How To Give Effective Feedback

Giving effective feedback to clients, consultants or team members that you work with is extremely important. What is just as important is knowing how to do it the right way.

If you’ve hired a Virtual Assistant, designer or copywriter in the past then you know that it can sometimes take a while to get the final result that you’re looking for. The feedback process is incredibly important because we’re not mind-readers.

At the end of the day if you want the final product to truly represent you and your own style, then you have to be effective with your communication. It’s absolutely necessary.

Here are three rules to live by when offering feedback to your Virtual Assistant, designer, or copywriter.

Rule #1 Share your vision

That means painting a picture of your desired end goal and giving us some inspiration to work from.
My recommendation to you: spend just 15 minutes scouring the web for inspiration and researching your competition. So you can show us the end result that you’re looking for.

When you share your vision, you begin with the end in mind. And oftentimes that can speed up the entire process drastically.

Rule #2 Be Honest

If you fail to give honest feedback because you “feel bad” then it’s on you if the final result doesn’t turn out as awesome as you’d hoped.

In the past 5 years of being in business, I’ve had numerous clients tell me to start over or change direction and it’s 100% fine. That’s part of our job. It’s what we do, we can’t get it right the first time every-time. Even if we try.

No matter what, be kind with your honesty. We want you to be proud of our collaboration. And if you gracious and kind with your feedback then we’re gonna put more effort into the next round. Because we genuinely want to get you the final product that you deserve.

Rule #3 Be specific

Every creative professional knows that sinking feeling of receiving the vague feedback of “just not feeling it.”

When you give us vague feedback we don’t know how to best utilize our time moving forward and we can sometimes get lost in your confusion. The more detailed you are with your feedback, the faster that we can move forward and give you that end result that you desire.

My biggest tip here is to make bulleted lists for what you like and don’t like about the last round that we provided that way we know exactly how to move forward and how to utilize our time so that we’re not wasting time just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks and what you want.

If you’ve done a good job of being honest and painting a picture for us by providing inspiration then these bulleted lists are essentially the icing on the cake that will allow us to move forward in a direction and give you that creative product that we and you can be proud to show off to the world.

If you want a sneak peek into how I brief my clients when they come on for a website or retainer project I actually make that available to you as a freebie on DesignMastermind.NYC/bestpractices

I share all the do’s and don’ts in a resource that I actually provide my clients when we start working together, so you can get a sneak peek into my process. As well as prepare yourself for working with your next creative professional.

And finally, I would absolutely love it if you subscribe to my YouTube channel. Where every week I geek out on web design and answer your most burning questions.

Thanks again for stopping by, I’ll see you next week!