#agency-life
Sponsored by Campaign Monitor :partying_face: Many thanks to the CM for helping us keep this community free! CM was founded by two agency founders looking for a better email solution. It was engineered for agencies from day one (way back in 2004).
Thread
Hey all—we handover the ownership of all content to our clients, but sometimes our writers ask if they can include what they've written in their portfolios. I don't have anything against it, but would rather ask the client first since they technically own the content. Is it okay to ask the client that or totally uncouth?
I think you should @Maeva Cifuentes. Who knows? They might not object. But if don't ask, you'd never know for sure, and thus, you won't be able to give writers a concrete answer when they ask to include the work in their portfolios. So yeah, it won't hurt to ask. Or so I think...
I did some writing for an agency at one point that allowed us to republish the work in our own portfolios, but the posts had to be de-indexed so it didn't hurt the client's SEO. I don't know if there was something specifically in the agreements with clients that informed them of this fact, but I do know that the agency was not seeking permission on each individual piece.
@Maeva Cifuentes, since you're coming across this, have you considered adding a clause to your ToS/working agreements stipulating that work may appear in portfolios (with any proprietary info removed)?
As a writer myself, I have it in my contracts that rights of the work are transferred to the client but that I retain the right to share the works as part of my portfolio across my channels.
Some clients (agencies and others) want me to ghostwrite and then that's something we'll discuss, but it's not my default way of working.