Hiring freelance help seems like it should be easy and straightforward: A school identifies someone off-campus who can handle a specific project, assigns the job, then settles up when the work is done satisfactorily.

Oh, if only things were that simple.

Anyone who handles outsourcing — like, say, a school’s communications director — comes to realize quickly that getting help this way comes with issues:

• Help by the project is a reactive process, with an unavoidable and perhaps long delay between realizing the need and completing the solution. Typically, though, a school needs help now with its communications project.
• Finding the right person for the job can be a challenge. For some tasks, any pair of extra hands will suffice. More often, though, the freelancer must be experienced — and trustworthy, too. Therein lies a problem: Talented folks are in high demand, often booked weeks in advance. They may be unavailable when a given project emerges.
• That means the wise school communications director identifies not just one competent freelancer but several, then constantly maintains that list of names to be ready for any situation. This chore is a tedious distraction, stealing focus from meaningful work.
• Once the freelancer is booked, the person will likely need at least a basic introduction to the school, the audience and the need. This task, too, is repetitive — every new contributor will need one — and amounts to another productivity tax that impedes the highest and best use of employee time.

Then there is the freelancer whose deliverable doesn’t match what the school ordered. And we haven’t even gotten to discussing the time demanded by invoices, tax forms and other billing matters.

The inefficiency can be aggravating. The unreliability can be discouraging. At the same time, projects need doing, and few schools possess such broad expertise and bandwidth to handle everything in-house.

Thankfully, there is a better way to enlist freelance help.

Keep those contracts rolling

In higher education, communications offices are moving increasingly to outsourcing on retainer: They offer rolling, monthly contracts to freelancers who have proved their mettle.

This allows colleges and universities still to enjoy key benefits of outsourcing, such as budget discipline and broadening their talent pool. The arrangement simply gives them dibs on people who can handle everything from the extraordinary to the mundane. And typically they pay less than they’d pay a green full-timer.

Longer engagements mean the freelancer and the communications team get to know each other better. In turn, this typically helps produce better deliverables. And the open-ended contracts allow the school to assign a wide variety of tasks, rather than to address only one need at a time.

A communications feast

Such outcomes intrigued us at Fine Point Communications. Could retainers work just as well for independent schools, getting them needed help while eliminating the hassle of per-project hiring?

Last year, as a trial, we offered communications on retainer to a few schools. Some needed fill-in support as they searched for new communications directors, while others engaged us to improve messaging across campus.

We wrote these retainer contracts as “all-you-can-eat”: A monthly fee covered any and all work we performed — based on what we and the client anticipated from the start to be the average monthly workload.

Of course, some months were busier than expected. But this arrangement meant the client paid only the agreed fee, regardless of how many tasks came to us.

We kept plenty busy with these retainers, and our work ran the gamut of school communications, with everything from departmental leadership to producing newsletters and more:

• Advise on a year-long communications strategy
• Draft and refine school statements alongside senior administrators
• Redesign a website home page to improve engagement
• Summarize survey findings for a parent presentation
• Draft a year-long schedule of development messages
• Report and write magazine articles and alumni profiles
• Conduct media relations to build community awareness

Trial takeaways

The trial was extremely satisfying: Each client achieved its needed outcomes. What’s more, our all-you-can-eat approach unanimously led retainer schools to pull in Fine Point wherever we could help. After all, they faced no extra charge for the service.

One of our engagements, for instance, started with coaching a junior employee and with message development. In time, though, we came to advise a board committee on reaching some of its strategic goals.

We see scope evolution like this as the biggest benefit in a school switching to retainers. As new needs emerge, the communications office can simply return to its trusted partner, rather than repeatedly finding, hiring and onboarding freelancers.

More tasks get done, and little issues are resolved quickly, before they can become big and messy.

Our trial convinced us that communications on retainer serves schools better than the customary, per-project freelance model.

While Fine Point Communications will keep providing project work over the coming school year, a retainer option now leads our roster of services.

A contract has a minimum term of three months, after which it rolls over monthly. It can end or be revised with 30 days’ notice. Ideally, though, we want to work with a client through the academic year. That way, the school can assess our expertise, range and responsiveness through seasonal ebbs and flows.

Want to learn more about this model for freelance? Feel free to set up an appointment with us, where we can talk through particulars.

This post is adapted from the July 2024 issue of Refill, a newsletter published by Fine Point Communications.