How To Give Effective Feedback to Ensure A Successful Project
We encourage clients to provide clear, consolidated, and constructive feedback to ensure a smooth and efficient creative process. Your timely and detailed input helps us align our work with your vision and keeps your project on schedule. Here’s how to give feedback that empowers our collaboration:
- Be Specific, Clear, and Share Your “Why”—Instead of saying, “I don’t like this,” explain what specifically isn’t working and why. Provide details to help explain the reasons behind what you really like in your designs and copy and what you don't like. This will help us make revisions faster and ensure you love the final result.
Examples: “I love this paragraph because it sounds like me.” or “This paragraph isn't working for me because it doesn't feel friendly enough.”
- Trust Yourself—Only involve key stakeholders in reviewing your designs and website copy, and avoid seeking feedback from too many outside sources. Sharing with friends, family, or colleagues who may not understand your business and vision can slow down progress and dilute the effectiveness of your brand. Focus on feedback from those who are integral to your project's success and what feels right to you.
- Consolidate Your Feedback—Do your best to capture and communicate all your feedback for our team in your first round of revisions. This prevents piecemeal changes and ensures a cohesive review and revision process by submitting a comprehensive round of comments. This will make it more efficient for our team to edit and incorporate your requests once we have all the information. The second round of revisions is for light fine-tuning and approvals.
- Be Constructive and Collaborative—Frame your feedback constructively. Highlight what works well and what needs improvement.
Example: “I love the layout of the homepage. Can we apply a similar style to the Services page?”
- Have Your Final Foundational Brand Language & Visual Identity Handy—Our team used your approved foundational brand language to develop the copy for your website, and your visual identity to design your website. Refer back to these foundations of your brand and focus on what will feel the most clear, appealing, and simplified for your audience.
- Get the Big Picture—Read through all your copy once before starting to comment. We suggest reading your copy once, then putting it aside overnight, and then starting to write notes for us the next day. Your website copy was based heavily on your approved foundational brand language, so please refer back to that if you feel like anything is out of alignment.
- Leave the Rewriting to Us—Instead of rewriting something yourself, just let us know how you want it to be different. You hired us because we are the experts in writing brand copy, so don’t worry about completely rewriting anything. Unless you want to, and if so just note you would like for us to keep it exactly how you wrote it.
Examples: “I'd like this sentence to sound more assertive.” or “Please make the copy on this page a little shorter.” - Keep Your Feedback in the Allotted Rounds—Each deliverable of your project has designated rounds of revisions. Stick to these rounds to avoid delays and additional charges, and provide feedback within the given timeframe for each round, ensuring all necessary changes are addressed before we move on to the next step. If we have to backtrack and revisit a step that has already been approved, it affects all pieces of your project and extends the timeline and the cost of your project.
- Use the Provided Commenting Tools—For approvals and feedback, use the specific commenting tools we provide (e.g., Google Docs, Figma, Superflow). These tools help us clearly document and resolve your change requests efficiently. Providing feedback outside these tools can delay your project and increase the risk of missed requests. Please avoid sending multiple emails with separate requests; keep all changes and feedback within the provided tools.
- If You Feel You Are Unable to Communicate Clearly Using Our Tools, Ask for a Meeting—If written feedback doesn’t fully capture your thoughts or you feel you are having trouble communicating what you need, get with your Project Coordinator about scheduling a meeting with the appropriate member of our team. Or create a Loom video to explain your feedback and add the link to your revisions. If you don't understand why we wrote something a certain way, just ask! We're always open to explaining our thinking.
By following these guidelines, you’ll help us create the best possible outcome for your project. Your active participation and thoughtful feedback are crucial to our collaborative success.