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This Creative Brief Template Helps Ensure Powerful Copy and Design

Many creative marketing projects get underway without a clear sense of expectations between a nonprofit's marketing and organizational leadership, and the creative folks (whether in-house or freelance) delivering it. The result? An extended and expensive creative development process with many revisions – not to mention chewed-up nails, bruised egos and depleted momentum.

Taking the time and energy up front to craft a thorough creative brief will save your nonprofit time and money, and ensure you get the fundraising brochure, campaign website or annual report you envisioned. And, in going through this process you may realize that another medium or approach will work better than the one you had in mind.

Your brief should be, well, brief, running no more than two pages. Make it scannable with the use of clear headings and bulleted lists, rather than a narrative form with dense paragraphs.

Here's what your brief should include:
  • Overview
    • General project information
    • Goals
    • Measurable Objectives (benchmarks to measure progress towards goals, e.g. increase membership by 20% each year or media coverage
    • Deliverables Needed
      Deliverables can change during the creative process, i.e. the graphic designer might suggest that a blog, rather than an e-newsletter, will do more to address your goals.
  • Primary audiences
    Provide enough detail to enhance everyone's understanding of who the audience is. Include some user demographic information if possible.
    • Who are your primary target audiences. Choose a typical audience member or two and profile including occupation, age range, gender, what her day looks like, etc.
    • How will your audiences use this brochure, white paper or website?
    • What should be avoided in talking to these audiences?
  • Tone and Image
    • Funny and casual, or formal and buttoned-up, or...
    • What do the audiences believe or think, before you start communicating with them?
    • What tone and imagery should we use to engage them?
    • Specific visual goals?
  • Messages: Features, Benefits and Values
    • List top features and/or facts about the program, service or organization, and its value to target audiences
    • How do these stack up against the competition?
    • If you could get one sentence across, what would that be? How would you prove it?
    • Other major points?
  • Budget and Schedule
    • Has a budget been approved?
    • When must the message get to the audience for greatest impact (e.g. service introduction date, conference, special event)?
    • What is the due date for the finished work?
  • Process
    • Who is the point person (on the nonprofit side)?
    • What is the internal review and approval process?
    • Who needs to sign off on final execution?
  • Anything else?
    • How many rounds of revisions on your side (be they your's personally, your bosses, or your nonprofit's CEO's) should the writer or designer include in her bid for the job?
    • A graphic designer needs to know, for example, whether your mailing house will enclose the brochure by machine or hand, and, if by machine, what kind of fold the machine can handle.
Download my creative brief template today and review it with my tips fresh in your mind. When you do, you'll be poised to complete it quickly when your next marketing project pops up.

Get my creative brief template here.

More at Five Steps to Great Graphic Design for Nonprofits


© 2002-2008 Nancy E. Schwartz. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Nancy E. Schwartz helps nonprofits succeed through effective marketing and communications. As President of Nancy Schwartz & Company (www.nancyschwartz.com), Nancy and her team provide marketing planning and implementation services to organizations as varied as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Center for Asian American Media, and Wake County (NC) Health Services.

Subscribe to her free e-newsletter "Getting Attention", (http://www.nancyschwartz.com/getting_attention.html) and read her blog at http://www.gettingattention.org for more insights, ideas and great tips on attracting the attention your organization deserves.

NOTE: You're welcome to "reprint" this article online as long as it remains complete and unaltered (including the copyright and "about the author" info at the end), and you send a copy of your reprint.


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© 2002-2008, Nancy Schwartz & Company
Revised April 12, 2008

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