Level of Detail
Take time to include details in your Work Request Form. The more details you provide, the easier it will be for the contractor to tailor their responses to your request. Provide details about:
- your target audience
- project goals
- background research or related past campaigns - and relevant links
- metrics from previous efforts or feedback on tactics that have or haven’t worked in the past.
The contractor will use these details to create a comprehensive proposal for you. These details will be important later on. This is because the contractor's response becomes the official project scope. The project scope is an official record of your project. You can use it throughout the project to manage expectations. If the proposal includes key details, it will be easier to look back at what you agreed to.
However, you may want to keep the scope more general. For example, your project may include research. The results of this research may inform later stages of work. In that case, you want a broad project scope that includes budget, core deliverables, and timeline. This way, you can add more detailed plans and deliverables after you conduct the research. By developing a broader scope, you can avoid making a lot of changes to your project scope. Your business office uses the project scope to check invoices before paying them. When the project scope does not align with the work outlined in an invoice, it can cause problems. One common problem is that payments get delayed to the contractor.
Providing Budget Guidelines
The Work Request Form provides several fields for you to use. Within the form, you can specify your budget or budget range. We recommend you include at least an approximate budget. Offering a budget helps the contractors draft a realistic proposal.
Offering a budget range rather than one maximum budget figure can be useful. By requesting a budget range, you can review “good/better/best” scenarios to see which fits with your desired outcomes. Including a budget range may also help you compare the proposals you receive.