Feedback is a gift. That’s true when it’s useful, but we’ve all gotten confusing, misguided, or inattentive feedback. Bad feedback threatens to derail everyone rather than move a project forward, and you don’t want that. Especially if you’re working with an agency and don’t have millions of dollars to spend on endless rounds of revision.
Generous feedback is focused, organized, and insightful. Here are five tips for delivering the kind of feedback that helps everyone make progress.
1. Stay in Your Round
Creative collaboration is often incremental. You might start out with a rough approach that’s full of good ideas that then get improved and refined after each round of feedback. Keeping in mind the arc of a creative project can help you give the right level of feedback at each stage. A typical process might look like this:
- Round 1: Directional feedback to identify any major issues with the potential for new ideas that need exploration.
- Round 2: Confirmation of what’s working plus adjustments and refinement to make sure major issues are resolved.
- Round 3: Small changes that lead to finalization.
Complex projects may require more than three rounds, but the overall approach is the same. Early rounds require big-picture feedback and later rounds are where you address the finer details.
2. Make Your Feedback Actionable
You don’t want your agency to guess at what you want. Any comments should be about solving a problem. For example, rather than saying, “this doesn’t feel right,” you might say, “the blue is too dark and makes the text hard to read.” Your agency will then know to think about color choices and how text is displayed and won’t get caught in a mind-reading spiral.
3. Brief your stakeholders
Stakeholders often struggle to give useful feedback because they’re not close to the specific project but they’re very close to their specific corner of the organization. As a result, they often provide feedback that’s overly detailed or indecisive.
Help them out by telling them the level of feedback you’re looking for. Let them know that they don’t need to rewrite copy or redesign the content. Their knowledge and insight is what you’re after.
4. Reconcile and consolidate feedback
When agency partners must wade through crosstalk and indecision, they’re more likely to misinterpret your feedback, which can add rounds and expense to your project. If multiple stakeholders are weighing in, make the final cuts on which comments go to your agency. If you see anything that might need clarifying, jump in with a comment that contextualizes the feedback so that your agency knows exactly what needs to be done.
5. Stay organized
On-time feedback, from a single point of contact, in the agreed upon format is the true gift. Staying organized through each round reduces the potential for confusion and ensures that you’ll get creative work that works for you.
Feedback Is Hard
Giving and receiving feedback can be emotional. It’s not easy to tell people what you really think, and nobody likes having mistakes or weak ideas pointed out to them. Processes that don’t make the feedback clear or actionable only lead to more bad feelings. Don’t make the process any harder than it already is. If you give thoughtful, organized feedback, your agency will appreciate you and your projects will be more satisfying.