Handling Pro Bono and Discounted Projects
A few weeks ago, I was reading this article on 30 Ways to Create an Incredible Client Experience and I thought about something I started doing a while back. It actually seems counter-intuitive at first, but turns out to actually improve the experience on projects where you're charging less than your full rate.
From time to time, I do a project or a portion of a project for free. Some are for friends or family, some for charity and sometimes I have some hours that I don't bill for because I screwed up.
When I first started out, I would do that free or discounted work and it would never be mentioned again. Then on more than one of these projects, things were just sort of sour.
On one, someone was upset that the project was late (I was too), and I'd actually put in a ton of unpaid work over a couple of months to get it done and we still didn't make it in time. The client made a comment that hit me hard. He was looking at my bill, which only included the first 40 hours of each of those weeks and said, "Maybe if you'd been willing to put in more than just the minimum effort, we'd have launched on time."
Right there and then, I realized how important perception and visibility are to a project. Later on, as I read more about marketing, human psychology, etc. I learned a bunch of things about the way people view "free". Further experience taught me that if the value wasn't visible, people will invent a number in their head. And, if the number they come up with on their own is closer to what you pay the neighbor kid to mow the lawn than to what they pay their mechanic, you're in trouble as a tech professional.
A few years ago, I was having a conversation with another consultant and was complaining about how a pro bono client I was helping seemed decidedly ungrateful. He told me that he billed even the free stuff and just discounted it. He went on to tell me to ask this particular client how much they thought they were getting for free.
I followed up on that suggestion and discovered that the non-profit in question thought that the web work I was doing would cost about $300 on the open market. Problem was that I'd given them the same amount of time that my paying clients pay well over $5000 for. Clearly there was a mismatch.
So, what I do now is to shine a light on that free and discounted time. If I'm doing some geeky work for someone that goes beyond a quick phone call or a chat over a meal, I write up the time spent at my normal market rate. I then apply the appropriate discount. That means that if the whole project is free, there's a completely normal project invoice, with a 100% discount applied.
That's something to think about for those who are starting out doing web or design or other work where the common advice to break in is to do a project for cheap or free to build your portfolio. That advice is frequently criticized because it can lead to either that first client or everyone they refer to you expecting the same cheap deal. If, however, you bill that portfolio building project and just discount it, the point that it was a one-time deal is much clearer. You can even name your discount to nail the point home.
I also do this for the kinds of things where I either screw up (I'm the first to admit that it happens) or need to a bunch of research and don't feel ethically right billing for it. I did it a couple of months ago, where the actual bill for the month was something like 22 or 24 hours and I included another 8 that I discounted 100% because I spent an entire day rebuilding the staging server after I messed it up by trying to take a shortcut.
Given that we had had conversations about the delay, putting it on the bill made it clear that I had really made an effort to rectify things. It also showed that I had skin in the game for the problem.
It's really all of those various reasons that have reinforced this technique. All kinds of assumptions and underlying miscommunication gets cleared up when this stuff shows up on a bill. I'm really still quite amazed at how well it diffuses bad blood on both sides.
If you've got frustrations with or have held back from doing discounted work because you aren't sure how to handle it, this approach is worth thinking about. It works great for me.
