Our editorial standards cover some of the main ways we collaborate with clients on content projects. We hope this page will serve as a reference point for any questions you have, either now or in the future, about things like project timelines, project expiration, scope changes, and more. By agreeing to work with us, you agree to abide by these editorial standards.
Please note that while we have no plans to update these standards, it is subject to change at any time. If there’s ever a major update that impacts our agreement, we’ll notify you via email.
If you have questions about our editorial standards and/or anything else about how we work with clients, please email projects@campfirelabs.co. Thanks!
Throughout this page, you’ll see two terms repeated: projects and deliverables.
A project refers to the scope of work we agree on together, which may result in one or more deliverables.
A deliverable is any individual piece of content we create, such as an eBook, blog post, or case study.
Whenever we start a new project, whether it’s our first project together or our fiftieth, we follow the same process, with the same steps, editorial standards, and timelines. These steps are outlined below, so that you know what to expect every time.
Please note that when working with us, you will have a dedicated Project Manager—your primary contact—who will help manage logistics, facilitate feedback, provide status updates, and answer questions. You will also work directly with our Creative Director, who is available for creative ideation and creative feedback. Our writers are of course an integral part of the process as well, but project communications will flow primarily through our Project Manager and Creative Director so that they can keep the trains running on schedule.
At the start of every project, we schedule a kickoff meeting to be held within two weeks of the agreement being signed. This meeting involves our creative director, account manager, and a project manager, as well as anyone from your team who would like to attend.
In this 45-minute meeting, we recap the project’s scope, review our editorial process, and confirm any action items needed from both sides over the following 30 days. Any substantive creative discussion related to specific deliverables should wait until a creative brief has been submitted (see next section for more details about this phase of projects).
Once a kickoff meeting has taken place, it’s time to start a new deliverable. For new projects, the first deliverable should be assigned within 30 days of kickoff.
For every new deliverable, we ask for the following:
Whether we’re conducting interviews or proceeding directly to writing, the clock won’t start on the timelines described in Section II until all of the steps above have been completed.
Clients on retainer projects receive a set number of “credits” to be used over a period of time. Once a kickoff meeting has taken place, credits may be assigned toward new deliverables at any time by sending a creative brief to your project manager. Once steps 1-3 above have been completed, we will add the new deliverable to our capacity plan and get started within 2 weeks.
In order to help us plan ahead and ensure that we have a qualified writer available to take on new deliverables, we expect credits to be assigned evenly over the duration of a project. For example, if you’ve purchased 24 credits to be used over a 3-month period, we expect you to use approximately 8 credits per month and will reserve capacity accordingly.
If you fall behind on regular credit usage, or if you would like to assign a significant number of credits in a shorter-than-expected time period, we will do our best to accommodate, but please be aware that we may not be able to meet the timelines outlined in Section II.
Writing and editing timelines are based on the word count of each deliverable. Please note that these are maximum timelines; we will always aim to deliver work ahead of schedule, while keeping in mind that truly exceptional content takes time to create.
First draft timelines cover the period of time our writer spends writing their initial draft, as well as our internal editorial review process, which involves our creative director and staff editor. A project manager will communicate this timeline to you once the writer is ready to start writing, and will email you with a completed draft once it is ready for your review.
Due to the unpredictability of key project milestones (e.g. creative briefs, interview sourcing, interview scheduling), writing timelines are as follows:
Some longer deliverables, such as eBooks, automatically include the creation of an outline. When this is part of the process, we will send you an outline approximately one week after the final interview. Similar to drafts, we ask for your feedback on outlines and will revise them until you're satisfied. Once you've approved the outline, we will begin writing the first draft.
Standard timelines for first drafts are as follows:
A revision is any subsequent draft after the first draft, based on feedback given by your team. Revision timelines include a detailed review of your feedback, discussions between the writer and our editorial team, and the writing and editing of a new draft (ie. revision).
Timelines for revisions begin on the business day that a project manager confirms receipt of your feedback. Please note that we won’t begin the revision process until you tell us via email that your team has finished leaving feedback and that you are ready for us to begin a new draft.
Please also note that we are closed on Fridays. Any feedback submitted on Friday will be confirmed the following week, at which point the revision timeline will begin.
Standard timelines for revisions are as follows:
In our experience, most deliverables require one or two revisions, but we are happy to offer unlimited revisions free of charge until you’re completely satisfied with our work. The above timelines apply to all revisions, whether it’s the second, third, or sixth draft.
In the event of any substantive edits requested—i.e. those that require significant structural changes, require additional research or interviews from the writer, or constitute a major departure from the original creative brief—revisions may take additional time. Our editorial team will notify you of this and set a general timeline for when to expect a draft to be available for review.
In order to keep projects on schedule and adhere to the writing and editing timelines listed above, we require the following (where applicable):
The creative brief is a foundational part of our editorial process: it helps our writer and editorial team understand your strategy, goals, and vision; ensures alignment between our team and yours; and serves as our primary source of truth when it comes to creative direction.
To make this part of the process easier for you and your team, we supply a creative brief template at the start of every project. The template is customized based on the project, and contains sections for you to fill out to ensure your creative vision is all in one place.
We ideally look for creative briefs that allow the writer to feel like they’ve just had a quick meeting with your team. A successful brief should not only give the writer the basic facts and details needed to bring a deliverable to life; it should contain any other, less tangible elements that you want to see included in the finished product. Here’s an example of a high-quality creative brief for an eBook that includes all of the details we look for.
Incomplete briefs can slow us down at the start of a project and add extra rounds of revisions at the end, so it’s worth taking the time to properly fill them out. By providing thoughtful and detailed answers when you fill out the creative brief template, you increase the chances of us “getting it right” the first time and help us avoid a lengthy editorial process.
Interviews with subject matter experts are one of the most important parts of our creative process. Not only do these interviews give us the context and information we need to write with authority and credibility on a range of topics, they provide us with real-life stories, insights, and examples that help us bring the content to life.
Sourcing interviewees and conducting interviews is typically one of the most unique and time-intensive parts of any project. In most cases, we can’t provide a firm delivery date for a first draft until we’ve sourced, scheduled, and conducted all of the necessary interviews. This is because, as noted in Section II, we don’t start writing until we’ve completed all interviews for a deliverable.
If you are providing people for us to interview, please first confirm their names, roles, and any other relevant information. Once you have confirmed their involvement and given them context about the project we’re working on, please introduce them to us via email and we will coordinate with them directly to schedule an interview.
In the interest of timelines, if an interviewee reschedules more than three times, we may suggest that you substitute a different interviewee.
As noted above, interviews can take a long time to schedule and conduct. The more interviews involved in a project, the longer it will take to start the writing process. This is especially true if any interviewee reschedules or if their involvement hasn’t been fully confirmed. If you know you would like to include interviews in a project, we recommend identifying and confirming them as soon as possible—even prior to project kickoff, if time allows.
During a project, either side may request a meeting outside of the usual meetings held as part of our standard editorial process. These meetings may include:
In general, we are happy to meet and will always do our best to accommodate everyone’s schedules. If you’d like to request a meeting, please try to give us at least a week’s notice to help us find a time that works for our distributed team members.
As creative people, we understand that the creative process is fluid and ever-changing. And as a team that works primarily with marketers, we understand that marketing goals and strategies evolve quickly and can be influenced by many internal and external factors.
A scope change is what we consider a larger-than-usual change in the size or type of project originally requested as part of our scope of work, or a deliverable that becomes substantively different from what was defined in the creative brief.
For example, if we were scoped to write a 1,500-word blog post, but during the editorial process your team decided that the content warranted expansion into something much longer, such as a 3,500-word eBook, that would necessitate a scope change. Similarly, if we were assigned to write an eBook on a particular topic, but later received feedback asking us to instead write the eBook on a different topic, that would also constitute a scope change.
Major scope changes typically require a new agreement to be signed, and may require us to pause ongoing work until that happens. We will always do our best to accommodate your needs in a way that is favorable to your team and fair to ours, and will communicate clearly when a scope change is necessary, including any change in pricing.
Please note that requesting a scope change does not guarantee that we can accommodate it, especially if we are already midway through a project or deliverable. The timing and scale of each request will determine how and whether we are able to accommodate it. However, we will work closely with you to hear any requests and communicate what we are and aren’t able to do, including how it might impact project timelines and pricing, until both parties are satisfied.
For any approved scope changes that do not impact pricing, we will ask you to confirm the change in writing. If pricing does change, we will send a new agreement as described above.
In our experience, the most successful projects feature one main stakeholder on the client side who serves as our primary contact. This person is typically able to coordinate internal and external stakeholders, consolidate and resolve any conflicting feedback from team members, and provide clear direction via creative briefs.
If this primary contact changes mid-project, or if you welcome a new team member who will also be working with us, we would like to meet them as soon as possible. In these situations, we prefer to hold a “mini kickoff” where we introduce our team, talk about the work we’ve done together so far, and review scope and editorial process. Depending on the situation, we may briefly pause work on any outstanding deliverables until we’ve had a chance to meet.
Stakeholder changes can often come with a shift in priorities and/or creative direction. If a new stakeholder takes over and would like to discuss taking the project in a new direction, this may necessitate a scope change. Any deliverables that have been signed off on as “completed” by a previous stakeholder will be considered finished. (See Section VI for more information about scope changes.)
With every project we take on, our goal is to deliver the entire scope of work in a timely manner to the best of our abilities. However, as detailed in Section II, we require your support to adhere to timelines and keep projects on schedule.
In addition to the project expiration dates written into our agreements, unfinished projects and unused credits (for retainer clients) may be paused and/or expire if we don’t hear from you for an extended period of time. In these instances, we will proactively and regularly follow up with you to let you know that timelines are in jeopardy.
If we don’t receive a response within 30 days of delivering an outline, draft, or revision, we will put the project on hold. You may request to resume the project, but there will be a waiting period of 2 weeks as we assign a writer and make time in their schedule. Drafts past the first round of revisions (ie. second draft and beyond) will be considered approved and finished.
If we don’t receive a response within 90 days, the project will expire, and we will be unable to resume or begin new work without signing a new agreement.
If you are on a retainer agreement, credits must meet all of the following criteria by the end of the term outlined in our agreement to avoid expiration:
Unused credits may be rolled over to a new term by renewing the agreement. Each unused credit may be rolled over a maximum of one time.
We take privacy seriously, including the privacy of our clients. All Campfire Labs employees and contractors sign a confidentiality agreement stating that they may not publicly talk about our clients, our clients’ businesses, or any specific projects without explicit permission.
All project deliverables, ideas, concepts, designs, interviews, research materials, and proprietary or non-public company information disclosed to Campfire Labs (i.e. company structure, marketing plans, sales techniques) are covered by this agreement.
If you would like members of our team to sign an additional privacy or security agreement such as an NDA, please let us know before we start working together.
Campfire Labs operates on a 4-day workweek and is closed on Fridays. This means you will see and hear from our team on Monday through Thursday. Any project feedback or other emails sent to us on Fridays or weekends will be read and responded to on Monday.
We are also typically closed for major holidays in the United States and Canada (including Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s), and have biannual weeklong office closures in July and December. We will let you know several weeks in advance of any office closures, major holidays, and/or writer vacations that could impact your project schedule.
At Campfire Labs, our first company value is “lead with kindness."
We emphasize kindness and humanity in every situation. That means treating people with respect, empathizing and understanding that everyone has their own personal challenges, and seeking this value in others, from the people we hire to the clients we work with.
When we work together, we hope that you’ll treat us with the same kindness and humanity. ❤️
