My Writing Client Questionnaire

May 12, 2010

Are you using a client questionnaire? I’ve been using one for a few months now and Taylor’s post on How To Please Your Client Every Single Time reminded me that I’d planned to tell you more about it. Like many writers, I’d been running my writing business by asking clients about their requirements, but I created this list of questions from scratch every time. That’s just not efficient. If you have to ask your new clients the same questions before you start a job, it makes much more sense to keep them all together in one place.

Researching Writing Client Questionnaires

That decided, I set off to find out what should be in my questionnaire. I found some great resources such as How To Extract The Facts with a Web Design Client Questionnaire on Freelance Switch. Although this is aimed at web designers, I thought it offered a lot of useful pointers for any freelance service provider. Section 1 of Smashing Magazines big list of useful web design checklists also provided some food for thought. Although I don’t remember seeing it at the time, Noupe’s tips on creating the perfect client questionnaire are also helpful. Those lists are intended to help you create your own questionnaire, so that’s just what I did, adding a couple other useful things I’d thought of or seen around.

My Writing Questionnaire

My questionnaire has four sections: contact information, company background, about the project and budget/finance. The first section is pretty straightforward, but includes questions on the client’s time zone (useful for all of us location independent people) and the best way to contact the client. In the background section, I ask clients to describe their company, how they differ from their competitors, how they want to be seen/found by customers and how they solve their customers’ problems.

Project Details

The biggest section deals with the project they are hiring me for. I ask about content and word count, where they plan to use the content, who they are trying to reach and what they want the content to do. I ask about tone, deadline, how the work should be delivered and who I should contact with queries. A key question is what the client thinks is most important about the project — this gives me a steer on what to emphasize. I also ask about how often the client needs to be updated on progress.

Finishing Touches

Finally, I ask about the client’s budget and how they plan to pay, with my payment terms and outline contract terms at the end. This means no new client has to ask about how to pay — the only question is where.

The questionnaire is just two pages and it has proved to be extremely useful. Not only do I get a lot of information about the current writing job, but I can also offer clients advice on other services that might help them to achieve their aims.

Update: Find out more about the process in my podcast: Writing Tools: Your Client Questionnaire