How to buy technology ethically

1. Don’t ask more than 3-5 agencies to pitch for the work.

Writing a proposal for a project takes us at least a day or two, even if it’s quite a small project. Every project is unique, we think deeply about how we can meet your needs, and we involve people from across the team (tech, design, production) to input into the proposal. If you’re asking 10+ agencies to put in a proposal for your work, that’s a lot of wasted time and effort and it’s going to hit many ethical businesses hard. 

Agencies like ours spend thousands of pounds every year writing proposals that they don’t win. That’s part of running a business for sure – you can’t win ’em all – but it’s a big overhead for any small business!

2. Invite agencies personally rather than posting your brief on forums, LinkedIn and more.

If you post your brief in public forums, or on social media, you’re going to get a LOT of agencies applying for it. But in these instances, because the chance of any agency winning the project is going to be small, many agencies simply won’t bother putting a proposal in at all. It’s just not worth the risk of them investing lots of effort, if there’s only a 1 in 20 chance of getting the work.

Also, do yourself a favour! Doing a little research on agencies you like the look of – plus some initial shortlisting about who to invite – will help you cut down your own costs in reviewing and responding to those who put in a proposal.

3. Don’t use the pitching process as a way of getting free expertise.

If you’re looking to work with an ethical agency, the likelihood is that they’d be happy to share their opinions and expertise with you for free ahead of being invited to submit a proposal. Rather than inviting them to pitch, which is very time consuming, ask them to book a call to chat to you about how they would approach your project. Most agencies would be happy to do this. And if you like what they have to say, and you have a good rapport, then invite them to write a formal proposal. If you think that they’ve got good insights but they’re not right for your project, consider recommending them to others or considering them for future work. 

We’re all learning as we go. We really value getting proper feedback on our proposals, and we’d much rather that it was honest and specific. We often get quite generic feedback, like “the agency we chose was stronger on their deliverables” but that doesn’t really help us know how we should be pitching next time. We really do see potential clients as very important stakeholders in our business, so your opinion is useful to us.

We’ve got pretty thick skin – we’d rather that you’re honest so that we can improve, than you try to not hurt our feelings. At the end of the day, the business is our passion and our livelihood, and so we’ll do a lot to learn how to make it better.

On a related note: it’s particularly frustrating when we don’t even get a response from the client to say that we’ve been unsuccessful. Please don’t do this.

5. Once you’ve received the proposals, don’t go back and forth with a lot of questions, and make a decision swiftly.

Sometimes, even after spending days writing a proposal, we’re asked to respond to a lot more questions that the client thinks of. Clarifications are fine, but we’ve had instances where (so it seems) wider stakeholders have got involved after the agency proposals have been received, and have issued lots of additional questions and scoring grids. We’ve had to fill in reams of additional questions or return to the brief and extract & rewrite much of the original material.

Again, this is a massive drain on our resources.

Added to that, it creates a false sense of hope – we can’t help but think: if they’re asking us all these questions, they must be really interested! In these situations it’s very frustrating to find out months later  that we didn’t win the work, precisely because this back and forth has got our hopes up.

Really, try to engage and include all your stakeholders in advance, and get the key questions you need answering issues as part of your brief.

6. Think carefully about whether you even want a small agency to do your project.

Working with a small, ethical digital agency is a great option. You’ll have a very dedicated team who are close to each other and close to you and your project. The team will almost certainly be passionate about social change and the work of your organisation. There’ll be less hierarchy than in a big agency so you’ll end up with more senior people on your project. And in most cases, you won’t be paying a chunk of money to extractive shareholders.

However, small agencies need to make a living, so they need to charge their clients. It’s rare that a small agency can deliver whole projects for free or ‘pro-bono’.

Big digital agencies, who make the bulk of their money from unethical clients, and often deploy a lot of junior staff onto projects, can afford to do some projects pro-bono. Of course, that can be great for some charities who really don’t have money to invest in their tech. Be warned that at the end of the day, you’re unlikely to get the aftercare that the project needs. But from our point of view, we can very rarely compete with free/loss-making projects offered by big commercial companies. So please consider before you go out to tender whether you want to pay for your site and work with a small dedicated team, or whether you’d rather work with a big company.

7. Don’t ask the agency to do speculative work as part of the proposal.

Needless to say, speculative work is a huge overhead on agency time and resources. Plus of course, the chances are that any designs submitted will be based on huge initial assumptions about your users and needs, so a) will likely show a wrong approach, and b) won’t allow the agency to demonstrate their full design process. At Outlandish, we’d never do design work without trying to centre users at the heart of the project first – for instance via a healthy research and discovery phase.

Fortunately we haven’t been asked to submit initial designs as part of our proposal for a long time, so some things seem to be changing for the better. Clients, keep channelling this best practice!