We are all in the creative business now.
Be it a presentation, a report, a video or even something as simple as a Tweet, anything you publish as a business needs to be greenlighted by at least a few individuals.
This process, typically understood as a creative approval process, is the reason why you never quite hit it on time.
I get it. In fact, over the last 6 years I have been reviewing, approving, giving feedback almost every single day. In my opinion, review and feedback are as important as ideation and conceptualization.
While too much time and importance is given to ideation, many fail to appreciate the difference a healthy feedback and review can make to the overall creative.
I have 5 tips for providing better feedback and review.
- Fix the stakeholders: Instead of getting feedback from anyone and everyone who may not have a complete context of the project, call out those who will get to have the say.
- Schedule it on the calendar: And share the link with all the stakeholders. This ensures that all the feedback is collated, discussed and agreed upon before sharing it with the one working on it.
- Give it all in one go: The worst thing to do for the person working on a project is sending them feedback points in multiple pieces of communication. Some people go ahead and do that too on multiple mediums. That way, it's difficult to keep track of feedback pointers. Always collate 100% feedback as a single piece of communication.
- Use tools: Collaborative tools allow people to leave comments, provide references and work asynchronously. So instead of sending comments in a mail, try uploading that pdf on a google drive and leave your feedback as annotations. Or upload the video on wipster - a video review tool and leave your frame by frame feedback on it.
- Be patient: Feedback is an unexpected event for all the parties. It means that more work needs to be done to reach the desired state. It's a humbling experience that can often turn into a frustrating feeling if the other stakeholders are not ready for the same. If you are in charge of the project, always keep buffer for feedback and be patient with the creator to get it right.
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