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C R E A T I V E A L L I A N C E S
For these flexible and ongoing partnerships, we use the number of requests/deliverables per month to measure our monthly scope (instead of tracking hours).
Pen & Mug serves as your fractional creative director/department, helping founders and marketing leaders elevate their branding, website, product design and other communications.
Our "Creative Alliance" partnerships cover everything from graphic design to website maintenance, and from executing multi-channel campaigns to defining top-level creative strategy. The P&M Point System allows us to plan ahead more effectively than tracking hours, while still keeping our working partnership extremely flexible and collaborative.
In short: we’ll do our best to plan projects weeks/months in advance with you, but we’ll also be agile enough to take on urgent needs when they arise.
Creative Alliance agreements are structured as a flat monthly rate for work up to a target number of points (or ‘requests/deliverables’) per month. This gives us and our clients both the consistency and predictability needed to plan budgets and working capacity.
We treat your monthly target as just that — a target — not a hard cap, and not something that accrues over time or rolls over month to month. As upcoming projects are identified and new requests are submitted to our team, we’ll work closely with our point(s) of contact on your team to prioritize projects correctly and space them out to hit our target accurately.
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Clearer capacity Measuring capacity in points (requests/deliverables) simplifies planning ahead.
Predictable value Tracking requests/deliverables (rather than hours) ensures consistent value.
Flexible partnership Agile and collaborative partnership that can easily adjust as needs change.
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"Points" allow for variation in the type of request. Because a simple update to a web page shouldn’t cost the same as creating a 24-page booklet from scratch, we use a three-tier system: