Working with Freelance Talent

I'm a big fan of Seth Godin but I think his recent post on working with freelance talent could lead to frustration and mediocre results if taken too literally by schools, colleges and universities.

In my view, he's got two main points:

1. There is more great freelance talent out there than ever before. Use it.
2. You better do the difficult, internal strategic thinking you need to do before hiring that talent if you want results you can use.

As that freelance talent, I couldn't agree more. Institutions hire me for message strategy and writing. When they know what they're trying to accomplish we can do great work together.

My quibble with Godin is that he posits: Either give the freelancer "a clean sheet of paper." Or say, "Here are three logos from companies in other industries, together with the statement we want to make, the size it needs to be, the formats we need to use it and our budget, go!" He concludes that the second option will definitely yield results you can use.

I suggest a third option: Do the difficult strategic thinking about what you want and need to accomplish, what your institution is truly great at, what you think your message buckets are and what your budget is. But if you need help answering some of those questions, freelance talent who knows your competition can get you there. And being so specific about the details of look and feel as to suggest size may miss the point of hiring that talent. They're partners who need to collaborate with you. Not people who simply fill in your blanks. I say this having been both an institutional client and a consultant.

I think about Yale Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeff Brenzel. When he hired Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, Bierut's colleague Yve Ludwig, and me to do the new Yale viewbook, Brenzel's team had already done the hard thinking about their goals. Walking away from our first meeting, we knew what the key messages were. We knew the audiences. We knew what we wanted the audience to feel when they held and read the viewbook. And then he said "Go!"

In some ways, I've never had so much specificity and so much freedom.The results hit every one of the goals and then some.

How Will the Message Be Consumed?

Last week, I helped present a new brand story to a great university. The story was very well received and everyone around the table was excited. Then one member of the client team asked, "But how will the message be consumed?" Indeed.

Certainly, you want a great story to tell but moving prospective students from one phase of their decision making to the next, in my view, has always been the hardest part. I've seen many admission offices struggle with the management and timing of message delivery. Even when we were only talking about a one-dimensional paper communication flow (search to viewbook to application to yield) that pushed prospects through the traditional admissions funnel from inquiry to visit to application to matriculation. Now with a longer recruitment cycle and social media in the mix, prospectives have seemingly endless jumping in and jumping off places. "How will the message be consumed?" can be a perplexing and anxiety-producing question for many admissions teams.

While some have decreed the traditional admission funnel and its accompanying communication flow all but dead, Brad J. Ward has come up with a brilliant take on the admission funnel a la social media. It is the best visual and explanation I've seen yet of how an admission office might channel their stream of communications in consideration of all the tools now available. He and other higher ed social media experts caution against a one-size fits all view of this funnel. Still, it's a great starting place for any admission team to think about moving prospects from bite to bite of their message and keep them coming back for more.

Photo by theogeo

Friday Favorite. (weekly featured link from me to you)

As a writer, sometimes the quickest way for me to get into a project is to be inspired by visuals. I keep shelves full of maps, museum guides, postcards, books, ads, and magazines. Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New York Times T series, New York Magazine, J Crew's little collection of look books, my daughter's teen novels, and back issues of Communication Arts can always be counted on to ignite some kind of spark. So what a joy it is to dip into Design Observer, founded and edited by Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, and Jessica Helfand. DO is writings about design with plenty of inspirational visuals that tell me why I'm so inspired by what I'm seeing.