Home » Costing content projects: Part 2 – Models

Costing content projects: Part 2 – Models

Now that we've gone over the factors that inform the cost of content projects, let's look at costing models.

In our last post, we covered the different factors that go into costing out content projects. Now let’s dive into costing models — ways of charging for this work.

Which one works best for you will depend on the work at hand — and also your organisation’s preferred model for buying services.

Let’s dig in.

Item-based costing

This one is the simplest on the surface. We write X number of pages, and for delivering those pages we’ll charge you $Y. What’s significant here is that the contract ties payment to the number of assets delivered.

Item-based costings work very well when you can scope out everything required in advance, as we saw in our last post. And it is an easy message to sell up the line to senior stakeholders: ‘this is exactly what we’ll get for our spend.’

Where item-based costing falls down is in more complex projects. On these projects, other factors (like complexity of client engagement) are difficult to accurately predict upfront. Tying the contract to an exact number of pages can create expectations for your stakeholders that are very difficult to manage — and can distract from actually doing the work.

Day rates

Clients will often ask for a costing itemised by day rates for personnel. And this is very clean to cost out: we allocate a content designer or an editor on a project at full capacity for ‘X’ number of weeks. So here, payment is tied to personnel being available full-time for the days promised.

Our concern here is that day rates can lead to clients being massively over-charged. Content projects are always stop-start. There are always periods where we are waiting on briefing, or feedback. A day-rate model means that you are committing to paying the writer for periods when they’re not required.

Project rates

Here you’re charged for activity leading up to a deliverable. It’s similar to item rates; the difference here is that the content deliverables (number of pages) are not usually defined with absolute precision.

Project rates work well when you can predict the level of engagement needed and control that quite tightly. When we’re doing strategy projects, for example, we’ll do this on a project basis and specify the number of workshops.

But getting content cleared isn’t always easy to nail down. Some pages will sail through clearance quicker than we expected — and some will need a few more conversations.

Content sprints

Now we get to the model that True North uses on many of our large content projects. It’s a type of ‘time and materials’ costing, so you only pay for time that’s allocated to your project. We’ll scope out the writing resources needed for a set period (usually in chunks of two weeks). We scope this based on projected effort, for example:

1 x content strategist at 5 hours per week
1 x lead writer at 20 hours per week
2 x writers at 40 hours per week

The effort needed — and the mix of resources required — will change as the project ebbs and flows. What’s important here is that you’re only paying for what you need at each point.