Wow. It’s a tradition (almost) as big as Thanksgiving here at Copel Communications. In which we devote our mid-November blog post to that which we’re thankful for. And in which, of course, we ask you what you’re thankful for! In other words, feel free to chime in, in the comments!
 
The title of this article is a tad misleading. Last year, we wrote about what we’re thankful for. 
 
“What” implies things. 
 
You can already see where this is going. That’s why you read these. Just to stay two jumps ahead of us!
 
Not what, but who
 
Sure, there’s plenty of “what” that we’re thankful for this year. Our technology and systems keep chugging along, relatively unimpaired. The economy, doom-and-gloom headlines notwithstanding, has been pretty good to us. Heck, at the more primal/Maslowian (??) level, we’re happy every time we flick a switch and the lights come on. Or open a spigot and get water. 
 
Don’t take anything for granted. 
 
But enough of the stuff. Let’s talk people. 
 
If you’ve read any of these articles of ours, you know we’re sticklers for anonymizing details when appropriate. This article is no exception. That said, if you’re reading this, and you’re called out in our little honor roll below, we’re confident that you’ll know who you are. 
 
Boy are we lucky to be surrounded by great people who help us do our job and make us look insanely better than we actually are. 
 
Here, we’re talking about other creatives. We’re talking about vendors. We’re talking about members of internal client teams we work with. We’re talking about SEO nerds and knob-turners. Some examples: 

• We’ve got a great graphic artist we’ve worked with for years. She turns our crappy thumbnail sketches into masterpieces. And she’s simply a nice person to work with. 

 

• We’ve got a designer who’s also a video editor we work with, at one of our clients. This person exhibits a degree of can-do attitude and positive professionalism that’s at once inspiring and humbling. Bonus: When the higher-ups at that same client get delayed on, say, providing us input for a project, this one person transforms into the world’s most polite yet effective squeaky wheel on our behalf. Bonus-bonus: This is also one of the nicest people we’ve ever met. 

 

• There’s a video editor out there whom we’ve never even spoken to, but boy is he great. Why haven’t we spoken to him? It’s because he resides behind the wall of one of the major gig platforms, so we have to effectively email him our input and feedback. (See our article about how you can navigate these sticky wickets yourself.) The talent from this person is blinding. Even better: He’s got great taste. We can describe stuff in broad strokes, and he translates it into just the right music cut, just the right amount of white space in a title, just the right kind of transition or effect. We hope, someday, to talk to this special person! 

 

• There’s a voice-over artist we’ve been using for years who is flat-out awesome. Here’s proof: Every time we get one of his reads (via an intermediary; it’s complicated), we always respond, not with “Oh, here are the flubs to fix,” but rather, “Wow is this guy ever great.” Double bonus: Both his turnaround times and his pricing are amazing. 

 

• We’ve got a web designer who is so smart and professional, that they make us raise our game when it comes to providing input and/or working with a mutual client. And the deliverables—the websites—are just gorgeous.

 
Not to leave out… 
 
We’re happy to sing about these unsung heroes. They’re vital members of the Copel Communications pantheon, which includes some really great clients who make it all possible, and the love of a family that makes it all worth it. 
 
What, and who, are you thankful for this year? Post your reply in the comments, or feel free to contact us.
​

​There’s a hint in the headline to this article. Read it again. 
 
We’ll circle back to it in a minute. But the topic is important: You want to fill that room for your upcoming webinar! Otherwise, all of that prep work is for naught. 
 
Here, we’ll give you some pointers, based on actual client experiences, to help you boost your odds. 
 
To webinar or not to webinar
 
This entire article, and the recommendations herein, predicate on some pretty big assumptions: 
 
1) You think a webinar is an optimal marketing tactic for your business, and 
 
2) You’ve done a stellar job creating the presentation you’ll deliver during the webinar itself. 
 
Those are huge assumptions. 
 
A webinar is, as we’d noted above, a big commitment. They’re hard to do. It’s much easier, say, to be a guest on someone else’s well-established podcast (we have an article on that topic, too), but that isn’t necessarily easy to get, either. 
 
To have a successful webinar—and by “successful,” we mean “one that brings in prospects and leads to future business-generating conversations with them individually”—you need to choose a ripe topic that will attract your desired audience. You need to craft a really great presentation for them. You need to hone it and rehearse it. You need to publicize the event before it happens, in order to “fill the room.” You need to manage attendee lists and email sequencing thereto. You need to nail the presentation when you do it live. And you need to crush the follow-up, because that’s the impetus for the entire webinar in the first place: building new business. 
 
Phew. 
 
If that checklist sounds daunting, good. It should. But the upside can well be worth it; we’ve helped numerous clients with webinars that they’ve used to build business. 
 
While we’ve worked on various facets of webinar development and production, we’d like to focus on just one aspect here. It’s the “teaser” that we’d teased in the headline. 
 
Building unbearable suspense
 
Marketing a webinar is like marketing a Hollywood movie that’s slated for theatrical release: It’s all about driving the maximum traffic for one specific date. For a movie studio, it’s opening weekend. For you, it’s your webinar date and time. 
 
So your marketing—let’s say, your social ads—for this webinar is exactly like what you see—say, on TV—for a movie. You may not have noticed this, but you’ll almost never see a TV commercial for a movie that’s already opened. That window has closed. Ditto for your webinar. 
 
So you can learn—and borrow a page—from Hollywood here. Think about a movie ad or a trailer: It gives you glimpses of the very best moments of the movie. Because the (untrue) assumption you have, as a viewer, is that the rest of the movie will be that good. But it isn’t. It never is. It can’t be. 
 
Still, you can tease snippets and factoids from your webinar, since you already know all of its content, and can gauge, pretty easily, what you think are some of its juiciest tidbits. 
 
And here’s the last bit of inspiration we’ll give you. It’s the one we’d teased in the headline of this article. And it’s one you’ve seen in several places. Here’s one: 
 
You’ve seen it on the TV news. Just as they’re about to head into a commercial. They’ll never tell you, for example: 
 
“The U.S. Olympic committee just chose Los Angeles as its next host city! We’ll give you all the details after the break.” 
 
That never happens! You know that. It’s always something more like this: 
 
“The U.S. Olympic committee just chose its next host city, and you won’t believe where it is! Get all the details after the break.” 
 
It’s a teaser. Reading about it, here, makes you groan, but you’ve got to admit that it’s effective. 
 
And here’s the lowest form of teaser, but we still love them, in a perverse way; and it’s what inspired our headline for this article: 
 
Clickbait! 
 
Yep, all of those “stories” you’ll see at the bottom of a news article’s page, with headlines like “You won’t believe how so-and-so looks today” or “My jaw dropped when I saw her dress” or whatever. 
 
Now look at your webinar content. Think of what, in it, is exciting. And then tease the heck out of it.
 
Need help with a webinar challenge, or any other marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

Here at Copel Communications, we recently helped a client of ours to plan, execute, and roll out a new product. It was a big initiative, spanning several months. 
 
Our client, not surprisingly or unreasonably, asked us to craft the rollout plan, along with a Gantt Chart so they could easily visualize the process. 
 
You know what a Gantt Chart is, right? It was invented by an early 20th century management consultant named Henry Chart. 
 
Okay, we couldn’t resist that one. It was Henry L. Gantt. And the chart—you’ve seen tons of them—is made up of little colored horizontal bars that “move forward” over time, showing what gets done and when. 
 
It’s basically a matrix. For ours, the vertical columns represented months, going forward in time from left-to-right. 
 
And the horizontal rows represented the different activity streams of this project. Some would, say, start in August and run through October. Others wouldn’t start until November, but would run for six months. And so on. 
 
Confession: We are not Excel mavens here at Copel Communications. If you are, we salute you! But you might still pick up a tidbit or two from this article. 
 
List, then draw
 
The plan/execute/rollout initiative was, as we’d mentioned, very detailed. Indeed, the way for us to even wrap our minds around it was doing it as an outline.
 
And that’s how we proceeded. 
 
It went something like this: 
 
Step One: Write up the highest-level bullet points of the outline. Things like “Come up with product ideas.” “Develop the best idea.” “Create marketing materials.” And so on. 
 
Step Two: Populate the sub-bullets of each. So bullets such as “Create marketing materials” would include sub-bullets such as: 

• Write blogs 
• Create an email sequence 
• Develop social posts 

 
And then there would be sub-sub-bullets. In the above example, “Develop social posts” would include sub-sub-bullets such as: 

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram 
• X

 
And so on. 
 
Chart your course
 
Even if you’re an Excel maven, that little bit of Word-play can help you. Just use indented bullets for brainstorming; you don’t need any special Word skills to do that. 
 
Here’s the thing: The Gantt chart isn’t as detailed as that outline.
 
It basically just charts out the highest-level bullet points, over time. 
 
There’s probably some built-in Excel (or even PowerPoint) command that will “Gantt-ify” a bullet list; if there is, illuminate us in the comments section. 
 
In the meantime, if you’re living in Word Land, like us, the chart-“drawing” process is actually quite easy: 
 
All you do is create a table in Word. The top row is the months (or days, weeks, whatever). The left-most column lists the titles of the different activity streams (“Come up with product ideas,” “Develop the best idea,” etc.). 
 
And then all you do is fill in the colors for where the two will overlap. If the first month of “Develop social posts” is, say, October, then make that cell a color other than white. And click-to-fill the other cells as needed. 
 
It takes all of about two minutes. 
 
We delivered both of these docs to our client, who was delighted to receive them. First and foremost was the Gantt chart they’d requested: A quick and easy visualization of how the project would play out over time. 
 
And, for added detail, there was a Word doc outline of the project, in which each row of the Gantt chart teed up to a top-level section of the outline. It was perfect. 
 
It may not have been obvious to the client that we “worked in reverse” to make these deliverables, i.e., starting with the outline and then culling from it to make the Gantt chart, but who cares? They were happy, and the process was efficient. 
 
Have a marketing challenge you’d like to address? Or have tips for us on how to make Gantt charting even easier? In either case, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us today. 

​We recently saw what we’re about to describe, and it left us aghast. 
 
Learn from the little tale we’re about to spin!
 
What you’re reading—this article, these very words—is a blog entry. Here at Copel Communications, we’ve been posting articles like this, every two weeks, for more than ten years, now. 
 
Thank you. We knew you’d be impressed. 
 
But what is this horror-inducing tale? you’re surely asking. And what does that have to do with the title of this article?
 
Okay. Maybe you’re not asking. We already knew you were smart. And likely figured it out already. But stay with us. 
 
So. We post blogs on a regular cadence. Twice a month. At the top of the month, each month, our blogs are more focused on our consultants audience. At mid-month—like this article—they’re more broadly geared toward our creatives audience. And yes, they certainly overlap. You don’t need to be running an ad agency to get a good takeaway, from this article, for your business. 
 
As we’d said. Every two weeks. Like clockwork. 
 
Now you don’t need to do them every two weeks. That’s our cadence. 
 
But man oh man. It is a cadence. 
 
Here’s the story: 
 
We were recently connected with a gentleman who was running his own creative agency; it specialized in web design. We’d been introduced by a mutual acquaintance, and had booked a Zoom call. 
 
Prior to the Zoom call, we did our due diligence. That is, we checked out this web designer’s website. And this is where we had our holy !@#$ moment. 
 
Just like our site—and almost everyone else’s—this designer’s website had a “Blog” section. (It could also be called “Recent Posts.” Same thing.) 
 
So we decided to check it out. 
 
And when we got there—we are not making this up—we saw—promise, we are not making this up: 
 
One blog. 
 
One. 
 
Just one. 
 
One.
 
And—to make matters worse—it was date-stamped. From about two years ago. 
 
Oh-my-goodness. 
 
Put yourself in the shoes of a prospect searching for a web designer. You Google. You find this designer’s site. And you check it out, just as we did. 
 
And, out of curiosity, you decide to catch up on their latest thought leadership and/or musings. And you see one sole blog, time-stamped from two years ago. 
 
Quick: What’s your reaction? 
 
You got it: Are they still in business???
 
Our reaction precisely. 
 
Whoever you are, reading this article, do not repeat this suicidal mistake. Do not project to the world—and to your prospects, for goodness’ sake—that you, once, two years ago, had an idea, just one, and then went completely brain dead but somehow managed to keep paying your URL hosting fees. 
 
It is worse, far worse, than not having any blogs at all. Clearly!
 
Now extrapolate from this story, this extreme example. 
 
Could you solve this by having two blogs? One from two years ago, and another from merely one year ago? 
 
Of course not. 
 
See where this is going? If you’re going to post, then post. And keep at it. 
 
But what if you’re not a content machine? That’s entirely possible.
 
Then do this: Create at least, say, a half-dozen entries. And make sure they’re not date-stamped when you post them. Needless to say, make sure that the topics of these articles are evergreen, too; you don’t want to, say, comment on that morning’s big headline from the news. 
 
Of course, if you’re a web designer, you may want to show off that you’re good at building, and updating, websites. Starting with your own. 
 
Need help with a challenge like this? Or any other? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

​RFPs—that is, Requests for Proposals—come in all shapes and sizes. Broadly, there are the ubiquitous ones that populate the world of government services contracting. There are plenty of private-sector RFPs out there, too. 
 
In this article, we’re going to address the tipping point that must inform all of your RFP pursuits: the notorious “go/no-go decision.” We’re looking out for your best interests here, trust us. 
 
All-American competition
 
A little background first. Why would a company (or the government) issue an RFP? The bigger question could be: Why wouldn’t they? 
 
Think about it. If you’re an entity that needs to spend money on services (or products, but we’ll focus on the former here), it’s entirely safe to assume that 1) you want the best possible services at 2) the lowest possible price. And what’s fairer, what’s more American, than level-playing-field competition? 
 
So. You issue an RFP. And you let all these suitors compete against each other. You get exactly what you’d wanted. It’s a beautiful thing. 
 
Or is it? 
 
The race to the bottom
 
Let’s get real jaded, real quick. How well does the government do things, compared to private industry? By and large, not nearly as well. There’s no profit motivation. There’s no “Government 2” that they’re competing against. There’s a baked-in complacency and a literal ability to print more money if they need it. 
 
This shows in their work. Think of all the shoddy government services you’ve had to suffer through—IRS, DMV, U.S. Postal Service, Amtrak, you name it. Think of how many times you’ve said, “If only Amazon were running this!”
 
And the crazy thing is, tons of these shoddy government services are actually provided by private-sector contractors! Why? Because they came in with the lowest bid.
 
We’re over-simplifying here—there are other ways that the government procures things, and even in the private sector, there are SLAs or “service-level agreements” which stipulate a minimum required level of performance—but, as we’d intimated, nice and jaded, RFPs often represent a race to the bottom. Cheapest possible—and just passable. 
 
Now pivot this scenario to your business. Would you want to willingly join in, in this death spiral? 
 
To RFP or not to RFP
 
The upside, for you, of competing on an RFP, is that it’s typically a pretty big contract. And it’s all or nothing. You either win it, or you don’t. And either way, you’re putting in a ton of work. 
 
Hmmm. 
 
This gets to the very core of the go/no-go decision. 
 
We were told, years ago, about an NFL coach who had a plaque in his office. It read: “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing, Coming in second is un-American.”
 
Yowch. Painful. Brutal. But refreshingly similar to your RFP go/no-go decision. 
 
It boils down to this: Only respond if you can, and will, crush it. Partial measures are a total waste of time; expend that energy on other biz-dev. Assess your capabilities and those of your likeliest competitors. Can you crush the competition? If you can almost crush them, what would it take to push you over the top? 
 
Here’s a little anecdote for you. We were recently invited to compete on an RFP for a slate of marketing services. We could see, right away, that it wasn’t a great fit. We knew we could crush a certain part of what this company was requesting, but there were other parts that weren’t our specialty. 
 
We were just about to pass on this one when--hmmm—we learned, through the grapevine, that a few other companies, which we know and have worked with before, were also invited to respond to this exact same RFP. 
 
Know where this is going? Imagine where it went? 
 
Of course. We reached out to those other entities, and said, “Let’s consolidate!” 
 
And that’s exactly what happened. Working with the others, we created a veritable Dream Team… and crushed the RFP. 
 
By the way, there are interesting and creative ways to craft the actual RFP response itself, to help you win it, which go beyond the scope of this article. 
 
We’d love to help you in this realm. Contact us and let’s talk. 

​We recently had a client dump a whole bunch of input on us, as part of a larger marketing project we were helping them with. This data dump, incidentally, was incomplete. They gave us links to videos, and slide decks, and web pages, and Word docs… yet when we cross-checked the lists of stuff we were supposed to receive vs. the stuff we actually received, we found gaps. Plus there was stuff—input—that we flat-out didn’t understand. Was it even relevant? Were we missing something? 
 
Clearly, a big team meeting was needed. But our preliminary order of business was simply wrangling all of the input—and making sure that the checklists indeed teed up with requirements of the final deliverable. 
 
This was not easy. 
 
So. Where are we going with this? And how does this help answer the perennial question of “How will this help me make more money?”
 
Seeing the bigger picture
 
Sure, we’d needed to book, organize, and run, a meeting. And the clock was ticking. This, incidentally, gets to the answer to the italicized question we’d posed above. 
 
Time is money. And when you multiply the number of people in the room by what they’re worth, on an hourly basis, the stakes go up real high, real fast. 
 
So this is about more than just booking a meeting. There are bigger takeaways than that. 
 
This is about bringing different people together in service of a larger—and more profitable—goal. And it’s, frankly, about sweating a ton of details in advance. 
 
Chop, chop
 
Know what we ended up creating from all this mess? A “next steps” email to the team we were working with. 
 
Think about that. How many times have you had to compose a “next steps” email? It’s hard.
 
We had to lay out: 

• What we’d received from the client. 

 

• What we still needed from the client. 

 

• What we’d received but didn’t understand or couldn’t make sense of. 

 

• The constraints for the project established by our client’s client—and how all of the above aligned (or didn’t) therewith. 

 

• The goals of the proposed working session. 

 

• A brief overview of that working session’s agenda. 

 
We still have the email we’d sent to our client. It’s just 397 words long. And yet it took us an hour to write. 
 
Yup. 
 
We can’t share it here—it’s confidential—but we’ll bet you could read the thing in under two minutes. 
 
And that was the intention. And that was why it was so hard to compose.
 
Important point: Every recipient and cc on this email is very busy. We had to make our case, be ultra clear, and close with a specific call-to-action (“Shall we send you slots for a meeting?”). 
 
This email took us an hour to write because the initial draft was about double the length of the final one. We sweated the details. We moved paragraphs. We moved sentences within paragraphs. And we cut, cut, cut, as much as we could. 
 
Speed reading
 
Honestly: Do you think that any of our client-recipients of this email would have guessed that it took us an hour to write this two-minute read? Of course not. They never gave it a thought. 
 
We didn’t want them to give it a thought. But we needed to get stuff done, quickly, succinctly, and efficiently, and this much-sweated-over email was the best way to do it. 
 
And think of this: What kinds of replies did this email elicit? Were they equally-well-thought-out, carefully-considered-and-organized responses? 
 
Of course not! They were more like “Good idea; how’s Wednesday?”
 
Were we upset by this? Did we feel slighted or unappreciated? Nope. We beamed. Mission accomplished.
 
Because when you fast-forward this story, 1) all of the missing input magically appeared, prior to the meeting, 2) all of the related gaps were filled, and 3) the meeting itself went swimmingly—a full-court press in which seemingly impossible goals were surmounted in a shockingly short timeframe. 
 
And, frankly, none of it would have happened without the “next steps” email.
 
Now do you see the broader lesson here? 
 
People routinely dash off emails with nary a thought. But sometimes, when the situation calls for it, you’ve got to hunker down and really figure out the tactics of where you’re headed, and do the hard work of putting that into something that can be read at 10x the speed it took to write.
 
Need help getting all of these “tactical marketing ducks” in a row, whether via email or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

​It’s funny how some things in business are cyclical. Way back in the day, we toiled over printed outreach, a.k.a. “direct response” a.k.a. “mailers” a.k.a. “junk mail” a.k.a. “printed spam.” 
 
Of course, all that went out the window when things went electronic. Spam postal mail was superseded by spam email.
 
Ah, progress! 
 
Yeah, we can afford to be a little snarky here. Stay tuned. Because the very recent tale we’re about to spin holds profit potential for your business, and your outreach. 
 
Dialing up the numbers game
 
First things first: You invest in direct response to drum up new business. It’s like cold-calling. (We could—and may—write another article on that topic, speaking of business cycles and swinging pendulums.) 
 
Direct response is a numbers game. If you send out to 100 people, your odds of getting a response aren’t very high. If you sent out to 10,000 people, your odds go up accordingly. 
 
Direct response is also often described as a three-legged stool. The list is one of those legs, and its quantity is just as important as its quality. You don’t want to send to people whose addresses (physical or electronic) have changed, not to mention their title… or even their company. 
 
The second leg is the quality of the offer. You’ve got to have something that’s really targeted and worth their time, ideally solving a problem they needed solved yesterday. 
 
The third leg is the outreach piece itself. That is, the email, or the letter, or the catalog or brochure or whatever. That’s the crux of this article. 
 
A matter of cost
 
Print is expensive. Postage is expensive. There’s a carbon-footprint consideration to it, too. So the whole marketing community breathed a collective sigh of relief when things went from postal to email, decades ago. 
 
And for a long time, it worked. Correction: It still does… to an extent. But things have definitely changed. 
 
You’ll cringe when we mention it, but a big disruptor here is ChatGPT. When it hit the scene, it made it easy for anyone to instantly generate a well-enough-worded email, which they could then blast out to whomever. 
 
And boy did they ever. It practically broke the internet. 
 
No, that’s an exaggeration. To put a finer point on it: it practically broke every ISP’s spam filter. We have clients now who can’t even send emails to their own, known clients without their getting trapped in spam filters. It started with ChatGPT: The clients’ clients’ spam filters have been closed down so much, to deal with so much incoming junk, that even their own trusted vendors sometimes get locked out. 
 
Some of those longtime trusted vendors happen to be clients of ours. And they’ve been switching back to postal outreach. And it’s been working. 
 
Where have all the emails gone?
 
One of these clients of ours recently sent out a catalog. Well, not really a catalog. Call it more of a thought-leadership piece that was really a very handy resource for C-level executives to have on their bookshelf. (We’re purposely being cagey here; we can’t reveal too much.) 
 
Now this “catalog” isn’t any good unless it gets opened. In other words, tucked inside the envelope with it was--gasp—a cover letter.
 
Yep. We worked on that one. Short, but vital. 
 
It teased what was in the “catalog.” It teased the benefits of working with the company that created it. And it invited the reader to book an all-important demo to learn more. 
 
Guess what? Envelopes were opened. And demos were booked. By the exact same execs whose spam filters had blocked every other form of recent outreach to them—including electronic versions of the exact same catalog. 
 
Email isn’t dead. But boy is this pendulum ever swinging toward print right now. 
 
Need help with thorny issues like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help! 

​Here at Copel Communications, we’re huge fans of remote work. We’ve been doing it, exclusively, for nearly three decades now, with clients all over the country (and sometimes, the world). 
 
Remember the pandemic? People asked us how we adjusted. Our answer: The rest of the world merely caught up with us. 
 
That said, there are some glorious exceptions. We recently worked on a big project with a geographically-scattered client team with a deadline looming, and we ran the meeting on-site at our client’s headquarters office. 
 
Sure, there were disadvantages to this, but there were also some interesting advantages—that you can profit from in your next meeting or on-site. 
 
The cons
 
Let’s get these out of the way. Scheduling this event for the numerous attendees was hard. It took lots of emails to send slots and check availabilities. Apps like Calendly might have helped… to an extent. But there were last-minute changes, in which one person’s suddenly-updated schedule impacted everyone’s, and we all had to start again. 
 
Then there were the logistics. They had to book the conference room. Order lunch. Set up the big screen for running preso’s in the room. 
 
And all of us had to dress up and drive. For a location which was, fortunately, only 30 minutes away, we had to allow a 15-minute cushion for traffic and parking. Not to mention the loading up the laptop and cables and all that junk. So, round trip, there’s, easily, two hours out of the day just gone, with zero work getting accomplished, while adding to the region’s traffic and carbon footprint from the commute. 
 
So… this better be one good meeting. Right? 
 
The pros
 
After a zillion Zoom calls with this team, it was refreshing to see everyone in person. Everyone had… shoes. It was incredible. 
 
Granted, when we got there, after all the hellos and small talk, everyone still had to fire up their respective laptops and log into the local Wi-Fi network and all that. More zero-productive time. 
 
But then it was time for us to run this meeting. And of course we arrived prepared. So we shared the agenda, the input materials, the catch-up from the previous Zoom meeting, and started to get things underway. 
 
And up to this point, aside from seeing that people wore shoes and being able to physically see who was looking at whom at any given second, it wasn’t any more productive than a Zoom meeting. 
 
But there were differences. We’d mentioned that this was basically a fairly stressful gathering, since we were working on a difficult project on a deadline. So it was a little easier to feel the tension in the physical air… and to defuse it as well, with a stretch, a yawn, or a trot over to the snack table. And it was easier to handle the inevitable digressions, too, since we could “read” the room and still watch the clock, and keep the group reined in.
 
But the best, and most un-Zoom-like part of the whole working session was the time spent not working. It was the lunch break. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s all log off and log back on in 30 minutes.” It was more like, “Who ordered the turkey club?” and “I thought you were a vegetarian,” and “No, Larry’s the vegetarian,” and then “That’s because my wife got me into it,” and, within short order, the room that had been filled with workers was replaced with a room filled with humans. It was great to simply not work. Hang out. Crack jokes. 
 
Our follow-up meeting, after this one, was back on Zoom again. It was infinitely easier, from a logistical standpoint. And it was better. The in-person bonding from the earlier on-site carried over and provided deeper connections going forward. 
 
Despite all the remote-lauding we’d done at the beginning of this article, the aforementioned on-site is hardly the only in-person meeting we’ve attended! Typically, we’ll do in-person at the beginning of an engagement, to meet all the players and make connections. That’s probably the best time to do it. 
 
But later ain’t too bad, either. 
 
Have a virtual-vs.-in-person story to share? Send it our way. We’d love to hear it. 

You’re in business to make money. These days, that sounds like a dirty little secret, but all businesses exist to make money. To reward the owners. The shareholders. To turn a profit. 
 
Therefore, you charge your clients for everything you do. 
 
Or do you? 
 
Or should you? 
 
In this article, we’ll dive into the reasons you should, or shouldn’t, provide some hard, payable work for free. It’s based on lots of experience, with lots of clients—and often, their clients. 
 
The cold-reality ROI argument
 
You’ve surely heard of a “loss leader.” Something that gets a prospect in the door for a super-attractive price. “Super-attractive,” as in “untenable.” Hence the “loss” you take on it. 
 
Ever played a scratch-off Monopoly game at McDonald’s and won a free order of French fries? C’mon. You think McDonald’s will lose money on that one? Remember: You can’t claim that prize on that visit. You have to come back.
 
So would you ever, honestly, make a trip to McDonald’s, and only order French fries? Even if they’re free? Of course you wouldn’t. Neither would anyone else. 
 
Hence the “cold, hard ROI” argument for freebies. Which goes something like this: 
 
Sure, you can give away something for free—just so long as you’re virtually assured that you’ll end up making way more than the value of what you gave away, from that same client or customer.
 
Ooof. How cold. How… Darwinian. 
 
It’s the little things
 
First off, know that we here at Copel Communications toss out freebies to our clients from time to time. Typically, they’re what we’d consider “too small to charge for.” We recently did a little quick-turn project for a client that, while admittedly urgent, simply wasn’t a huge amount of work for us. 
 
So what were we going to do at the end of the month? Line-item it for, say, 50 bucks? 
 
Naah. We refuse to nickel-and-dime like that. 
 
Still, we did list it on that month’s invoice. But the price? “N/C.” 
 
Surprise and delight
 
Sometimes, tossing out the freebie is just the right thing to do—especially if you’ve got a longstanding relationship with a client and the right project comes along and you can afford to do it. 
 
Ever give your dog a treat not because he chased a squirrel away from your bird feeder, but rather "just because”? This is like that. 
 
True story: We have a client that competes in an incredibly high-tech field. In fact, among our tech-savvy clients, this is one of the savviest, to the point where it’s always challenging to write for them—to assume that mantle of brilliance. It’s difficult and daunting. 
 
Yet we must be doing something right, because this client keeps turning to us with projects for years and years. 
 
One day, however, the owner of this business hit us with an unusual request. Turns out he was running for town council in the area where he lived, and wanted our help with some of his campaign materials. 
 
Man oh man. We knew this would be a freebie the instant we saw it. 
 
He sent us some fliers. And posters. And emails. And what-not. Asking us to clean them up, and bill him for whatever it required. 
 
Now we know this guy and you don’t. Trust us: He’s a great person. Any town council would be blessed to have him aboard. 
 
We were flattered, and honored, to work on this stuff. Sure, we had other paying gigs on the calendar, but were happy to carve out time for him. And when we turned to it, we hit it out of the park. 
 
Our client was delighted! He was so grateful—perhaps especially because this assignment fell outside of his usual high-tech comfort zone. “Send us your invoice,” he said. 
 
And so we sent it. With every single item line-itemed. We showed the “rack rate” for each thing—what it would cost in the real world—and even added up the total cost. 
 
And then, below that, we subtracted the entire total cost, with the note: “Courtesy discount." 
 
Amount due? Zero. 
 
If you think this client was delighted by the work we did, you can only imagine how surprised and happy he was to find out he was getting it for free. 
 
And we felt great. It still feels good, simply re-telling this story. 
 
Happy ending?
 
So, this client immediately came back and rewarded us with zillions of dollars’ worth of fresh, new work. Right? 
 
Wrong. In fact, it was months before he needed our services again. 
 
Are we bitter? Not at all! This is the antithesis of the “cold-reality ROI” argument. We’d call it the “spark of humanity” argument. A little Christmas, when it isn’t Christmas. 
 
Businesses exist to turn a profit. But they’re also run by people who live lives. Sometimes you simply need to connect at that very basic level. 
 
Have thoughts on this issue or a story to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear it. 

​Boy is this ever a “modern problems” topic. As a former agency creative director, we’re used to, well, directing creative people. 
 
But nowadays, very often, you can’t. 
 
You can’t speak to them. You can’t see them. And yet you need to direct, and coach, and motivate them, to do their best work. 
 
What gives? 
 
The gig economy cometh
 
Back in the day, we’d walk around the bull pen and engage with our artists at their drawing boards (yikes!) and computers. We’d go to recording studios and direct voiceover talent and jingle artists. We’d direct photographers on photo shoots, videographers on video shoots, and so on. Very straightforward. 
 
Enter Upwork. And Fiverr. And their ilk. The vaunted “Gig Economy,” wherein people can work, and make money, from anywhere. 
 
We’ve weighed in on this topic before. It’s a double-edged blade, which democratizes the availability of talent purveyors to buyers, while also (often) encouraging a race-to-the-bottom mentality when it comes to pricing and (often) quality. 
 
We won’t get into that here. What we will get into is the way that these platforms, such as Upwork and Fiverr, force you to work. They expressly forbid the talent on their platforms from engaging with the people who hire them… outside of the limited messaging capabilities of the platform itself. 
 
Think about that. We’ve had some tricky video assignments, for example, which we needed to dole out to qualified editors. The requirements for success were nuanced. Know the best way to communicate this to the editor? How about a phone call? Or better yet, Zoom? 
 
Nope. Not allowed by Upwork. Or Fiverr. (To the point where they’ll banish these workers from their platforms if they’re caught engaging in such egregious violations of their terms and conditions. The platforms are effectively dangling their livelihoods on a string.) 
 
So what do we do? How do we surmount these challenges? Is it possible to make lemonade from such tainted fruit? 
 
The pen is mightier than the restraint
 
There’s really only one tool at your disposal if you’re looking to get great work out of these gig-economy vendors. And that’s the written word.
 
Imagine that rousing speech and directions you’d planned (or hoped) to give that vendor in person. Write it down. Verbatim. It’s your only/best choice. 
 
Sure, you can, and should, list all the mandatories in the project (“The logo must stay on screen for at least four seconds,” etc.). But you need to put the “carrots” in there, too. We’ve ended some lengthy directions with exhortations such as, “If this one comes out great, there will be others in this series. So impress us!” You’re not some HAL-like computer spitting out commands. You’re a person, doing your best to connect to that vendor on the other side of the gig-platform wall. Be nice. Make friends. 
 
And don’t be surprised if the street isn’t exactly two-way. You may spend, say, an hour writing up an incredible input package. And you may get in return something as succinct as “ok got it thx.” 
 
Don’t be offended. Just roll with it. You don’t need, say, that graphic artist to spend an hour or two on a beautifully written reply; rather, you want them to devote their time to making beautiful graphics, following your instructions in both letter and spirit. 
 
Need help getting the best out of a hybrid team like this? Contact us. We do this all the time, and would be delighted to help you, too!