You receive an email from an organization you have been trying to reach for the past two years. You’re elated because they want you to bid on the redesign of their Web site. There is an attachment with all of the criteria they require¾a fairly routine RFP. Your firm has designed hundreds of sites and this is right up your alley. After studying and researching their site and spending more than an hour on a conference call discussing your capabilities and the goals and needs of the organization, you start the arduous task of developing the proposal.
Within the proposal, you discuss the direction you feel the organization should take to maximize their goals for their site. Next, you include the team that will be handling the project - their bios and experience. Then, you include some samples to past sites your firm has designed (before and after) and end the proposal with a list of references and contact names. You also provide a detailed estimate to complete their project, as you understand it. The proposal and estimate are sent a day earlier than the deadline and you’re feeling very confident.
And now you wait…
It’s been two weeks and you’re wondering what is going on. Then you hear that familiar ping and it’s an email from the organization. It opens by congratulating your firm for making it to the final cut and asking you to come in and make a presentation in two weeks. You’re up against 4 or 5 firms but you still feel confident. After all, you’ve hurdled the price fence. If you weren’t within their budget, they wouldn’t have called you back. You trust that your experience and talent will take your firm to the finish line. But as you read further into the congratulatory email, you realize that at the presentation they want you to show them at least two designs for the home page, a site map, and some wireframes for TWO different sites. In other words, they want you to do speculative work.
In these times of economic downturns, we want to get all the business we can. We need to jump through more hoops than ever before. But we are in the business of design and doing spec work is unacceptable. Here’s why it’s bad business to do speculative work¾both for the design firm and the organization that requests it.
In its recommendation, AIGA, the nation’s largest and oldest professional association for design, discourages design work to be produced and submitted on a speculative basis in order to be considered for acceptance on a project. As Brendan Hurley, president of the American Marketing Association-DC and SVP, marketing and communications for Goodwill of Greater Washington, states, “While I don’t think the request is unethical, I do think it’s unreasonable. The request sounds like it is coming from someone who either doesn’t know what they are doing, or has an over-inflated sense of leverage due to the economy.”
AIGA explains that there are two main reasons for not providing speculative work.
“1. To assure the client receives the most appropriate and responsive
work, successful design work results from a collaborative process between a
client and the designer with the intention of developing a clear sense of the
client’s objectives, competitive situation and needs. Speculative design
competitions or processes result in a superficial assessment of the project at
hand that is not grounded in a client’s business dynamics. Design creates
value for clients as a result of the strategic approach designers take in
addressing the problems or needs of the client and only at the end of that
process is a “design” created. Speculative or open competitions for work
based on a perfunctory problem statement will not result in the best design
solution for the client.
2. Requesting work for free demonstrates a lack of respect for the
designer and the design process. Requesting work for free reflects a lack
of understanding and respect for the value of effective design as well as the
time of the professionals who are asked to provide it. This approach,
therefore, reflects on your personal practices and standards and may be
harmful to the professional reputation of both you and your business.”
A third reason and this comes from Robin Ferrier, communications manager at Johns Hopkins University-MCC, “I would be wary of spec work. It’s too easy for someone to take your ideas and implement them without having to hire you.” Even with a nondisclosure statement, clients can and will use part or all of your ideas and it has happened many times.
Luckily, a request for spec work appears rarely. As an industry, we must support the idea that the work we do has value; our ideas are our intellectual property and are not simply given away.
For more information on the subject, visit AIGA’s Web site at:
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/position-spec-work
Tom Egly
TGD Communications
www.tgdcom.com
tom.egly@tgdcom.com