How to write a graphic design brief for your credit union marketing
When you’re dealing with a graphic design project for your credit union, it’s vital to write a detailed graphic design brief at the very beginning. It doesn’t matter if you are working with an agency or your internal marketing department. There are two main reasons for this:
- It ensures that you, as Marketing Specialist, Marketing Manager, Marketing Director or V.P. Marketing, know exactly what you want to achieve from your project.
- The brief acts as a point of reference for your designers or design agency, giving them key points to focus on. This helps to prevent costly revisions.
Both of these reasons will ensure that less time is needed for completion - saving you from exceeding deadlines. They will also help save your budget when it comes to agency “concepting” or revisions or conference calls to hash out the overall concept.
The crux of the matter is this: The more information you provide at the beginning of the project, the more value for money you’ll receive from your graphic designer or agency.
To help get you started, I’ve set out some pointers when writing your graphic design brief. Consider including your:
Corporate profile
Don’t assume that your team or agency know your brand as well as you do. Incorrect assumptions about you can render the entire opening discussion absolutely meaningless. Provide a summary of your credit union positioning statement along with a brief history. Basically, if your #1 SEG is the US Postal Service - let the creatives know that this is important and why.
Market position
A realistic evaluation of your credit union, service, and brand relative to your what the competition is doing. What makes you special. This needs to be reinforced at every opportunity. This needs to be represented in every piece.
Current situation
Explain what’s happening to bring about the need for this project. For instance, a new product or service launch that needs advertising. Maybe you have worked something out where you have an EXCELLENT short term high-yield certificate rate. Maybea competitor is making an offer and you need to get your “One-Up” out there as to why its not just the product, but the service you can depend on if a new member selects YOUR credit union.
Communication background
This includes both previous and present communication activity, such as research, advertising, direct mail, graphic design, MCIF data, focus group results, web trends, public relations etc.
Communication task – “the message”
What’s the context of the specific message in relation to your business plans? How does this campaign reinforce your brand? You should include pieces of information to be shown in the designed item e.g. text, logos, images etc.
Target market
Demographics – the age, gender, income, employment, geography, lifestyle of those members that you want to reach.
Objectives
What do you want to achieve? Make your objectives specific and the results measurable. “More Members” is not significant. Everyone wants more members. You need to state your objective in a way that can be calculated. You Objective should be stated as “When not running a targeted membership campaign we earn 1,000 new members a month. 800 of those members are from indirect lending sources. For a targeted membership campaign, we need to see 800 new members (non-IDL) within 60 days after the completion of the first mailing. This is an average of 400 new members in each month. This is a two month campaign. Each new member needs to have opened at least two accounts upon joining. We are using 2 different postcard mailings, a direct mail folded application and branch merchandising and web marketing. We are estimating a 60 day run with the final mailing to be delivered 30 days from the first mailing.”
Available budget
I know this goes contrary to your gut, but if you are dealing with a professional company - you have to tell them your budget. Providing your budget helps the in-house designer or agency to allocate a specific amount of time to each stage of the design process. For instance, if you’re spending $3,000 a designer can spend much more time concepting and designing than if you’re only spending $1,000. The more concepting and designing, the more possibilities for an excellent outcome. Actually, it is possible that durring the concepting, the ball gets rolling and you might get 3 or 4 campaigns out of one concept meeting. So if you intended on spending $1,000 and get only one idea - you got what you paid for. But what if you got 4 or 5 ideas from a $3,000 concept meeting? That means you might get campaings for the year, and save your budget for incentives.
Sometimes you have to give a little to get alot.
The other reason you need to share your budget is that you never know where something brilliant might spring up. Sometimes you, under a tight budget, a creative person can come up with a simple idea with a huge impact. It forces them to be creative instead of going down the same old roads. For example - maybe you don’t have enough money to have banners printed for your branches for a home loan campaign. A creative person might suggest (if you are a school based or community based credit union) that you work with the local school to get the kids to draw their own “Dream House”. Decorate the branches with the entries and offer a savings certificate to the winner for $500 towards their “Dream Home”. You could even use the winning artwork for the postcards, posters, inserts etc. If a designer or agency knows that they need to overcome budgetary obstacles, the good ones will.
Schedule and deadline
Give your designer or agency a detailed and realistic schedule of how you would like the project to advance. Take the following into consideration:
- Consultation (research, strategy, brief development)
- Creative (concept and design development)
- Production (artwork, printing and other production for all campaign pieces)
- Delivery
If you do not have a creative brief form, send us an email. We will send you a generic form that you can use. It is simply that important. You really shouldn’t start a campaign without one. It saves time, money and frustration.
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Comments
Great tips, Tony - especially, “I know this goes contrary to your gut, but if you are dealing with a professional company - you have to tell them your budget.” Our company doesn’t do creative, but in the social media work we do, that certainly applies.
BTW, all your posts have been rockin - recorded a podcast the other day (still being edited) where I raved about CU Hype and how guilty I feel that I haven’t left a comment in a while - I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly!
Thanks Trey. Your support has really meant a lot to us over here.
One thing I left out when I was grinding out this eye-wrenching post was about budgets.
The most common reason people don’t want to give out their budget is that they think that is miraculously be what the final invoice amount will be. In other words, they think they will get screwed. I have actually heard a professional answer the question “How much will this cost?” with “Well how much do you have budgeted?”. That is what these people are afraid of.
A professional should be able to tell you how much it will cost (within reason) for the work that you are requesting. Where it is beneficial to disclose your budget is when you are looking for that “Something Extra”. I love it when a client says “Look, we only have $15,000. We definitely need about 20 posters and some postcards - but what else can we do to really make this thing pop?”
That tells me that they are serious about marketing and not just going through the motions. What we do is not “Cookie-Cutter” (sometimes but not every time). Different things work for different credit unions. For example (I do a lot of examples)I had a client strip branch banners from their marketing proposal because they just do not work for them. They would rather spend the money somewhere else. Letting your team know this creates the opportunity for creativity.
And usually, all creativity needs is a little opportunity.
Jennifer - I took a look at your site and I love the retro stuff. Your photoshop stuff is pretty good too.
And I definitely appreciate a visitor from Ireland reading our humble blog 
Keep up the good work!
I couldn’t agree more. I’m a designer myself and I can’t state categorically that the more effort that goes into the design brief, the easier and more efficiently work can be completed and most importantly completed the way you want it.