“The
scariest moment is always just before you start.”
Stephen
King
*This
is part one of a two-part series. Keep your eyes peeled for the second post!*
Earlier this year, I spotted the new St Oswald’s Hospice (SOH) store around ten/fifteen minutes from my home, and having volunteered for the Hospice as a Digital Volunteer for around four years (including a couple of temporary contracts; with one being Kickstart Project Coordinator and the other being Communications and Marketing Assistant), I got in touch with the lovely Head of Communications and Marketing, and pitched the idea of collaborating. When she said she liked the sound of it, she introduced me to the Retail Communications and Marketing Officer, and after a few more emails, I was asked to write a brief for the collaboration…
“Where
do I start?!”
So, I
like to think that I’m a very honest and open person – and I try really hard to
ensure that this quality is fed into – and plays a massive part in – I’m NOT
Disordered and the content I create. With that being said, I’m going to admit
that when I was asked to write the brief for our collaboration, I panicked!
Because even in the entire eleven years I’ve been blogging and despite the
number of collaborations I’ve worked on; I haven’t once ever had to write a
brief! And this meant that when Eilish asked me to do it, but then, at the end
of the email, offered to do the brief if I couldn’t; I was faced with the
sensation of being at cross-roads and needing to make a big and important
decision. I mean, on the one hand, I very obviously wanted to jump at the
chance to get out of doing it because I knew it was very likely going to be
hard work to go from literally not knowing where to begin to then sending a
collaboration brief to a massive, influential charity! But I ended up agreeing
to do it for two big reasons:
1.
I
actually really love learning new things – especially in the communications and
marketing industry because I enjoy the roles and responsibilities in that
career path so much anyway. But it’s to the point that when I’ve been doing
volunteer work or bits and pieces with collaborations and content for, I’m NOT
Disordered, it actually winds me up when people deem it to be ‘work.’ Like when
they say, “you’re still working at this time of night?!” I love what I do so
much that I don’t want people to think that I’m reluctant to do it in any way,
or even for them to think that I consider these things to be a chore…
2.
It
will likely come in useful for me to learn how to do these things in case I’m
asked to do it again and there’s no one offering to do it instead. When I first
started blogging in 2013, I had no real goals or big dreams in mind with it. I
literally only wanted to use it to keep my loved ones up to date because the
psychiatric hospital I was an inpatient in was over 100 miles away from home.
This meant that I only shared the link to new content on my private Facebook
account… Then, somehow – word of mouth, I guess at that point – everything
snowballed! After eleven years though, I’ve found myself to now have so much
more determination and dedication to make my blog and its content the best it
can be, and so I feel like learning to create a brief would be a really good
ability to add to my repertoire.
So,
with all these thoughts in mind, after deciding to do the brief, I then had to
consider if I should tell Eilish that I had never written one before and ask
for advice around what I should include in it. In the end though – and this
wasn’t a pride thing; I wasn’t worried I’d look unprofessional or stupid to
admit I didn’t know what to do and I wasn’t scared that I’d lose the
collaboration if I told them I couldn’t write a brief – I decided to do what
everyone does when they need advice these days; I Googled it! Now, some people
judge people who use Google and believe them to be something along the lines of
cheating! However, I looked at it as being an illustration of my passion,
interest, and dedication to this collaboration because I was taking the time to
make sure I got it right and produced ‘work’ that was as high a standard as if
I had already written a brief one million times before.
Thankfully, in my Google search, there weren’t hundreds of similar results, and so it wasn’t hard to decide upon the one I actually used from the site: brands.joinstatus.com. Even though it was intended to be a brief companies and brands used to approach influencers, I still found it to be completely appropriate and not too detailed or overly complicated. Plus, everything I briefly read on it still seemed relevant to what I needed from it. These factors meant the article on the site made creating the brief fairly exciting; to a point where I was actually looking forward to getting started! I do wonder though, was it so lovely because it was something new? And would that mean if I do end up writing more briefs, I’ll become sick of doing them?!
Some
Final Bits & Pieces For The Beginning Of Creating The Brief
·
If
you’re struggling in so far as the layout/design of the brief, there are full
templates available online (some come at a cost/fee, but most are free).
Actually, they have some on the site I mentioned earlier which I actually used
in researching what to include in a brief.
·
Visual
inspiration and examples of previously created and successful collaborative
content can be included in your brief to bring a sense of fun, creativity, and
to show evidence of your abilities. I had created a ‘Collaboration Pack’ before
the brief and it actually contains screenshots of popular, previous blog posts,
so I attached that to my email sharing the brief with SOH.
·
Some people or organisations you’re sending a
brief to, might actually have some guidelines and formats which they’d like any
briefs to be submitted in. For some, it could even be appropriate and a good
idea to send it as a short PowerPoint or you could do it as a document that is
collaborative so yourself and the prospective collaboration partner both have
editing permissions that enable you to work as a team in finalising the brief.
· In some instances, in approaching someone or an organisation that you’d like to collaborate with, it could be useful to leave some bits up for discussion in order to encourage contact from them. In a brief, however, it’s typically better to not leave a single point or opportunity in it where the partner might feel unsure or confused in any way.
The
Three Best Reasons for Creating A Brief
1.
It
immediately states your expectations of the work your collaboration partner
creates, which ensures that the partner can’t turn around midway through it and
say that you’re asking something of them which they can’t – or don’t want to be
– responsible or accountable for.
2.
It
enhances the chance of even the first draft being close to ideal because you’re
all on the ‘same page’ from the offset – particularly in the part of the Brief
that talks about the ‘voice’ of your collaboration content.
3. It minimises a lot of back-and-forth emails and other forms of stressed and frantic contact, by having everything in one place – which is also a really productive and positive method to keep things more organised in a general way too.
Collaboration
Goals
Initially,
I was actually genuinely surprised to see this was the first part to write
about in a brief… I guess that I just thought it would be about writing down
your ideas and then what you want to achieve by doing this. In fairness, in the
first five or six years of my blogging career, I would email organisations or
well-known people and my ‘pitch’ was literally just a few paragraphs in the
actual email! In that though, I typically started it off with a little bit
about my mental health story and how that had affected the creation and the
journey (up until the point of my email) of I’m NOT Disordered. Then, I went
into the idea, and I’d end it by saying what I hoped to achieve from the
collaboration and how the partner could benefit from working with me/my blog.
Obviously
over the past five years – but particularly these past two – I’ve learnt so
much about collaborations, and with my blogging inspiring me to find a passion
and purpose to work in the communications and marketing industry; I began
seeing things from a more professional viewpoint. And I think that this new
perspective came in at the right time because I felt like with, I’m NOT
Disordered now having over one million readers, those I was pitching to or in
talks with regarding a collaboration had higher expectations than when my blog
was just starting out. So, me learning how to put together a Media Kit (which
you can view here)
and a more ‘together’ and professional collaboration pitch, came at exactly the
right time!
Regardless
of my growth and developments in collaborations, I still hadn’t had to write a
brief before, and so that’s why listing the goals of the collaboration as the
first port-of-call seemed a bit alien to me. In looking into this further
though – and with a bit of an explanation on the site I spoke about at the
beginning – I recognised the fact that by confirming your goals from the
outset, could really tell the prospective partner a lot about what will be
expected of them. In doing this, they can almost immediately establish whether
they’re even capable of taking on a collaboration where these goals are
necessary to achieve or accomplish. This means you can also use covering this
part at the beginning of the brief to ensure that everyone is on the same page
from the very beginning – that these goals are something the partner is also
eager and agreeable to achieving.
If you’re struggling to figure out what this part is asking and what it really entails, some things that could be included in this section are: are you trying to promote a product? Do you want to achieve a particular number of sales? Is this more about raising awareness of a cause you feel you are both passionate about? Do you want to increase donations by a particular percentage? Are you looking to increase your social media following? Do you want a new logo or change in branding – including to the general aesthetic or colour scheme – publicised, with the intention of encouraging feedback?
Target
Audience
In all
honesty, this was the one bit in the Brief which I was absolutely dreading
because I knew even before seeing the template and advice online, that I would
have to include something along these lines… I mean, it’s an aspect that – even
if you had no clue about blogging, collaborations, communications, and
marketing – you would still very likely imagine that having a target audience
is something which would quite obviously be involved in some way in any sort of
project, event, launch, partnership, advertorial work in this industry.
So, the
reason I was dreading it, was because, whilst I knew how to find out the
characteristics and general information of my readers, it wasn’t something I
did often. Definitely not as often as I look at my reader count and the
statistics of that e.g. the number of readers I get in one day and the
number/percentage increase in readers on a day I’ve published new content etc –
particularly where the content is a collaboration, and the partner is
interested in knowing how popular the piece/pieces are/were. In all honesty,
when you’re approaching someone or an entire organisation with an idea for a
collaboration, typically, the only real statistic they’re interested in – or at
least the ones which influences their decision the most, are around the number
of readers. And this factor (the importance of views in a collaboration pitch)
has actually been a massive influence on my confidence and my recognition of
the size of I’m NOT Disordered’s audience. I actually used to be reluctant to
talk about that element of my blog, but in recognising that mentioning it
improved the opportunities I was offered and the unique experiences I was
granted, I found that celebrating and publicising reader milestones was a
completely valid and understandable behaviour/attitude.
So,
with no collaboration partners ever asking for specific statistics and me
having no real need or interest in checking them out, it was something I hadn’t
ever really looked at or deemed important until creating this brief for St
Oswald’s Hospice. I actually ended up finding it quite interesting to see the
percentage in so far as genders – because I found out that my blog’s audience
is actually most popular with men than women (54.15% to 45.85%). I also
recognised something which I’m actually already aware of and found useful and
that’s the audience’s key interests – and the way I’m kind of already
knowledgeable in this, is in so far as the themes of the most popular blog
posts. So, from the analytics provided (I used Google Analytics), I found that
the ‘key interest’ in readers is ‘general health’ and my most popular content
have been those centred around any sort – not just mental health related – of
advice or tips and then those which provide some sort of insight into being a
Blogger and into having a mental health illness.
Now,
the reason I have already been aware of the themes of popular posts – which is
probably very obvious! – is because it provides me with both inspiration in
terms of future content and ideas for future collaboration partners. Something
around this which I do put a lot of consideration into and have found
challenging over the years, is balancing what readers enjoy with the content
that I enjoy creating the most. This is really concerning posts with any sort
of fashion element e.g. the Wardrobe collaborations with ASOS that I’ve done
during Christmas etc. and with the Gift Guides I’ve really only typically
created for Blogmas series. It’s difficult because I definitely can appreciate
why that content isn’t popular – I mean, I doubt anyone comes to I’m NOT
Disordered for content on fashion or gift ideas. However, I do really enjoy
putting these posts together; particularly because I get to use Canva! To be fair, I’m at a point where I
love any content that allows me the excuse to use Canva because it gives me the
opportunity to build my knowledge of its features and to use them to really
embrace my creativity in a very productive way whilst also just letting it run
wild!
So,
aside from the popularity and the interests of I’m NOT Disordered’s readers, I
find nothing else about the audience analytics helpful. However, I included
everything in the collaboration brief because I recognise that something I
don’t feel that I or my blog and its content really benefit from knowing, might
actually be quite useful and persuasive to my collaboration partner.
All
The Links You Need
Website:
Home | St Oswald’s Hospice (stoswaldsuk.org)
Twitter
(X): @stoswaldsuk
Facebook:
@stoswaldshospice
Instagram:
@stoswaldsuk
Retail
Instagram: @stoswaldsretail
YouTube:
@stoswaldshospiceuk
LinkedIn:
@stoswaldshospice
General
Details For The Blyth Store:
Blyth | St Oswald’s Hospice (stoswaldsuk.org)
To
Volunteer In The Store:
Email:
volunteer@stoswaldsuk.org or call the store direct: 01670 330 885
Don’t
live in Blyth? Find your local St Oswald’s Hospice Store: