, Bank of Montreal |
Get This Gig: Speeches
Where Do I Start?
By positioning yourself specifically as a speechwriter. Don’t send a letter saying you’re a freelance writer who does it all, speeches included. People tend to perceive speechwriting as a discipline unto itself, so sell it that way.
Enroll with Toastmasters International. Contact the National Speakers Bureau and ask what opportunities might be available. Tell middle-management or junior-associate friends you’re willing to do some speech work for them pro bono so you can cite those credentials later.
Who Do I Contact?
Start with the president’s executive assistant. The majority of speeches are given by the top names in any organization, and they aren’t always satisfied with the copy their communications department comes up with. Furthermore, senior people like the feeling of having an individual resource they can depend on. When that resource is outside the company, the feeling of exclusivity can be even stronger. So aim for the top.
What Do I Charge?
An hour of your time for every three to five minutes of speaking is the appropriate range.
ANNUAL REPORTS
Public companies—that is, those owned by public shareholders like you and me—are obligated to publish a report every year that discloses where they stand money-wise and the direction they plan to take going forward. While these documents are data-heavy, they also include a considerable amount of writing, including, typically, the chairman and/or president’s letter up front plus lots of captions, headings, legends, descriptions, and justifications. Few writers will tell you that annual reports are particularly exciting to write or edit, but consider that a company’s annual report is the single most important document it will prepare during the year, and if the final result is something that makes everyone in the organization proud, everyone who worked on it will be thought of with that extra bit of glitter. Which, in your case, can lead to other assignments and positive word of mouth. And that’s what it’s all about.
| 48 ANNUAL REPORTS | A company’s annual report may not be the most exciting thing it publishes all year, but it’s certainly the most important. |
Get This Gig: Annual Reports
Where Do I Start?
Every public company is legally bound to make its annual report available to the public. Many, in fact, are now published online. So take that list of local businesses you received from your local chamber of commerce and do a hard-target search of annual reports on their Web sites. If they aren’t posted, call the company directly and ask to be sent a copy. Then, in your introductory letter, include annual reports among your specialty areas.
Who Do I Contact?
The annual report, though invariably a team effort, is most often owned by the marketing department. Send your letter to the marketing manager, marketing director, or vice president of marketing.
What Do I Charge?
Since the page-by-page content of annual reports is highly variable— one page might be almost all text, another might be almost all graphs— use an hourly rate. It’s notoriously difficult to predict how many hours of your time annual reports are going to take, though more than expected is a safe bet.
OTHER REPORTS
The annual report aside, companies have a constant need to generate several other types of reports for the purpose of informing various audiences on the status of various projects. One of my clients, an information technology systems consulting firm, performs a monthly analysis for each of its clients on each desktop computer in the office as well as the overall computer network. They do a rigorous audit of functionality, speed, and performance, producing an internal report made up largely of number grids. Then they pay me to take all that data and turn it into language understandable to what I call the MIL: the Most Important Layperson in the office. Usually the MIL is a senior executive who is a far cry from tech-savvy but who has the decision-making power to just as easily green-light tech improvements as stop them dead in their tracks. This is just one example of the kind of report you might help companies produce. They spit out a lot of them—and someone like you can take the spit and use it to polish the report to a high shine.
| 49 OTHER REPORTS | With general reports, write for the MIL: the Most Important Layperson in the office. The MIL is not necessarily the highest-ranking person in the client office or the one with the most knowledge or expertise; it’s the person who wields the most influ-ence when it comes to your project. |
Get This Gig: Other Reports
Where Do I Start?
Choose half a dozen local companies and go to their Web sites. Go to the tabs that say Services or What We Do or the closest such description you can find. There these organizations will talk about all the great services they offer, and you will find clues to the kinds of communications needs they have. Is it a management consulting firm? Then dollars to donuts they do umpteen presentations every month. A retail conglomerate? Odds are they produce marketing materials on a pretty much constant basis. Do this exercise with as many companies as you can, then tailor your initial contact letter accordingly.
Who Do I Contact?
Since the irregular reports companies produce don’t fall into any specific category, make your contact strategy general as well. Contact the manager of human resources—send a great letter that outlines your skills and services, and cite examples of half a dozen different types of corporate writing you’d be happy to handle. With any luck, one of them will stick.
What Do I Charge?
It depends on the project, but an hourly rate is usually a good basis for your first go-round with a new company.
Dress the Part
(OF A PROFESSIONAL)
Writers have traditionally worn the “creative person’s”
outfit—the stereotypical turtleneck and suede jacket with elbow patches, or some other variation—perhaps in a deliberate attempt to separate themselves from the corporate, money-grubbing drones they disdain. Dispense with this idea, starting today. When you meet with a client or prospect, you aren’t there to announce yourself as a counterculture icon, you’re there to announce yourself as a professional with a valuable service to offer. You’re in business, they’re in business. Sometimes you’re in business together. Sell the value of your services through both the quality of your work and the way you present yourself as a professional. If you get invited to a meeting for potential corporate work, err on the side of overdressing, unless you know for certain that the corporate environment you’re entering is casual. Arriving in a suit when others are in shirts looks fine; arriving in a shirt when others are in suits does not.
CONFERENCE SCRIPTS
Everyone loves a conference. It’s a break from the normal office routine, it offers a chance to mingle with colleagues, and it provides the opportunity to stay at a fancy hotel for a night or two.
That’s the perspective of those attending the conference. But to those organizing the conference, its significance is much weightier. This group must concern itself with communicating certain messages; ensuring smooth, logical transitions between sessions; and the hope that people will come away from the conference feeling united as a team and inspired to perform. After all, once the conference is done, it’s going to be evaluated formally or informally, and the opinions of those who attended are going to wend their way to the executive or senior team who sponsored the conference. If it’s a winner, all is golden; if not, the pall is cast. Bottom line: The organizing committee knows it had better do a good job.
And hopefully they know this: The success of any conference comes down to (a) how effectively it’s structured overall, and (b) how well its individual elements are delivered. As a professional communicator, you have plenty to offer in this regard.
First, there’s stepping back and figuring out what the conference is truly about. Most conference teams will dive in and start developing sessions, team-building exercises, and breakout discussions without a cohesive understanding of what they’re actually trying to accomplish, like people trying to combine pieces from different jigsaw puzzles into a common one. Since your expertise is rooted in the ability to pull a single thread out of a bunch of disparate material, the best first step you can offer any conference organizers is to conduct a focused session whose sole reason is to answer the question, “What is the purpose of this conference?” You might be surprised how difficult it can be for them to agree on an answer. Once they do, you can help them plan an overall mix that accomplishes its goals.
That overall mix will be made up of numerous individual sessions to take place over the course of the conference, whether three hours or three days. Most people are not good presenters. Even fewer are good session leaders or facilitators. You can help further by working with them to storyboard presentations, brainstorm interactive activities, structure breakout sessions, and so on.
On a more granular level, you can help write the actual words people are going to say. A variety of people end up taking the podium at a conference, and the range of speaking skill is inevitably broad. Some people prefer being scripted down to the last word; others prefer having a general course laid out for them with the key points they need to hit along the way. Here’s a rule of thumb: The more senior or experienced the person, the less scripted they’ll want to be; the more junior or inexperienced, the more they’ll appreciate your writing help. The person chairing the annual company sales conference, for instance, will probably be the vice president of sales or regional sales manager or some other comparable person who’s done so before. That person will probably be happy to use your help planning the overall conference theme, the connections between sessions, and the creative breakouts. But there will also probably be, say, a junior sales associate new to the company who’s been asked to do a presentation on his customers’ responses to the product the company recently launched. That’s a command performance, and no doubt a nerve-wracking one. The junior sales associate might have a decent idea of the messages he wants to get across but only a vague idea of how to do so. He’ll be thrilled to have someone like you in his corner.
| 50 CONFERENCE SCRIPTS | A successful conference is just a topical story with multiple plot lines interwoven around a clear theme. |
Get This Gig: Conference Scripts
Where Do I Start?
Conference scripting will be seen as a specialty, so create some marketing collateral that specifically calls out this service. It can be a letter, a simple flyer, or anything you feel communicates the message effectively.
Who Do I Contact?
There are two different parties you want to get in touch with. First, the human resources departments of all the companies on your list. All departments have conferences, retreats, and off-site meetings, so targeting any one of them amounts to a crapshoot, whereas Human Resources is the only department that touches every other department.
Second, make contact with event firms. These are companies in business for the express purpose of running events for other companies. They’re typically full-service operations, meaning when they get hired to run a conference, they take on all the responsibilities of that conference, including concepts, scripts, and activities. Tell them how much you’d love to work with them and just how good a fit, given your skill set, it would be.
What Do I Charge?
Since conference writing involves a number of different facets, determine your fee via an accumulation of hours. To provide the most accurate quote possible, ask as many questions as you can and be perfectly clear on the scope of the assignment and what will be expected of you.
Someone Who Works for
A BIG IMPORTANT COMPANY AND WHO HAS
THE ABILITY TO HIRE FREELANCERS ANSWERS
TEN IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
Nicole Bleiwas, Director of Customer, Commercial, and
Consumer Leadership, Coca-Cola Ltd.
Q When you’re seeking a writer’s help, what are the three most important characteristics you look for?
Writing style, past experience, and cost.
Q When you use freelance writers, how do you typically find them?
Almost always through recommendations from others.
Q Do you know at the outset of a project whether you’ll need a writer, or is it usually a spontaneous call?
I usually have a general idea that one may be required. The specific point during the project at which I engage a writer tends to be spontaneous.
Q What’s more important, a writer’s rates or her credentials/ experience?
Credentials. There needs to be a value equation whereby rates and quality of work match up.
Q Under what circumstances do you usually seek freelance or contract help?
Usually for documents that are intended for broad distribution. If they’re going to be seen by lots of eyes, they need to be done well.
Q When enlisting freelancers, do you need to go through a lot of approval hoops?
Our company has a policy for hiring vendors, and this applies to freelance writers just as it does other suppliers, like promotional agencies. Any outside individual must be willing to sign a nondisclosure agreement before we begin work with her.
Q If a freelancer/contractor does solid work for you on one project, is there a good chance you’ll go back to her for another one down the road?
Yes. Definitely.
Q What are the main advantages of using a professional writer/communications expert versus someone in-house?
When using someone in-house, you run the risk of the communication being internally focused and therefore only understood by those within the company. So the intended audience plays a role in whether we go in-house or external.
Q When checking a freelancer’s credentials, where’s the first place you go (e.g., her Web site, paper samples, calling references)? I like to look at samples of the person’s work.
Q What’s the number one thing a freelancer can do to get in, and stay in, your good books?
Listen to objectives and follow the brief.
CORPORATE VIDEOS
When launching a new strategy, implementing a new system, announcing a new initiative, or rolling out a new program, companies of a certain size face a sticky problem: how to communicate the change, and its importance, to all of their employees. Sometimes this is done through the distribution of gargantuan binders that no one reads but everyone displays on their cubicle shelves. Sometimes it’s done via extensive orientation sessions. Other times it’s conveyed with a long memo from the CEO outlining how strongly she feels about the new initiative.
Sometimes, however, the top brass decide to create a video to communicate the change, and sometimes—that is, when the right writer is used—that video marries stylishness with intelligence, resulting in a replicable tool that engages people in a way they find entertaining and informative. Such videos aren’t usually long—five to ten minutes is pretty typical—but they are carefully assembled, usually with the help of the company’s graphics and information technology personnel. They sometimes include messages of support from the project sponsors or testimonials from employees, interspersed with critical information about the new program and what it means for the company and its people.
Corporate videos are great fun to work on because (a) they typically entail a large investment from the top, so those assigned to both the creative and production teams treat the work seriously and want to do a great job, (b) it’s one of those writing projects that involves high-energy, high-spirited collaboration, (c) seeing the end product often produces a great sense of accomplishment and gratification, and (d) writing a script is always fun, no matter what you’re writing it for.
| 51 CORPORATE VIDEOS | A corporate video helps the company sell itself to its customers and its employees. |
Get This Gig: Corporate Videos
Where Do I Start?
Though corporate videos are a great potential addition to your list of credits, they aren’t produced frequently enough to warrant a specifically tailored letter. So take the standard letter you use to introduce yourself to corporate prospects and make sure it includes mention of corporate videos.
Who Do I Contact?
Any corporate videos will be joint efforts between Marketing and Information Technology, so send your communiqué to the heads of both departments.
What Do I Charge?
It depends on your level of involvement. You might be asked to write an introduction and nothing else. Or you might be asked to conduct interviews with people across the organization and then edit the transcripts of those interviews into catchy three-minute vignettes. Or somewhere in between. As always, be clear up front on what you’re being asked to deliver and then deliver a quote that assumes 20 percent more hours than you—or they—would likely expect.
INTERNAL MEMOS
A company isn’t likely to enlist your services strictly to write an internal memo, but once you’re in the door and have proven that any document you touch becomes better, don’t be surprised if the people on the teams you work with start to come to you for other stuff. A memo from a junior associate to her supervisor, for example, may seem of minor significance to you, but to her it might mean the difference between getting a big project approved or rejected—and getting it approved might mean a move to the next level, and a move to the next level might mean a substantial raise or a critical foothold toward eventual partnership. I derive tremendous pleasure when clients approach me for help with increasingly small assignments, not because it feeds my ego but because it tells me that they’ve come to appreciate the true mountain-moving power of professional communications. Getting in can be a challenge, sure, but I don’t know of any client who, after discovering the impact a trained communicator can make, has ever looked back.
| 52 INTERNAL MEMOS | “No matter how small or insignificant it might seem, every time you communicate, it matters.” —Edward Hughes, President and CEO, Aculon Inc. |
Get This Gig: Internal Memos
Where Do I Start?
Whenever you’re working for a client in their offices for any stretch of time, you’ll inevitably be copied on lots of memos. Keep the e-mails, memos, and other notices you get, and try to gather other ones, too, like those sitting on top of the recycle bin or unclaimed for an entire day at the side of the photocopier. Take them home and review them in detail to see if any common flaws are detectable. Eventually you can have a casual chat with the department manager about the fact that interdepartmental communications seem slightly marred, and you have a few suggestions for ironing them out.
Who Do I Contact?
No one at first. This is, as I said, an inside job, and you need to be the insider. Don’t send a letter to a company telling them you want to write their internal memos. Wait until you’ve gained access to the inner sanctum, then do your homework and figure out who has both the right level of authority and the right amount of trust in your opinion.
What Do I Charge?
Little, if anything. This is the kind of work you do to cement your reputation and enhance your perceived value. If you’re asked to, say, create new interdepartmental communications templates, that’s a project, and you should charge accordingly. But if the executive responsible for your check asks you occasionally to review the memo she wants to send out, don’t go send an invoice.
B2B PUBLICATIONS
You’ve probably heard the term B2B. It stands for Business to Business (as opposed to B2C, which stands for Business to Consumer). Many companies produce specific marketing materials targeted not at the general public but at other companies they hope to turn into customers. A company that manufactures computer parts, for instance, may market itself to the consumer at large, but it’s more likely to invest dollars in marketing to other businesses, who are most likely to have use for its products and would place bigger orders on a more regular basis.
One of my clients is a designer and producer of office interiors. Though its products are displayed in retail showrooms across the country, its marketing efforts are solely B2B—that is, they’re targeted strictly at other businesses from whom they stand to win big contracts, as opposed to a one-man show like me, someone who might buy a desk or chair only once every few years. They know where their bread is buttered, and they strategize accordingly. Because companies invest substantially in B2B programs and the materials that support them, professional writers are a critical resource for them. The competition for customers rages daily and is more concentrated today than ever before. Organizations recognize that if they aren’t getting their message out properly, they might as well not be getting it out at all.
| 53 B2B PUBLICATIONS | B2B (Business to Business) materials are those that companies send to other companies to try to turn them into customers. All organizations know that the competition is fierce, so the writing has to be powerful. |
Get This Gig: B2B Publications
Where Do I Start?
If you have friends, associates, or former colleagues employed at companies who conduct B2B marketing, ask if they can sneak you a sample or two so you can get familiar with the look and sound of typical B2B materials. Short of that, it’s difficult to perform targeted B2B research because most companies’ B2B efforts are internal and proprietary. The most sensible way to advertise your B2B offering is to simply include it among the other services noted in your introductory letter.
Who Do I Contact?
Send your letter to marketing managers at Big Dogs, Small Fish, and Lone Wolves, all of whom work in the B2B space.
What Do I Charge?
B2B writing, like most other corporate writing assignments, will involve specific amounts of copy for specific marketing pieces. Base your estimate on the general number of words you expect to write, and use a guideline of an hour for every 250 words of fresh writing or 500 words of editing.
MANUALS AND TECHNICAL WRITING
Those in engineering departments, on product development teams, and, especially, in technology roles adore people who can describe the things they design and manufacture in terms decipherable to the layperson. One of my clients devises surveillance systems using artificial intelligence software; I write scripts for the Flash videos they post on their Web site that let people see how cool and effective their products are. The people at this company are brilliant, but they all think and communicate in complex terms intimidating to, say, an airport manager who just wants to know whether their system is going to help him catch suspicious characters. That’s where writers come in. The faster technology and manufacturing race forward, the greater the need for people who can say things clearly. Picture yourself tearing open the box to a new purchase—a computer, a bike, an electronic toy—and, as the instruction booklet flies out and you snatch it, think of the difference in your reactions toward instructions filled with convoluted steps and impossible-to-decipher diagrams vs. simple, unambiguous directions laid out in plain language and accompanied by corresponding drawings. The difference in those two reactions is the difference between a professional writer and anybody else.
| 54 MANUALS AND TECHNICAL WRITING | Being able to write complicated things in a simple way is like being the only person in a room who can translate a foreign language. |
Get This Gig: Manuals and Technical Writing
Where Do I Start?
Whenever you receive a new product, keep the diagram or instructions that accompany it. Fortunately, such documents almost always contain errors, or at the very least language that barely warrants being called language. Next, prepare a specific letter offering your technical writing services in a casual, friendly way. Make note of the diagram or instructions you received and gently point out a spot or two in which things might have been communicated a little more clearly.
Who Do I Contact?
Send your letter to the company’s marketing manager or director, since the piece was most likely produced by her department.
What Do I Charge?
It’s been my experience that technical writing takes considerably longer than people assume it will, in part because those who need to approve the copy are often big-time sticklers about how the details are conveyed. Be aware of this when quoting so you don’t shortchange yourself.
PACKAGE COPY
Gum, potato chips, batteries, lightbulbs, contact lenses, radish seeds— anything sold for consumer purchase is in some way packaged, and those packages almost always contain some writing. Don’t believe me? Next time you’re pushing your shopping cart through the grocery store (and trying to resist popping a wheelie), take a moment to inspect every item you toss in. Words are everywhere. Sure, sometimes those words are no more complicated than “Excellent Source of Vitamin C,” but often they’re much more than that. Think of the typical kids’ cereal box. Yes, the side tells you how much of your child’s daily riboflavin quotient he’s getting, but the back is usually filled with fun, varied copy, from mazes to trivia to contests.
The writing that ends up on packages is normally the result of a highly sensitive dance between a company’s legal and marketing departments, the former concerned with obligatory copy like ingredients, best before date, manufacturer’s address, and so on, the latter concerned with copy that will actually, you know, help sell the product. The great thing about your freelance role is that you don’t need to take up arms for one side or the other. Instead you get to be the golden child who makes them both happy.
| 55 PACKAGE COPY | Just about anything sold has a package— and just about any package has words. |
Get This Gig: Package Copy
Where Do I Start?
Begin with a fun exercise. Go through your shelves and pull out every single item that has words on it. For instance, at the moment there is a bag of Lay’s potato chips on my desk. I’m about to devour, oh, the entire bag, I imagine, but in the meantime I’m reading the back: “It starts with quality, homegrown potatoes, just as it always has …” This goes on for four paragraphs, or about 75 words. I can tell those 75 words weren’t easy to compose, and I bet they went through several levels of approval before making it onto that bag. They’re precisely the kind of words companies love assigning to freelancers, since doing so releases the marketing people who shouldn’t have been writing copy in the first place, plus they get the comfort of knowing it’s being done by a professional.
Next, prepare a list of the companies who manufacture all those items you’ve pulled out of the cupboard. These are packaged goods (also called consumer goods) companies. Their name has to be included on every product they manufacture, so if you can’t find it right away, keep looking. Craft a targeted letter whose body talks about your specialization writing package copy. Then visit each of the company’s Web sites so you can tweak each letter by making specific reference to their products, history, culture, or recent successes.
Who Do I Contact?
Call each company’s head office and get the name of its marketing manager, then send off the letters to as many companies on your initial list as you can. Cast enough lines and you’re bound to get some bites.
What Do I Charge?
Determine a small range for your hourly rate, and quote based on the size of the company. Lay’s is a Big Dog, so I would charge them the rate at the top end of my range. For Small Fish and Lone Wolves I would charge closer to the bottom end.
Ten Questions
WITH PAUL LIMA
Paul Lima, author of The Six-Figure Freelancer, is one of the fellow freelancers I most admire because of his unwaveringly disciplined approach to the writing profession and his ongoing self-challenge to broaden his expertise and expand his services. Here are Paul’s thoughts on a few matters:
Q Name three factors that have contributed to your freelance success.
One: desire. I wanted to run a freelance writing business. Two: dedication. When the work is there, I dedicate time to complete it. When the work isn’t there, I dedicate time to find it. Three: discipline. The first couple of years were tough. I could have quit. But I remained focused on the task of making it as a freelancer.
Q If you could go back and visit yourself when you were first starting out in the business, what advice would you give?
“Sales” is not a dirty word. Realize you are running a business and that selling and marketing is an integral part of any business. If you are not selling yourself, your abilities, and your services, nobody is.
Q What are the most common mistakes you see freelancers making when approaching corporate markets?
They don’t develop a business vision—who they are, what they sell, and who they should sell to. They don’t spend any time thinking about the services they can offer or the sectors they should target. Focus your marketing: Sell services you can deliver to sectors you’re familiar with. If an offer to do something you’ve never done for a sector you’ve never written for comes your way, look at it and take it if you think you can do it. But don’t try to sell writing services you aren’t familiar with to sectors you have no knowledge of.
Q Why is writing and communications expertise so important to companies today?
Every company needs to communicate with customers, vendors, suppliers, and staff. More and more of that communication is electronic writing—e-mail, Web sites, intranets, blogs, social networking. However, even if the communication is on paper or by voice, the words must speak to the reader and achieve the business objectives of the company or organization. It takes a skilled writer to pull that off.
Q What are you continually trying to improve in your own practice?
I create a business plan every year, and I don’t just pick up last year’s plan and try to do more of the same. I try to add new components that are of interest to me and that I believe will generate new revenue. In other words, I don’t want to ever become complacent.
Q What are your biggest flaws as a freelancer? What do you struggle with the most?
My grade five teacher will tell you: I’m a poor speller and I don’t know many of the rules of grammar. Seriously. However, I know how to structure a document and clearly communicate my client’s purpose. I hire proofreaders to help compensate for my weaknesses.
Q In what ways have you reconciled the aversion to self-marketing that afflicts so many creative people?
Having a family, a car, a mortgage, and a dog that eats more than the family helps me reconcile my aversion to self-marketing. In other words, I know how much I have to earn per year, and I know how much I have to earn per week to hit my annual revenue goal. I also know that money does not fall like manna from heaven.
Q What attributes would you say keep your corporate clients coming back?
When I am writing, I deliver the right words—on time and on budget. I also check my ego at the door. If the client wants a revision, I discuss the rationale for it, make a few comments, and let the client decide which way we go based on a sound understanding of the target audience and objective of the document we are working on. I also do some business writing training. I demonstrate practical techniques and tools that help my clients become more effective and efficient writers. My objective is a satisfied client who will hire me again and refer me to other prospects.
Q Do you have what you would call a daily routine?
I wake up and go to work! What I have to do each day is in my calendar. I turn on my computer and do not go to e-mail or the Web. I go to my calendar first. I’ve set it up to tell me what to do based on my business priorities. It all goes back to discipline. Discipline and time management start with knowing what you want to do, and why. I’ve written eight books in the last five years and am working on two more—all while running a full-time freelance writing and training business.
Q What are the most common obstacles you face when trying to market your services to companies? What have you done to overcome these obstacles?
Like many writers, I don’t like cold calls. So I send letters or e-mails first. Then when I call the prospects, I am not making cold calls—I’m following up!
NEWSLETTERS
The first corporate gig I ever had was writing copy for an internal newsletter at Procter & Gamble. My mom was a sales manager there, and she’d somehow finagled me a summer job assisting one of the people who worked for her, a wonderfully elegant French woman who I seem to remember wore terrific necklaces. She wanted to communicate her division’s projects, priorities, and achievements to the rest of the staff on an ongoing basis.
This occurs frequently within corporations of a certain size: Not only does the company as a whole try to market itself to consumers, but departments within the company try to market themselves to other departments so that (a) everyone can see how valuable their work is, thereby creating job security for everyone on the team, (b) their individual accomplishments get highlighted and land on the radar screens of those who ultimately make decisions about things like promotions, and (c) they stay “top of mind” even when their services aren’t in immediate need. Newsletters are the best way to accomplish quick, regular communication both external and internal, and these days they’re cropping up everywhere. Even small businesses are distributing newsletters to let you know what they’re up to and what they think about certain matters—no doubt you receive several—either in paper or electronic form.
The positive news for writers is that newsletters are typically more involved than they seem. That snippet about the new product the company is unveiling next month may be allotted only 250 words, but it ain’t an easy 250 words. Consider that various departments reading the newsletter will likely have a different level of familiarity with the product and that, in those few words, the big cheeses are going to want to see the product’s benefits well articulated and its position in the marketplace made clear—all while the whole enchilada is subtly placed within the context of the company’s strategic vision so the staff gets excited about the product launch.
In other words, it takes a professional’s hand. One thing that continues to delight and inspire me is how much people really do notice the difference between first-rate writing and other writing once both pass before them. This plays out powerfully in companies, because people trying to gain a leg up in the rat race realize that every small advantage has enormous implications.
Newsletters are also good examples of seemingly small writing projects that can generate a surprisingly large ripple effect. Unlike the binders handed out at most conferences that get placed spine out on cubicle shelves but never get read, people actually read newsletters, since they are by nature easy to digest and quick to finish. Or, if it helps to think about it another way, understand that, when people read a newsletter for which you’ve written copy, they’re reading your writing. And if there’s one principle that holds for novels, haiku, or corporate newsletters, it’s this: The greater number of people who read your writing, the more likely you are to garner a broader swath of interest. Treat everything you write with equal importance, because you never know who’s going to read it. One of my proudest moments in the corporate arena was a colleague saying, “I.J., these are the best meeting minutes I’ve ever read.” Yep—I’d worked my butt off to make them sound right.
| 56 NEWSLETTERS | Newsletters are great examples of seemingly small projects that can generate large ripple effects. |
Get This Gig: Newsletters
Where Do I Start?
You probably delete requests asking you to sign up for company newsletters so summarily that you don’t realize how many of them there actually are. From now on, sign up for all of them. When they arrive, read them closely and think about what you could do improve them. Then tailor your introductory letter to include prominent mention of newsletter writing, researching, and editing. As you accumulate newsletter credits, you can cite them in the letter.
Who Do I Contact?
For each newsletter you receive, call the company and ask who coordinates it. Send that person your standard introductory letter. If you don’t hear anything back, follow up a few weeks later by phone.
What Do I Charge?
As for most marketing materials, a general guideline of an hour for every 250 words of writing or 500 words of editing should serve you well.
RELEASES
When a company wants to put the word out about something but doesn’t want to break the bank on advertising, they issue a press release (also called a media release, news release, event release, product press release, and, increasingly today, social media release—the terms are largely interchangeable). This is sometimes referred to as sending it “over the wire,” an allusion to wire services like Reuters whose job it is to trawl for stories and broadcast the ones considered most noteworthy to the public through a variety of channels. A company might send its press release to a journalist at a specific newspaper. It might e-mail the release to an entire customer database. It might fax the release to a select group of B2B clients. It might do all three, and then some.
It depends ultimately what, on the company’s behalf, the release is trying to achieve. If you think about a release as someone standing up in the middle of a party and shouting, “I have an announcement, everyone!” it will be easier to write one. If that person is announcing that they’ve invented a new pill even better than Viagra, the announcement is going to take a certain tone and be of interest to a certain audience. If they’re announcing that Brangelina have confirmed they’re coming to the town’s film festival next month, the announcement will have a different pitch and be targeted toward a different segment of the population.
Releases have a fairly rigid structure, whether you’re writing about the opening of a swanky new local restaurant or the location of the next Olympic Games. They provide, in an extremely straightforward fashion, enough basic information that those receiving it have enough to follow up on if they’re so inclined. The basic structure of a release contains the following elements: headline (grab their attention), dateline (the date of the release and the city from which it originated), introduction (the five Ws), body (other details to whet readers’ whistles), boilerplate (usually the “About” paragraph that gives info about the issuing organization or individual), close (usually the -30- symbol or ###), and contact info (to let people know who they can contact for more information, since that, after all, is what you’re hoping the release will accomplish in the first place). Often a reinforcing quote is included as well.
Since releases are designed to provide information rather than entertain, they’re excellent outlets for demonstrating your mastery of language and showing off your ability to transmit information in a logical, structured, concise way. Creative flair isn’t usually welcome in releases—though, again, it depends on what’s being announced. If you’re writing about something edgy, funny, hip, or somehow outside the norm, it may be appropriate to stretch the rules of the form slightly, but always make the argument and get permission first. Otherwise, stick to convention.
| 57 RELEASE | Releases are a simple, straightforward way for companies to let the public know about noteworthy developments. But they still have to be written well. |
Get This Gig: Releases
Where Do I Start?
Many organizations have a fairly frequent need for release writing, so be sure to mention this skill prominently in at least one version of your introductory letter.
Who Do I Contact?
Releases are initiated and approved by the marketing department, so the person to aim for is the marketing manager or director.
What Do I Charge?
Release writing is fundamentally less complex than most other corporate materials, but the research required for their content is sometimes demanding, so consider it a wash and stick with a guideline of one hour per 250 words of writing or 500 words of editing.
BIOS
Once they reach a certain level within a company, people need to have their bios at the ready. Either the company needs to post the bio on its Web site under “The Team,” “Leadership,” or “The People That Make Us Tick,” or the bios are necessary for inclusion in client proposals. Or perhaps they need to be forwarded to a selection committee if the individual is being considered for an award. These are just a few examples; there are more. In most companies, anyone at an executive level requires a bio, but in many organizations these days such traditional thinking is tossed out the window and bios are done for individuals at multiple levels so the company can show how valued and expert all of its staff are. When I worked at McKinsey & Company, a mammoth management consulting firm charging equally mammoth fees, project teams were composed of an individual from every level, from senior partner down to business analyst—and you’d better believe the prospective client wanted to know about every single one of those people before it shelled out for the firm’s services. The bios were each only a few paragraphs long, but each had to be compelling in its own right. In other words, they needed a writer’s touch.
Like so many forms of writing, bios can be more challenging than they may at first blush appear. First, it’s important to know what kind of personality the company wishes to convey so you’re aware which would be preferred between “Frank earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard” and “Frank eats all the cookies in the office, but he’s ridiculously smart, so we keep him around.” Second, you’ll often be asked to compose multiple bios requiring consistent tone and structure but each sounding unique and portraying the individual in a special way. Finally, people’s accomplishments and credentials change over time, so you may be asked to provide bios that sound distinct but also work as templates so new information can be plugged in later. For an architectural client of mine I was asked to write bios for everyone in the company, to make them sound “professional but lighthearted and fun,” and to make sure all the relevant information was captured but not to make them too long so they could fit neatly on the Web site. That’s the kind of convoluted direction you should embrace, because once you prove you can deliver on it, you’ll be perceived as someone who can write whatever the company needs whenever they need it—just the perception you want to achieve.
| 58 BIOS | “Bios are one of the first things customers read. You can’t afford not to get them right.” —Ted Matthews, Brand Coach |
Get This Gig: Bios
Where Do I Start?
Do a random surf for company Web sites in your area, and home in on the bios they include. Read them for grammar, overall effectiveness, tonal and stylistic consistency with the rest of the Web site, and meaningfulness. Frequently this is where companies get tripped up. Do the bios seem to just float on their own with no connection to the rest of the site? Make notes for the bios on as many company sites as possible, then, when preparing your introductory letter, make mention of the fact that part of your expertise is optimizing the impact of every aspect of a company’s Web site, including bios.
Who Do I Contact?
Call each company and request contact information for its Webmaster or, failing that, its head of IT. Both types of people, since they’re at the other end of the creative spectrum, welcome the help of writers, just as writers welcome the help of technical support.
What Do I Charge?
The trick with bios is to make them different while also making sure they include all necessary information. This sometimes translates to more hours than expected. A typical bio, for example, might be only 50 words long, but it probably merits an hour for the actual writing and another half hour to call or e-mail the bio subject and glean usable information.
A Little Free Time
GOES A LONG WAY
Here’s a valuable tip: For your first assignment with a new client, identify something on your invoice as gratis. For instance, on all my initial invoices with a first-time client, if there are any extra rounds of editing beyond the first two (which are part of my standard agreement), I waive the fee for those extra rounds. Or I offer them a first-project 15 percent discount. It helps me be remembered as someone who looks out for his clients.
COMPANY HISTORIES/PROFILES
Organizations are constantly seeking ways to appear more genuine to their customers. One of the most common ways is to present a company history, typically showing the company’s humble roots, its period of growth and expansion, and the fact that it continues to uphold the core values on which it was founded despite having become bigger than its creators ever dreamed. Or something to that effect. The point is that the company history/profile, in contrast to more straight-ahead business documents, is meant to work on a warmer, more intimate level. Its purpose is to show customers that the organization is run by real people and always has been, people who have worked hard to make the organization the best it can be and its products or services truly useful to other real people. The company history/profile, in other words, is an example of a kind of corporate writing that can have as much emotional impact as a finely crafted short story. It has the same elements, after all: characters striving to achieve a goal, a narrative arc, pivotal plot points, and a resolution.
Company histories/profiles also give you the chance to exhibit your innate ability to find, within reams of ordinary information, the more interesting story, the nuggets that will fascinate, the anecdotal gems that will amuse and inspire. When company histories/profiles are written by those inside the company walls, they often come out brutally dry, dominated by dates and figures (the company was founded in 1966, it reached a million dollars in sales by 1981, it opened its fiftieth store in 2002) instead of the truly interesting material, featuring—wait for it—the people who have made the company what it is today. Facts and figures are essential, but they work best when placed in the context of real people striving to do something great. Here’s an excerpt from the timeline posted on the Ben & Jerry’s corporate Web site:
1963
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield meet in seventh grade gym class in Merrick, New York (Long Island).
1977
Ben and Jerry move to Vermont and complete a $5 correspondence course in ice cream-making from Penn State (they get a perfect score because the test is open book).
This is, in my view, an example of writing at its best, provided you look past the grammar. (That parenthetical sentence should be on its own, like this one.) In impressively few words, the writer has painted a portrait of two likeable, ambitious kids who don’t take themselves too seriously but do take their business idea very seriously. Consider how out of place a dull, fact-and-figure-dominated timeline would seem on the Web site of such a fun company. No matter what you’re asked to write, always get clarity and confirmation first on the voice in which it should be written. Then do your stuff.
| 59 COMPANY HISTORIES/ PROFILES | A company history/profile shows potential customers where the company has been, and, more importantly, where it’s headed. |
Get This Gig: Company Histories/Profiles
Where Do I Start?
You know all that surfing you did to find and examine company bios? Go back to the bookmarked company pages and see if they have a corporate history/profile posted. If not, prepare a unique letter that talks only about your specialty in writing company histories/profiles. Mention that most companies these days have their history summarized, if not detailed, on their Web sites, and that you have, for many of your clients, helped transform such summaries from simple timelines into vivid, engaging stories.
Who Do I Contact?
The company Webmaster or head of IT. Both are under terrific pressure these days to design Web sites that customers find appealing and informative. A professional writer offering them such a great idea might tickle them silly.
What Do I Charge?
It depends largely on how much research is involved. Usually it will land at one of three levels. Level 1: The company has a lot of already-organized content for you to go through and then create the story. Level 2: The company has reams of unorganized content from different sources, in different formats, written at different times, for you to go through and then create the story. Level 3: The company has little content and is dependent on you to talk to whomever you need to and find out whatever you can in order to create the story. Obviously, Level 1 will entail the simplest effort on your part, and Level 3 the greatest effort. Quote accordingly, always adding 20 percent more hours than your baseline estimate.
CASE STUDIES/PROJECT PROFILES
Talking the talk is easy. Any company can claim it’s great at what it does. The real question is how to convince customers the company puts its money where its mouth is.
One way to accomplish this is by creating mini-stories around recent successes the company has had. These are often captured as attractive one-page presentation-style pieces, or, sometimes, as simple Word documents. Typically they follow a structure that describes the client, the problem, the company’s approach to the problem, the solution it provided, and the positive results obtained from that solution. Case studies/project profiles show the company’s value proposition in action. In other words, they show potential customers that the company walks the walk. The other great thing about them is that new ones come up all the time—and they aren’t going to write themselves.
| 60 CASE STUDIES/ PROJECT PROFILES | Case studies/project profiles show that the company doesn’t just talk the talk—it walks the walk, too. |
Get This Gig: Case Studies/Project Profiles
Where Do I Start?
Case studies/project profiles are of greatest value to Small Fish and Lone Wolves. Big Dogs tend not to need them because of their already large customer base. In your letter or marketing kit targeted to these small- and medium-sized players, add a clear and concrete bit that includes (a) how much value can be derived from well-written case studies/project profiles, and (b) the fact that they just happen to be one of your specialty services.
Who Do I Contact?
Case studies/project profiles are marketing pieces, so send your stuff to the marketing manager.
What Do I Charge?
Again, this is a two-pronged exercise. There’s the up-front work, involving meetings or correspondence with those from whom you need to gather information or with whom you need to collaborate on format and presentation (the in-house graphic designer, for example), and there’s the actual writing. Show both parts in your estimate.
CUSTOMER STORIES/TESTIMONIES
Companies can spend a gazillion dollars on slick advertising, but they all know nothing beats a direct recommendation from one customer to another. That’s why firms of every size are constantly trying to get customers to go on record and talk about how sublime their experience with the company or its products was. This isn’t easy, however—consumers are happy to purchase things, but not many of them are willing to be mouthpieces for a company just to help it boost its bottom line.
With the right approach, however, those who act as buffers between company and customer can sometimes more easily convince the latter to offer a positive word or two about the former. And if it can be done for one company, it can be done for many.
| 61 CUSTOMER STORIES/ TESTIMONIES | “Customer stories are very powerful, but they must be written in an engaging way, like a good magazine article. Play up the drama, the challenge that was overcome, the mystery that was solved. Too many customer stories are wooden.” —Gordon Graham, freelancer |
Get This Gig: Customer Stories/Testimonies
Where Do I Start?
Develop a process for obtaining customer stories/testimonies and a template for capturing them. It isn’t enough just to mention in your introductory letter that you “write customer stories and testimonies.” You need to sell yourself as someone who can both get the information (and the permission) and write the stories. There are plenty of ways to
If the company can’t convince its customers to talk, that’s of no use. go about this, but regardless of the method you use, it must be seriously buttoned-down, since you only get one shot at it. As a starting point, take a look at Stories That Sell by Casey Hibbard, a book that talks all about drawing powerful stories out of satisfied customers and includes a specific chapter on securing consent.
Who Do I Contact?
Being able to tell the president that customer stories/testimonies are in hand and authorized would be a major feather in any marketer’s cap. So aim directly for the marketing manager.
What Do I Charge?
Develop a specific pricing schedule and include it in the letter, flyer, or brochure you send to the marketing manager. Because customer stories/testimonies are tough to get, it’s okay to attach a fair cost to them—$500, say, for getting an individual testimony and writing it up. This cost would increase if you are to place the text in presentation-ready format, too.
You and
THE WORLD WIDE WEB
The debate over whether you need a Web site is long over. You need one. The first place people go to learn about any business today is the Internet, so don’t think twice about the investment a Web site requires.
The good news: The investment can be quite small and still effective. The best writers’ sites I know are the simplest, cleanest, and most straightforward. You’re in the business of words, not graphics, so it’s words, not graphics, that should be the strength of your site. Check out the Web sites of other writers and see which elements you find compelling and which you find forgettable. Use this investigation to decide how your site should look and what it should contain. Then, for a few hundred dollars, you can have a site that stands up to anyone else’s and an ongoing online presence that helps convert curiosity into contracts.
FAQS
There are two reasons most companies include a Frequently Asked Questions tab on their Web site: to let people know more about how the company operates, and to try to minimize the number of inquiries to Customer Service. If asked to do an FAQ exercise, be cognizant that people inside a company don’t necessarily have an accurate handle on what people outside the company want to know. The best way to ascertain this is to not to talk to the people who run the business but to put yourself in the shoes of a potential or existing customer. Your goal is to help the company deliver what it needs—or, more frequently, wants.
FAQs can be short or long, serious or funny, static or dynamic. As with any corporate writing you do, the tone of your copy should match the personality of the organization. Before you write a word or perform a stitch of research, establish with your client what the FAQ is intended to achieve and what it should sound like, then off to the races you go. And don’t underestimate the importance of an FAQ assignment. To your client, anything that makes the company more customer-friendly is nothing short of invaluable.
| 62 FAQS | Well-considered FAQs make the company seem more friendly to its customers—and you can’t put a price on that. |
Get This Gig: FAQs
Where Do I Start?
Search Web sites of companies engaged in more complex business offerings, like finance or technology. These are the companies that are going to naturally have the hardest time communicating clearly with their customers, and therefore will be the companies most sorely in need of a way to lay things out simply. Note the ones that don’t have an FAQ or something analogous. Customize your introductory letter so it makes special mention of FAQs, then send it off to those companies.
Who Do I Contact?
The Webmaster or head of IT.
What Do I Charge?
FAQs, like press releases, aren’t difficult in execution, but the process of obtaining the information you need from those who have it is not always smooth or well facilitated. Often you will need to gather bits and pieces from various internal sources and then synthesize it—seamlessly, of course. Before quoting, try to ask the kinds of questions that determine how extensive your grunt work will be prior to the actual writing: Does an FAQ for the company exist today in any form? How old is it? Who wrote it? What kinds of questions does the company’s customer service team get asked most often?
BUCKSLIPS
Usually about the size of a dollar bill (hence the name), buckslips are small inserts added to larger mailing packages. Companies use them to call attention to a specific message or aspect within the context of something broader, like a special early bird offer within an overall promotion or an ad for a separate product that complements the main one being advertised (for example, a buckslip for a golf cart added to a golf store’s monthly newsletter). Since they’re usually printed on light paper, buckslips are a useful, cost-effective way to communicate late-breaking information or eleventh-hour changes, especially when the alternative is to alter and reprint an entire package.
| 63 BUCKSLIPS | Buckslips are usually short, containing at most a few hundred words of copy, so they need to be subtle and precise. In other words, they demand expertise like the kind you can offer. |
Get This Gig: Buckslips
Where Do I Start?
Hold on to any and all buckslips you receive in the mail. Make notes about what you see as their most common flaws or shortcomings. Once you’ve completed this research, add a mention of buckslips to your introductory letter.
Who Do I Contact?
Buckslips are marketing materials, so go straight for the marketing jugular. In other words, send your letter to the marketing manager or director.
What Do I Charge?
Base your quote on the number of words the buckslip contains. The standard guideline—an hour for every 250 words of writing or every 500 words of editing—should be safe.
EVENT MATERIALS
From small customer appreciation events run by midsize firms to trade shows occupying entire floors of convention centers to elaborate galas sponsored by ginormous multinational conglomerates, just about every company takes part, in one capacity or another, in events of various kinds. These events can afford numerous opportunities for writers, because they need to be (a) advertised in advance with things like posters, flyers, invitations, and e-mail blasts, (b) highlighted during the event itself with things like notes, signs, banners, posters, demos, and presentations, and (c) followed up on with things like letters, thank-you cards, informal surveys, and materials promoting the following year’s event.
Client requests for event-related writing might start out small, but be sure to knock every one of those small requests out of the park just as you would any big project, because events happen all the time, and what starts small may just get bigger, and bigger, and … well, you get the idea.
| 64 EVENT MATERIALS | Event materials—from posters to flyers, invitations to presentations, thank-you cards to evaluation forms—offer no shortage of opportunities for writers. |
Get This Gig: Event Materials
Where Do I Start?
Undertake a twin effort. First, do a Google search of “event companies”— companies that organize events on behalf of other organizations—plus your city. Then create a customized version of your introductory letter specifically targeting these companies and emphasizing your desire to work with event organizers.
Second, look for companies whose names show up on events in your area—golf tournaments, charity galas, that sort of thing. To those companies, send a version of your introductory letter that includes mention of event writing.
Who Do I Contact?
Go to the Web sites of the companies you find, or call their offices, and get the name of the person in charge of putting together event materials.
What Do I Charge?
If you’re working on only one part of the overall event mix, the company you’re working with may want to integrate your cost as part of its overall invoice. If you’re writing event materials directly for the company organizing the event, charge according to your regular hourly rate.
DISPLAY/EXHIBIT MATERIALS
Go visit any nearby store and walk around. Take a mental inventory of every word you see displayed—on signs, stickers, banners, flyers, panels, cards, and so on. Most of the words you see in these displays come in the form of short phrases or pithy messages. Guess what?
Someone had to write them. Words can move mountains, yes, but in the eyes of most companies what’s more important is that they can move customers—into the store, and then toward certain products or displays. Often these words are part of displays or in-store promotions into which big bucks have been pumped from Head Office, so errors are certainly not acceptable, and neither is soft or aimless writing. Never measure the worth of an assignment by the number of words it involves. Every brilliant MBA graduate who has tried his hand at writing the perfect phrase for a poster—and eventually pulled his hair out in the attempt—recognizes that promotional writing is hard writing, and the fewer the words, the harder it is to find the right ones.
| 65 DISPLAY/ EXHIBIT MATERIALS | Display/exhibit materials epitomize one of freelancing’s most crucial dictums: Never measure the worth of an assignment by the number of words it involves. |
Get This Gig: Display/Exhibit Materials
Where Do I Start?
Visit the big-box or chain stores in your area and make note of how effective or ineffective their in-store displays are. Prepare a version of your introductory letter that refers specifically to display/exhibit writing as one aspect of the services you offer. For example, “The aim of my practice is to improve every piece of marketing or branding collateral, from in-store banners to elaborate product brochures.” If you’ve noticed specific errors on any of the in-store materials, feel free to point them out as a way of bolstering your case, but make sure you avoid an inadvertently condescending tone.
Who Do I Contact?
Call the head offices of each of the companies whose stores you’ve visited and get the name of the marketing manager or vice president. Pop your letter in the mail to that person.
What Do I Charge?
As I said, it can take time even to find the right five words for a sticker. Just be sure not to charge so little that it looks as though you don’t care what you get paid. Use the lawyer’s approach here: Any project is worth at least an hour of your time.
The Madness
OF WRITERS
Often when I’m holed up in my office working on a new writing project, my wife Stephanie will walk in and ask me what I’m so excited about. I never actually realize that I’m acting excited, but she says she can always tell when I’ve found the story, by which she means I’ve finally corralled the structure, or the thread, for the piece I’ve been wrestling with. My whole demeanor changes, she says, as though I’ve stumbled upon a chest full of gold. She’s right—I know no more ecstatic moment than the one in which the story crystallizes before me, sometimes after hours, days, or weeks of trying to find it. It’s an instant of true magic for me—and one that utterly puzzles her, since the thought of taking a blank page and having to populate it with words is one she finds quite revolting.
“You’re enjoying that, aren’t you?” she’ll say.
“More than I can tell you,” I’ll reply. Then she’ll smile, shake her head, and walk out of the office as though she’s just been talking to an alien. It’s adorable, really.
OUTLINES
At various turns called straw men, dot-dashes, storyboards, and a host of other names, the pieces belonging to this category, no matter what name they may go by in a company’s particular vernacular, provide foundational frameworks from which to develop more complete versions—of project plans, presentations, documents, and so on. A straw man, for instance, is a preliminary business document intended to kick-start a broader discussion. A dot-dash is an outline consisting of key points and key subpoints around which to compose a complete document. A storyboard is a chronology of snapshots around which to craft a complete presentation. Each of these is highly effective when produced by someone skilled at articulating key ideas in a structured way. Someone like you.
| 66 OUTLINES | An outline is the scaffolding on which the rest of the story is built. |
Get This Gig: Outlines
Where Do I Start?
Outlines are all about imposing structure on content that would otherwise be loose and incoherent. So create a version of your introductory letter that emphasizes your ability to take any material, no matter how scattershot, and make of it a clear, compelling story that delivers all the relevant messages while being creative in presentation.
Who Do I Contact?
Marketing departments love writers who can pull together messages in tidy copy, thereby satisfying the demands of all the different internal stakeholders. Target the marketing manager.
What Do I Charge?
Outlines in all their forms can demand significant up-front time, so when providing your quote, remember to assume that extra 20 percent.
NAMES
A good deal of my corporate work comes to me after others have tried their hand at seemingly easy writing tasks and failed. Quite often these tasks involve the need to name something—a new product, a line of products, a program or initiative, a proprietary concept or framework, even a company itself—and they’re usually quite a bit of fun, since the process tends to be collaborative, intensive, and energizing. Plus, corporate naming isn’t far removed from the creative writing process; it’s only a stone’s throw, in fact, from thinking of a title for your personal essay, a moniker for your protagonist, or a name for the fictional company in your short story. You’re bringing to bear the same creative muscle and applying it to something that just happens to exist in the real world.
| 67 NAMES | “You can’t overstate the importance of an effective name.” —Kalina Marcysiak, Senior Business Transformation Consultant, IBM Global Business Services |
Get This Gig: Names
Where Do I Start?
It’s all about letting people know all the different ways a professional communicator can help. I actually scored my most recent naming gig because of this very book. I e-mailed a number of my corporate contacts asking if they’d be interested in offering quotes for various sections of the book. One of them e-mailed back saying, “I didn’t know you do name brainstorming. We’re desperately trying to find the right name for a hot new product we’ve developed. Can’t get there. Think you could come in for two or three hours next week?” In your intro letter, whether your services are listed in paragraphs, as a bulleted list, or some other way, make sure you include a thorough sampling so that those receiving it will realize just how many ways there are in which you can be useful to them.
Who Do I Contact?
Freelance naming gigs will come mostly from Small Fish and Lone Wolves, since Big Dogs will have their in-house marketing teams handle it. Send your letter to the most senior people at as many of these organizations as you’d like.
What Do I Charge?
Charge by the hour, and don’t skimp. Names are crucial in the business world. Your time spent helping figure them out is valuable.
TAGLINES/SLOGANS
A little further along the scale are the taglines/slogans needed to help sell the things you’ve helped name. And though the words contained in these pieces of mini-writing may come after the names themselves, they’re hardly secondary. One could put up a pretty strong argument, in fact, that a tagline/slogan does more to sell the product or company than the name of the product or company itself. The word “Nike” could mean anything, but the three words “Just Do It” communicate an entire world of athletic endeavor and passion. “Raid” tells you virtually nothing; “Raid Kills Bugs Dead” tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Personally, I love these kinds of assignments because they’re a terrific challenge and a tremendous opportunity to prove the true value of a professional writer. The fewer words one has to work with, the harder it is to amaze the reader—or, in this case, the client. Always have faith that, provided you put in the time, your talent will rise to the fore and create possibilities that cause the client to say, “Man, you’re good.”
| 68 TAGLINES/ SLOGANS | “A slogan may be just a few words, but it can speak volumes.” —Jennifer Ansley, Marketing Manager, Somerset Entertainment |
Get This Gig: Taglines/Slogans
Where Do I Start?
Make sure your letter communicates the fact that writing is more than editing. Many people, until they find out otherwise, assume that freelance writers offer the corporate world little more than identification of erroneous commas. Yes, those bad commas drive me nuts, too, but the point here is to outline both levels of what you offer—standard writing and editing help plus communications expertise applicable to the entire range of marketing materials.
Who Do I Contact?
Marketing departments spend a huge number of hours trying to capture just the right words to describe a product or service. Send your letter to the marketing department head. Hopefully he will see the light and invite you in to make his job easier.
What Do I Charge?
You don’t want to seem as though you don’t know how long your own work takes you, so when you’re asked to generate possible taglines/slogans, assume about a day’s work for half a dozen good possibilities.
MISSION/VISION/VALUES STATEMENTS
A little further yet along the spectrum we find the sacrosanct words to which organizations religiously cleave: the mission/vision/values statements that let the rest of the world know why they exist, what they aim to be, and what’s important to them.
It can be fashionable around the water cooler to joke that mission/ vision/values statements are little more than fluff. But studies have shown that, when the employees of a company clearly understand its purpose and goals, better performance results. If a company is serious about its mission, vision, and values, you, as the person tapped to help pin them down, had better be serious about them, too; if nothing else, when you approach a writing assignment with a serious mindset, the writing is inevitably better.
To write these well, it’s critical that you understand the distinctions among them. A mission statement describes the overall purpose and raison d’être of the organization (“To produce and sell ice cream.”). A vision statement describes what the organization wants to become (“To be the number-one ice-cream-selling company in the Midwest.”). Values (increasingly referred to today as “core values”—don’t ask me why) are those traits the organization cares about and wishes to see reflected in its employees (“Superior Ice Cream values passion, integrity, commitment, and a complete and utter affection for ice cream in all its wonderful flavors.”). Mission/vision/values statements are not meant to be fluid and dynamic over time; they are meant to be the philosophical bedrock on which the company operates. That means many people are going to have opinions about how the words contained in these statements should read, so be patient, open, collaborative, leave your ego at the door, and strive for something that will inspire pride and solidarity in everyone who reads them.
| 69 MISSION/ VISION/VALUES STATEMENTS | Mission/vision/values statements let the rest of the world know why a company exists, what it aims to be, and what it considers important. |
Get This Gig: Mission/Vision/Values Statements
Where Do I Start?
Mission/vision/values statements are created to help publicize what a company is all about—its brand. Create a version of your introductory letter that includes clear mention of the help you can provide creating and refining brand communications.
Who Do I Contact?
Look up branding firms in your area and send your letter to their chief officers. Most of them will be Small Fish, so it’s okay to target the top people.
What Do I Charge?
Mission/vision/values-type work is usually highly collaborative, involving meetings with many people in order to figure out what the organization truly stands for, what it wants to be, and what values it genuinely wishes to uphold. And then there’s the actual writing part. When you get this kind of assignment, prepare a quote that assumes time for both research and writing.
QUESTIONNAIRES/SURVEYS
Companies base their strategies on what they can find out about their customers. They attempt lots of trickery to suss out this information, but there’s one tried-and-true method they come back to again and again: the questionnaire/survey. I imagine you get hit with questionnaires/ surveys all the time, these days mostly online. Sometimes, if you’re feeling generous, you even fill them out.
Questionnaires/surveys are the easiest, most direct way to gather information, but for them to achieve their aim, they need to be properly written. You may not think of a questionnaire/survey as something that can be written well or poorly, but please believe me when I tell you that anything can be written well or poorly. A questionnaire/survey is a superb example of this. Those that are written poorly will contain vague questions, an indistinct structure, and a sense of overlap throughout—that the questionnaire/survey steps on its own feet. Questionnaire/surveys that accomplish their objectives do so because they contain questions that are both clear and nonthreatening, allowing the recipient to answer without feeling confused, misdirected, or ill at ease.
The same goes for internal questionnaires/surveys, used often by companies to take the pulse of its staff. Such questionnaires/surveys can hardly be put together willy-nilly; they need to extract highly specific answers in a highly sensitive way. If handed such an assignment, you need to ask many questions yourself before writing the questions for others. When was the last time a questionnaire/survey was sent out? What were the results like? Did people have trouble answering any of the questions in particular? What are the most important pieces of information you’re trying to draw out? Are there any specific sensitivities you’re aware of among the recipient group?
| 70 QUESTIONNAIRES/ SURVEYS | Questionnaires/surveys that achieve their objectives do so because they’re clear and nonthreatening. |
Get This Gig: Questionnaires/Surveys
Where Do I Start?
Create a version of your blanket letter that spotlights questionnaires/ surveys as perfect examples of what you do. (“Focused, effective questionnaires and surveys are just one of the services I provide.”) Mention the other stuff, too, but put these up front so anyone with that particular need won’t have a chance to miss it.
Who Do I Contact?
Questionnaires/surveys are usually marshaled by human resources departments and employed primarily by Big Dogs with the marketing budgets to accommodate them. Aim for the large firms, and get your letter into the hands of their human resources managers.
What Do I Charge?
As with mission/vision/values statements, try to determine as accurately as possible how much nonwriting work you’ll have to do—I’m talking about meetings, reviewing material, and research—and then, in your quote, split out that part of the assignment from the writing part so it’s clear how you’re calculating the estimated hours.
HUMAN RESOURCES MATERIALS
As a company’s main storehouse of employee information, operational principles, and specific protocols, every human resources department is by necessity document-heavy. The organization’s silent eyes and ears, often exerting more control from behind the scenes than is apparent, Human Resources, more than any other area, needs to have things officially recorded, from job postings to expense guidelines to staff evaluations. This translates into lots of stuff being written down, and people needed to write it. Because human resources documents are so critical, they need to be done exactly right, so those in charge often turn to writers to capture that special balance of thoroughness and concision that so many find elusive.
| 71 HUMAN RESOURCES MATERIALS | “It’s paramount that human resources documents are clear, thorough, and effective. They’re the company’s foundation.” —Mara Gunner, Human Resources and Organizational Development, Royal Ontario Museum |
Get This Gig: Human Resources Materials
Where Do I Start?
Ask friends of yours employed at Big Dogs or Small Fish to swipe some human resources materials from work; then use those types of materials as examples to cite in your introductory letter. Communicate the fact that you understand human resources materials need to be clear, thorough, and accurate—exactly the principles your practice is based on.
Who Do I Contact?
Send the letter to human resources managers at as many Big Dogs and Small Fish as you feel like targeting.
What Do I Charge?
Human resources materials aren’t that far removed from legal documents insofar as they often must include highly specific information. So be prepared to go back and forth multiple times on documents that appear relatively straightforward. The way I get around this is by building two rounds of feedback and revision into my initial quote. I make it clear to the client that, beyond those two rounds, the meter starts running.
AWARD NOMINATIONS
Most every company has some type of program whereby employees can be nominated and acknowledged for standout performance within a particular context—on a specific project, say, or for exhibiting bang-up customer service, or for doing exemplary work over the course of a month, or for finding a creative solution to a pressing issue. It usually falls to supervisors or managers to complete such nominations (and submit them to Human Resources, of course), but these people are, ironically, often those with the least time in which to do so, so typically they’re only too happy to hand off the responsibility to someone else—someone who can work within the parameters of a standard nomination template, or within the nonparameters of no template at all, and forcefully communicate why a certain accomplishment, by a certain person, merits recognition.
| 72 AWARD NOMINATIONS | Studies have shown that the number-one thing people want at work isn’t a bigger salary or extra status, but recognition for their efforts. Awards go a long way toward achieving that goal. |
Get This Gig: Award Nominations
Where Do I Start?
The more proprietary materials or templates you develop, the better chance you have of getting your foot in the corporate door. Ask friends and associates if they can provide you samples of the award nomination templates and forms used by their companies, then see if you can’t dream up some original but professional-looking forms a human resources manager might want to implement.
Who Do I Contact?
The larger the organization, the more likely it is to have a formalized award or recognition program and materials to support it. So it makes the most sense to target human resources managers at Big Dogs as a starting point.
What Do I Charge?
If people are interested in your writing award-related content according to their existing materials, charge by the hour. If they’re interested in using materials you’ve created, you can charge them a licensing or rights fee. The size of this fee depends on a few factors, including how extensive the materials are and how big the company is, but a few thousand dollars is usually the right neighborhood. It’s best to ask the advice of a corporate lawyer should you find yourself in this situation.
CATALOGS
Companies that sell stuff need to let their customers know what kinds of things they sell, how much they sell them for, and how they can be purchased. This is done in countless ways today—online stores, banner ads, leaflets, e-mail blitzes—but the most time-honored method is still the good old-fashioned catalog. From IKEA to Victoria’s Secret to Pottery Barn, companies still rely on catalogs to sell their products as much as they do any other channel, and those catalogs still have the same mix of content as they did a century ago: appealing photos, brief descriptions of most of the products, longer descriptions of a few featured ones, prices, and order forms. Some catalogs contain extensive writing. The catalog produced by clothing company Coldwater Creek, for example, includes almost an entire story for every item it shows.
Because of the intense competition for consumer dollars today, companies know that a single typo or mismatched caption in a catalog could mean loss of customers, so they ensure that the words going into that catalog are put through multiple drafts and scrutinized by numerous sets of eyes before seeing the light of day. Often they’ll seek someone from outside the company to bring an objective view to the catalog content, and a writer is exactly the kind of person they’ll seek.
The extent of what you’re asked to do will depend on the stage at which you’re brought in. If toward the end of the project, you’ll typically be asked to do a thorough proofread of the copy. If you’re brought in closer to the beginning, you might be given leeway to make editorial suggestions or, if right at the outset, recommendations to the overall layout and structure. In the end, catalogs are a bit like annual reports: Though they aren’t quite showcases for your creative gifts, they probably represent bigger opportunities than you think. To you, fixing some erratic punctuation, putting a few quotation marks where they belong, and altering a handful of clunky phrases doesn’t seem like a big deal. It might even feel boring. But to the marketing vice president who’s been put in charge of getting a flawless catalog out the door, a guy who’s utterly swamped but still needs to get this right, your work is not only impressive—it matters. In a big way.
| 73 CATALOGS | Companies still rely on catalogs to sell their products. And it isn’t just the pictures that sell the products—it’s the words. |
Get This Gig: Catalogs
Where Do I Start?
Go through every catalog you receive to get a feel for the kind of writing it contains. Look for errors or places where you think the copy could be stronger. You’re not trying to throw anyone under the bus here; you’re just making the subtle suggestion that you might be able to do a superior job with the same material. Create a version of your introductory letter that makes specific reference to that company’s catalog. Tailor it specifically for each company you target.
Who Do I Contact?
Send your letter to the marketing manager, since it’s her department that’s responsible for turning out the catalog. Try to time it so your letter is received six months before the catalog comes out, since that’s about the time production on it will begin.
What Do I Charge?
Estimate your hours by asking exactly which parts of the catalog you’re being asked to edit or write. You might be required to edit fifty two-sentence captions or to compose the customer letter on the inside cover. Get a clear idea of (a) what you’re working on, and (b) what proportion is writing vs. editing, then determine your quote.
LETTERS
All companies write to their customers. The bigger the company, the more letters they send. My biggest corporate assignment in the past year came from a Big Dog financial client for whom I’d been editing some product campaign brochures. One afternoon the vice president of marketing approached me and said, “Our customer letters are shit. Can you help?” “Of course,” I replied. (Remember: You can always help.) I asked how many different letters there were. “About three hundred, I think,” he said. “Or maybe five hundred, I’m not sure.” This brief exchange led to my reviewing and revising all of those letters. I didn’t want to see any financial letters for a while after that, but it was certainly a nice assignment to get.
| 74 LETTERS | Many companies try to save money by asking their marketers to be writers, too. Then they find out the two skills are very different. That’s where you come in. |
Get This Gig: Letters
Where Do I Start?
Prepare a version of your intro letter that talks strictly about the importance of effective customer communications (you can even say “customer-facing” communications if it turns your fancy) and how well you understand that importance. List a number of different types of such communications, including brochures, flyers, company Web sites, and, most important of all, letters. You’re positioning yourself as an expert at helping companies talk to their customers.
Who Do I Contact?
Keeping the letters you receive in the mail for just a week or two will give you plenty of prospects to target. Remember, don’t send your letter to the head of Communications; send it to the head of Marketing. Whenever possible, gently point out errors in the letters you’ve received from the company or offer a handful of specific suggestions for improvement. They just might be swayed by the fact that you’ve spotted things their own people didn’t.
What Do I Charge?
Customer letters are delicate animals, so they do take time. Use the standard guideline—an hour for every 250 words of writing or 500 words of editing—but be prepared for it to expand if necessary.
ADVERTISEMENTS
Advertising can take diverse forms, including billboards or posters, print ads in magazines, radio or TV spots, and direct mail pieces. A fair chunk of most companies’ budgets are devoted to advertising (subsumed within the overall marketing budget), so the copy that goes into those ads must be precise and strategic.
Though both companies and customers understand that the sole purpose of an ad is for the former to try to sell something to the latter, they maintain a tacit understanding that heavy-handed, in-your-face ads are unwelcome. Ad copy must therefore arouse customers’ interest and stir them to action while not seeming to do so. This is a subtle trick, one that you, as a professional writer, can perform better than anyone.
As you do more and more work for a company, you may find yourself being asked to participate in advertising work that goes beyond strict copywriting. Creative types are usually creative in more than one way, and once you’re recognized as an “idea” person in general, don’t be surprised if your clients ask you to help with things like general concept work on campaigns, brainstorming on specific ads, even graphic and layout composition. After a few months producing a departmental newsletter at Procter & Gamble, I was approached one morning by a junior associate named Chris whom I’d gotten to know fairly well but with whom I hadn’t worked directly. He pulled me into a boardroom with a dozen other people, closed the lights, and popped in a videocassette. Suddenly a commercial for Folgers coffee came on, featuring the addictive jingle, “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.” Chris then turned the lights back on and asked everyone, including me, what they thought of the commercial, which was to hit stations the following week. At first I was surprised to have been brought in, but then I realized why it had made perfect sense to Chris. This was creative work that involved communicating with customers. It’s the kind of thing likely to happen to you, too: Those you work for, and with, will open your eyes to areas that fall quite naturally within your range of expertise but that you never thought about pursuing before. Those people deserve your thanks, because once you add a new wrinkle to your range of services, it’s there for good—and every extra wrinkle is another potential way in the door.
| 75 ADVERTISEMENTS | It doesn’t matter whether companies want to advertise. They have to. And they know that both the images and the words have to be just right. |
Get This Gig: Advertisements
Where Do I Start?
Big Dogs’ marketing departments use dedicated in-house copywriters to give life to the ads they produce. But at Small Fish, even when people are hired for one role, they often end up doing many. Hold on to that steady avalanche of ads you get in the mail every week, and make a list of the companies who send them. Then create a version of your introductory letter that specifically highlights your interest and expertise in copywriting (which is the same as ad writing).
Who Do I Contact?
Call the Small Fish on your list and get the names of their marketing managers. Send your letter to them. You can try the Big Dogs, too, but they’ll be looking specifically for copywriters, so in the letter you should call yourself one.
What Do I Charge?
When writing ad copy you usually need to meet with graphic designers, the project manager, and others working on the same piece. Ascertain all these needs in your initial meeting, then prepare an appropriate quote using the standard guideline of an hour per 250 words of writing or 500 words of editing.
ADVERTORIALS
The word advertorial comes from the blend of advertisement and editorial; it’s intended to stir customer interest under the guise of sharing expertise or knowledge from a particular point of view. An insurance company, for example, might pay to have an insert included in a business magazine in which they outline the slam-dunk advantages of life insurance. Oh, and by the way, they just happen to offer a bunch of different types of insurance, too. The piece takes the appearance of an editorial, but its purpose is to sell the company’s products or services by presenting an argument that, directly or indirectly, endorses the benefits.
| 76 ADVERTORIALS | An advertorial is halfway between an ad and an editorial—it uses expertise and a specific viewpoint to pique customer interest. |
Get This Gig: Advertorials
Where Do I Start?
Educate yourself on the difference between advertisements and advertorials. Look at several examples of both and see what they’re trying to accomplish and the respective ways in which they go about doing so. Clearly mention both types of writing in your introductory letter.
Who Do I Contact?
Advertorials aren’t cheap, so the majority of them come from Big Dogs and, to a lesser extent, Small Fish. The marketing department produces them; send your introductory letter to the top marketing contact you can find at these companies.
What Do I Charge?
An hour for every 250 words of writing or 500 words of editing.
FOCUS-GROUP INPUT
To help determine whether a certain product or service will be enthusiastically received in the marketplace, companies will sometimes go straight to the source, real-life consumers. They gather customers in a room with a facilitator, feed them pastries and coffee, and have them answer a number of sneaky questions so they’ll reveal exactly what the company wants to know—thereby justifying the investment of conducting the group since they stand to make millions extra as a result of the information it produces.
The key to these sessions, of course, is asking good questions, getting people talking, and accurately recording the results to report back to the company. Don’t be shocked if one of your clients asks if you’d be interested in facilitating one of these sessions. The way they see it, you’re a professional communicator, and who better to lead an exercise in which the most important traits are articulateness, coherence, a feel for dialogue, the ability to quickly process and interpret what people are saying in order to squeeze as much information out of them as possible—and, as I said, a knack for capturing the most salient parts of an extensive discussion in a clear, meaningful way.
Consumer focus groups aren’t the only type. You might be asked to conduct the same type of session internally, with a selection of the organization’s employees, to help paint a representative picture of the staff’s general frame of mind, including specific praise or grievances. I said earlier that internal surveys are often used by an organization to take the pulse of its staff. Sometimes the organization’s senior brass choose to bypass this step and take the more direct route of talking to its people in a live setting. That is, having you talk to its people in a live setting.
You might also be asked to conduct a session with a sampling of staff from one of the company’s clients. I am surprised at how few companies do this, since I’ve always seen it translate into a higher success rate and an improved supplier-client relationship. Occasionally I’ve been asked to conduct these sessions, and I’ve found them enjoyable. First, since I don’t represent the company directly, I’m not seen as a threat, so people talk more freely. Second, meeting new people means making more contacts. Finally, since the organization is depending on me to come back with information it can use, I have to be on from the get-go, and I appreciate both the challenge as well as the opportunity to use my communications skills in a creative way.
| 77 FOCUS-GROUP INPUT | Why do writers make good focus-group facilitators? Because they know how to ask good questions, and they know how to report the answers. |
Get This Gig: Focus-Group Input
Where Do I Start?
Group facilitation is perceived as a distinct skill, so you need to either develop a specific letter that showcases it, or, if you prefer, to give it an unmistakable shout-out in your customary note.
Who Do I Contact?
Focus groups are run by companies of every type for all the different reasons mentioned above. They are usually coordinated by Marketing in conjunction with Human Resources, who act more as watchdogs to the process. Rather than wasting time and postage, call the companies you’re curious about and ask them directly if they ever conduct focus groups. When the person on the other end asks why, say because you’re an experienced focus-group facilitator and you’d like to send an introductory letter to the appropriate person outlining the potential benefits. With a polished answer like that, how could they not give you the information?
What Do I Charge?
Charge an hourly rate, and make sure to include the time you spend preparing, the time you spend in the session itself, and the time you spend consolidating and reporting the input.
BUSINESS CASES
When a department or a team wants to propose a project, initiative, or program, they typically need to justify it to the company’s decision makers with a well-considered business case. The business case lays out the rationale for the project using explanations, figures, comparisons, analyses, assumptions, and, finally, projections. Since they are among the most tightly structured of business documents, business cases benefit from the talents of those who can wield different elements—prose, tables, graphs, charts, and so on—to tell a persuasive story.
At a minimum, the business case will provide some background or context, the reason for doing the project now, the expected costs, the expected risks, and the envisioned results and benefits. More detailed business cases may include in-depth market analyses, interdependencies with other departments, key stakeholders, the proposed project team and project sponsor, expected resource requirements, a preliminary critical path, and a boatload of other stuff.
Remember that no matter the length or format of a business case, its purpose is always the same: to convince those with the power to give the thumbs-up that this project makes sense for the company, now. Keep in mind also that since business cases are usually presented to senior people who have incredibly busy schedules, they need to be succinct, straightforward, and crystal clear about what they are proposing.
| 78 BUSINESS CASES | “A business case should be watertight— but it had also better sound good.” —Beatrix Dart, Associate Dean, Executive Degree Programs, Executive Director, Initiatives for Women in Business, and Professor of Strategic Management, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto |
Get This Gig: Business Cases
Where Do I Start?
Go to the nearest bookstore, grab a book like The Ten-Day MBA by Steven Silbiger or Complete MBA for Dummies by Kathleen Allen, PhD and Peter Economy off the shelf, and flip to the section on business cases. Study how they’re laid out, their components, their format, and the way they’re constructed to make a persuasive argument. In your introductory letter, note business cases as one of your particular areas of specialization, and perhaps one of your first-time discount or pro bono categories. For example, you might tag business cases, white papers, and speeches as items that, for first-time clients, you’ll write for free as long as they come in under ten hours, or some other total you feel is appropriate. It’s a great way to hook clients.
Who Do I Contact?
Any department trying to get a project approved might generate a business case, but Human Resources will in general disseminate information about freelancers or vendors of interest to the rest of the company—so send your letter to the human resources manager, including mention of business cases as part of the services you offer.
What Do I Charge?
Assembling a business case will require that you solicit input from various departments, including Finance, Product Development, and Marketing. When determining your quote, ask questions to determine how much time you’ll likely need to spend on that part of the work. Then add 20 percent.
SCENARIOS/HYPOTHETICALS
Because they are built around figures, numbers, and projections, business cases are by definition fairly dry reading. Related to them, however, are documents that bolster the business case rationale by painting a picture based on present facts or future assumptions. The former type is typically used to depict the collective behavior of a particular type of customer in order to better understand its needs. The latter is often used to develop a portrait of a specific customer group in order to market to them as effectively as possible. Here’s an example: A financial client of mine, analyzing demographic projections for the next decade, realized it needed specific strategies to market its services to two emerging groups in particular: working moms, a group that would continue to grow, and Zoomers, the older kids of baby boomers, who were still in the midst of defining themselves and in the meantime consuming everything in sight, from technology to chai lattés.
The company brought me aboard to take the work done by its research team and turn it into concrete scenarios—a day in the life of each group, if you will. I loved this assignment, because it essentially involved writing a story, with the characters and their backgrounds and desires handed to me on a silver platter. Based on the stories I wrote, the company built strategic marketing plans to go after each group. And you thought there was no room for creative writing in the corporate world.
| 79 SCENARIOS/ HYPOTHETICALS | Based on future assumptions, scenarios/ hypotheticals are often used to develop a portrait of a particular customer group in order to market to them as effectively as possible. |
Get This Gig: Scenarios/Hypotheticals
Where Do I Start?
Google “customer segment analysis,” “consumer demographics,” and any other related phrases you can come up with. Read some of the articles these searches generate—they’ll show you the kind of data companies use to create scenarios/hypotheticals and, consequently, to make certain gambles. Get to understand the behaviors and habits of each customer segment or group, and familiarize yourself with the ways in which each group is shrinking, growing, or changing. Then create a version of your letter that specifically points up the scenario-generating part of your practice, in which you take existing data and use it to craft future scenarios around which marketing departments can noodle crucial decisions for the future.
Who Do I Contact?
The bigger the company, the more likely they’ll have an appetite for this kind of service. Big Dogs in particular are willing to entertain this type of investment, because the people who work for them are always trying to introduce different, memorable elements. Send your letter to the marketing manager and follow up by phone after a few weeks.
What Do I Charge?
A scenario/hypothetical will often take the form of a story. Either bill a total number of hours at the end of the project or determine an estimate based on (a) how long you believe it will take you to write the scenario/ hypothetical, and (b) how many hours you think you’ll need for research such as examining data, reading reports, and talking to different staff.
PROSPECTUSES
Also related to business cases, but more creative in execution, are prospectuses: documents that describe the major features of proposed projects or ventures in enough detail that prospective patrons, clients, participants, or investors can make sound decisions regarding their potential involvement. A prospectus can be written for just about anything, from a restaurant to a hedge fund, and, like scenarios/hypotheticals, they consist mostly of prose, rather than data, which makes them pretty fun to write. Say you want to open a bagel store in New Haven, Connecticut. The business case you present to investors would provide the financial details—your overhead, your taxes, your expected revenue, and so on—but the prospectus would tell the in-depth story behind the idea, too—why the people of New Haven would be expected to flock to a bagel store, why the temperature patterns in the city mean people are out on a Saturday morning more often than not, how the store would follow successful models opened elsewhere in the region. It’s still a business document talking about business ideas, but above all it’s a story, and that story must be compelling in the eyes of those deciding whether to, literally, buy into it. Potential investors can look at assumptions and projections all day, but in the end these are still guesses. What persuades someone toward a certain course of action? A great story. You know it, I know it, and businesses know it, too.
| 80 PROSPECTUSES | A prospectus is a document describing a business idea in a persuasive way in order to convince potential investors and other stakeholders of its promise. But above all, it’s a story. |
Get This Gig: Prospectuses
Where Do I Start?
Read several prospectuses to understand how they’re distinct from proposals (for more on that, see the following section) and business cases. In your standard letter, mention all three.
Who Do I Contact?
Send your letter to both the human resources manager and marketing manager. Big Dogs, Small Fish, and Lone Wolves all might have reason to produce prospectuses for one reason or another, so don’t exclude any of them.
What Do I Charge?
Like business cases, prospectuses will demand that you pull together lots of information from disparate sources. That’s likely to occupy a fair chunk of hours. The best thing you can do for both yourself and your client is to establish mutual clarity from the get-go, after which you can deliver an estimate you’re confident in.
PROPOSALS
Related to prospectuses, which are usually created to provide information to investors, are proposals, which are usually created for the unadulterated purpose of asking directly for something, most often business.
Business cases lay out inclusive, tightly structured financial projections and analyses, targeting the audience’s wallet via its brain. Proposals might target the wallet, too, but they’re just as likely to go through the heart or some other creative path. Business cases rationalize a course of action that will benefit the company in some way—case closed. Proposals are much more varied depending on both the company creating them and the audience they’re being created for. I once wrote two separate proposals for a real estate brokerage firm wanting to represent first an upscale hotel chain and, second, Planet Hollywood. You can imagine how different those two proposals looked.
All proposals, no matter how they’re packaged, share a basic structure. They must explain the audience’s specific need, articulate the proposed solution, lay out its specific advantages, and describe why it’s better than any other alternatives.
| 81 PROPOSAL | The most important thing to remember when writing a business proposal is this: Focus not on the company doing the proposing but on the audience it’s proposing to. |
Get This Gig: Proposals
Where Do I Start?
Surf the Web for proposals of different types—real estate proposals, financial proposals, marketing proposals, business proposals … everything short of marriage proposals. Learn about the various forms they come in and the ingredients they’re usually composed of. Judge them on the effectiveness with which they tell a convincing story. Peruse a copy of Writing Winning Business Proposals by Richard C. Freed, Shervin Freed, and Joe Romano. Then, since Big Dogs, Small Fish, and Lone Wolves all have occasion to bid for projects, make proposal writing a conspicuous part of your standard letter.
Who Do I Contact?
The marketing manager. In almost every case, the proposal is at some point going to end up in Marketing’s hands.
What Do I Charge?
Proposals can be difficult to quote on because of the extensive thinking time they often require. That is, outside of the actual content writing, you might spend a great deal of time mentally storyboarding, revising the structure, adding here, removing there, and dummying in placeholders to be completed later. As always, ask for as much information up front as possible on which to base your estimate. As a default, use a rate of an hour and a half per page or PowerPoint slide.
TIMELINES/CRITICAL PATHS
Though I’m a writer, I’ve spent a lot of time in different offices, around a range of clients, and on various project teams—and I can tell you there’s isn’t a project in the world that doesn’t run better when it’s organized around a specific, documented timeline/critical path that has specific owners accountable for the deliverables and milestones built into it. Yes, that was a cringe-inducing bit of corporate-speak I just laid on you, but those buzzwords do sometimes have their place. Anyone who has tried to manage a strategic initiative or multifaceted project plan without a timeline/critical path to keep it focused can well understand how much better things run when there is a plan in place.
| 82 TIMELINES/ CRITICAL PATHS | Why are writers naturally good at developing timelines/critical paths? Because they’re used to visualizing the entire story. |
Get This Gig: Timelines/Critical Paths
Where Do I Start?
Google “critical path”—lots of stuff will come up that demonstrates a solid, sound way to create a project timeline/critical path. This type of work involves project management as well as raw writing, but think of it as keeping multiple characters on track as you stalk the finish line of a story. If you’re inclined, research as many timeline/critical path-type forms and templates as you can, then create some proprietary ones of your own that you can mention in your standard letter or announce via a more customized one.
Who Do I Contact?
Though every department in a company can benefit from good project management tools, make the marketing manager your initial target, since that’s the area (not counting Communications) to which your skill set is most closely matched.
What Do I Charge?
If you’re getting in on the ground floor of a project and being asked to adapt some existing materials, make a fair estimate according to an hourly rate. If a company is asking to use materials you’ve created, charge a licensing fee. (See Award Nominations.)
WEB COPY
Last in this section, but hardly least in today’s world, is online writing. Since most people today make the Internet their first step when wanting to learn more about, well, anything, it stands to reason that what companies place on their Web sites is as important as, if not more important than, what they put in print. Almost any professional freelancer will report an increase in the proportion of Web writing they’ve been requested to do over the past several years. Company Web sites are no longer side projects meant to supplement print material. They are full-scale, ongoing endeavors often maintained by an entire team or occupying their own department. Since most organizations are increasing their Web content out of necessity but not correspondingly reducing their print output, the volume of stuff they need written has ballooned. This is great news for you.
Keep in mind that Web writing isn’t the same as writing for print. People are less patient online, so Web copy usually needs to be shorter, more concise, and, for the purposes of visual ease, more broken up. Showing you can tell the same story with equal impact in print and online will help solidify your status as an indispensable resource.
| 83 WEB COPY | “A company’s Web site is its calling card. If it doesn’t sound good, you’re in trouble.” —Martin Traub-Werner, Vice President, Raybec Communications |
Get This Gig: Web Copy
Where Do I Start?
Simple—start surfing, baby. The Web is your oyster. Visit as many sites as you want, making notes about what works and what doesn’t, recording errors big and small, perhaps printing out sample pages and marking them with suggested changes. One thing will become clear to you during this exercise: There’s enough bad Web writing out there to make you feel good. For companies whose Web sites have the most errors or contain the poorest writing, customize a version of your introductory letter that points out, using real examples, the kinds of ways in which you might be able to help them present the company more effectively. As always, be sure to do this with a kind, helpful, collaborative tone, not one that’s in any way patronizing or arrogant.
Who Do I Contact?
Big Dogs, Small Fish, and Lone Wolves all have Web sites, and they all rely on them increasingly to drive customer interest and activity. Send your letter to one of them, ten of them, a hundred, or until your envelopes run out.
What Do I Charge?
When quoting on Web writing, use the same rule of thumb as you do for print: an hour of your time for every 250 words of writing or every 500 words of editing.
Spell-Check Your E-Mails
(AND DON’T STOP THERE)
As a professional writer, you’re justifiably held to a higher standard of communication even in casual correspondence. While others can get away with messages characterized by endless emoticons and stomach-turning grammar, you can’t. Before you send that three-line e-mail to the editor with whom you’re just touching base, do a spell-check. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you won’t find anything, but the one mistake you catch might make or break a pivotal relationship. And if you’re truly serious about ensuring a professional image, don’t stop at the spell-check. Go through your messages word by word, even letter by letter, to make sure no homonyms have slipped by that might alter things irredeemably. Your first instinct may tell you it isn’t worth the time to do this, but keep in mind that the next writer, or the one after that, is going to take the time, and bypassing that extra step means giving him an unnecessary edge. Worse, your error might be immortalized, like the unfortunate writer whose story describing a man who had “lapsed into a comma” found its way to the desk of The Washington Post Copy Chief Bill Walsh, who used the gaffe as part of the title of his editors’ and writers’ guide, Lapsing Into a Comma: A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print—and How to Avoid Them. Nor do you want to suffer the fate of Walsh’s brother, who, while at PR Newswire, inadvertently sent out a Goldman Sachs press release referring to the firm, regrettably for him, as Goddamn Sacks.