Choosing an agency can be exhausting. And we know you’re busy. Here are four questions to ponder when Bump is on your short list.

1. Does Bump offer a service that will actually solve my problem?

You’ll see these explained across our website but here is a detailed overview in plain English of where we focus:

Strategy

• Retained senior communications counsel working directly with organisation leaders.
• Campaign strategy, concept development and execution (especially when there is a need to work with multiple stakeholders across an organisation, see #BumpIdeaSprint)

Experiences

• (Retained) senior experiential design counsel for organisations and brands that have a dedicated dynamic space to tell their story or that regularly run events to do the same.
• Experiential and event design and execution

Video

• Video production (especially when people are the subject as we place a lot of emphasis on interview skills to get the best out of them on camera, quickly)
• In-house video production up-skilling in the form of helping clients build their own studios and advanced video production skills.
• Virtual event production, either with partner studios for larger productions or in clients’ spaces for smaller productions.

Executive and organisation-level social media strategy and execution

• Retained executive profiling strategy, video content execution and retained senior counsel (most often with a focus on LinkedIn).
• Retained org-level social strategy and content execution with an 80/20 LinkedIn/Twitter split.
• LinkedIn “training” for senior leaders and/or the senior communicators tasked with helping those senior leaders.

Agencies

• Very carefully selected agency collaborations where we work with a single senior point of contact to complement their offering with ours.

2. Am I interested in the level of partnership needed to achieve the best result?

We’ve all done other jobs where the walls to creativity were paved thick and tall, where we spent way too much time trying to scale them. So with Bump, we’ve set up a creative refuge of sorts where we and clients adhere to a few ground rules in service of creativity (and you know, like, general collective professional fulfillment).

We have honestly spent ages trying to commit our “way” to a long winded highbrow manifesto of sorts and have failed at every attempt. So we’ve settled on the old “three keyword approach.” This is what we and our clients sign up to:

• Partnership – we succeed together and if we pivot together to navigate obstacles, we can never fail.
• Positivity – Good vibes all day, every day. There is much negativity in professional life we cannot control. But in this relationship, we can control it (who’s stopping us?) and will check negativity at the door.
• Trust – Every book ever written on relationships says this is at the core of the good ones. We show each other every day that we appreciate the trust given and work to earn it.

3.  Am I in the right point in my career and the right headspace to be a Bump client?

We’ve come up with many reasons NOT to include this section (what if we sound like jerks? what if we seem unwelcoming of very junior clients? what if we sound like “too much work” when clients are supposed to be paying US money?). But ultimately, this section IS here. We can’t be everything to everyone, but what we can do is communicate candidly and transparently about who seems to be served best by working with us.

Here is a list of 7 keywords/keyphrases we’ve learned about the clients who thrive with us:

• Partnership: You are looking for an equal partner to solve a problem from the first acknowledgement of that problem.

• Collaboration: Working with others in an environment of mutual respect, positivity, and love for creativity energises you. You know that every outcome achieved outside of such an environment is not only suboptimal in solving the problem but also carries a mental health burden you will feel far beyond just the problem-solving exercise at hand.

• Sophistication: You value expert consultancy as much as tactical execution and you can recognise when you are buying the former v the latter and how the combination of both helps better solve the problem.

• Confidence gained through experience: You believe in your abilities and judgment which you’ve developed through trial and error. This allows you to quickly filter out sub-optimal courses of action to solve the problem.

• Curiosity and humility: You acknowledge that while you could likely solve the problem yourself, you are curious to explore a variety of possible solutions which you believe will be even more effective given they draw on the experience and expertise of others.

• Seniority or privileged proximity to it: You are the decision maker or have (or have cultivated) privileged access to and the respect of the decision maker(s)

• Action bias: You know that doing nothing or delaying indefinitely is not an option to solve this particular problem.

4. Is the price right?

Oh, the money question. Nobody likes that one haha. Luckily, we’ve written about that extensively here.

Unofficial #5: Do I prefer to have a coffee chat first before even considering starting a new agency relationship? 

We’re right there with you. Spoken words, non-verbal communication, a mutually comfortable level of eye contact, caffeine = that’s how great creative relationships really get started and how mismatches are avoided. Let’s do that.