Clients are clients and they will change their minds. As a remote freelancer, I always wondered what the best way would be to handle getting approval from clients.  I mean, getting our clients to sign off at certain stages of a project is very important in moving the project towards completion and protecting ourselves from revision hell.

So how does a guy like me (who works from home mostly in his underpants) get approval from a client? For starters, lets make it clear that I hate fax machines with a passion.  “That” fax machine scene from Office Space is so spot on (yeah, you know what I’m on about).  Snail mail is just too freakin’ slow and not even on the radar as an option.  So in order to protect myself and my client and keep things moving towards completion,  I insist clients sign off at key milestones of their project using a simple and fast technique via email called a Production Notice.

This is a simple but powerful best practice that pretty much any creative freelancer can use (writers, graphic designers, programmers etc.) Ever since I started using this technique it’s saved my ass many times over. Here’s what the one I use looks like:

Sample of an Production Notice sent by email

E-mail subject: PRODUCTION NOTICE – ACTION REQUIRED
E-mail attachment: {attach JPEG screenshot of the client’s website}
E-mail message:

Dear Dave,

Attached are the preliminary design concepts for your website. Please take a moment to review these and get back to me when you get a chance.

As part of our production process, please make sure to follow the instructions below.

————————————————————-
PRODUCTION NOTICE: ACTION REQUIRED
————————————————————-

Please review the included email attachment(s) and reply to this email with either:

1) “Approved” in the subject line to indicate your approval, and we will proceed to the next step of your project.

OR

2) “Edits” in the subject line to indicate that you wish to request changes. If you do desire edits, please also provide a description of the desired changes.

Please note that by approving the artwork in this email you are giving us permission to proceed to the next stage of your project. Any edits requested after giving us your approval can possibly incur an added studio fee depending on the nature of those edits. Contact us if you need any clarification regarding this process.

Thanks!

When a client sees this in their inbox, they get that something important in my process is happening.  They stop, review and take one of two actions; they either approve the work or they hit me with edits.  Both of these actions are cool because it gets the project closer to the finish line. And yes, I do use all caps in the email subject :-P and I since I send most of my emails as plain text, it looks pretty much like the example above.

I use this Production Notice nine times out of ten to protect me from scope creep and whether you charge per hour or per project it can do the same for you.  If you aren’t using something like this, start now. You’ll be glad you did in no time.

That’s me.  What about you … do you use some kind of mechanism to have clients sign off at project milestones?

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Tags: Best Practices, client communication, work flow