Making the Most of a Small Budget
by Katie Jennings
When you set a budget for a new website project and hire a creative partner for help, you’re committing critical time and resources to a project that can and should have a material impact on the long term success of your organization. It’s important, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to pull the budget together. It’s quite common — very common, in fact — for clients to approach a project with a little bit less to work with than they’d really like. The numbers vary, but everybody wants to make the most of the investment.
As you think about maximizing the return on your investment in a new site, particularly if you’re working with a limited budget, here are a few things for you to keep in mind.
1. Make the most of the team you have. Even if you’re hiring a full-service creative firm, you don’t need to pay for work that you can do yourself. If you have a wonderful writer on staff, or a videographer, or a loyal and active volunteer staff, you’ve got a leg up. The partner you hire should be open to working with your team, and should provide you with direction about how to get the highest quality, most appropriate work from them.
2. Review your creative assets. Beyond just human assets, think about creative elements that are already in place and can be reused, such as photography, audio and video. Be realistic about how much of this kind of content you’ll be able to create (or buy) in the future. Make sure that your partner understands where you stand and where you’re going, and plans your site accordingly.
3. Keep notes. As you begin a website redesign process, you’ll engage in lots of conversations about the status quo, vision for the future, challenges, and opportunities for the future. This is actually very valuable discovery work, so keep careful track of who you’ve spoken to and what they had to say. Your budget will go further if you aren’t paying someone else to ask all the same questions, and as an added bonus, your colleagues will appreciate not having to repeat themselves.
4. Be decisive. When you’re working with an agency like Fastspot, we’re going to spend a lot of time thinking about your project. Your project manager will be engaged with you every week and our directors will discuss your project every week. We’re actively engaged and the clock is ticking. If you can move quickly through the process — making decisions promptly and firmly, minimizing the need to backtrack — the whole thing can be much more efficient. That means more of your budget is going to the site itself, which is where we all want it to be.
5. Prioritize. Sometimes, with a smaller budget, you’ll reach a decision point. You can do everything pretty well, or you can do fewer things extremely well. We recommend the latter. Make tough decisions about what absolutely must be included, and do an extraordinary job with your “must have” list. Lower priority items might need to be addressed in future phases, when they can be extraordinary as well.
6. Choose the right partner. Everyone wants to figure out how to make the most of a budget, no matter what the size. Don’t be shy about pressing your prospective creative partners to help you figure out how to do to that. The right partner will be an agency or partner who is energized by the challenge and ready to help you solve this puzzle.
Even with a small budget, success is not budget-dependent. It’s about taking a strategic approach to the project and understanding your own needs and assets. There’s no one right way to create a new website (or design a new brochure or write a new campaign). When it comes time for you to get started, remember to be creative, be thoughtful, and be open to ideas as you figure out the path that’s right for you.
image credit: Adam Heath
Originally published at www.fastspot.com.
