What should a UK firm's digital agency brief include?

A managing partner emails the same two paragraphs to four UK agencies: we need a new website, roughly this budget, please send a proposal. Four proposals come back between £6,000 and £34,000. None of them is wrong. They are quotes for four different jobs, because the email never said what the site had to do, who owned it at the end, or that the firm is regulated.

Six weeks go by and the shortlist is no shorter. Search this question and you are handed a template written by an agency: objectives, audience, brand guidelines, tech stack, deliverables, timelines. Every one of those sections helps a supplier quote, and they are worth filling in. Not one of them protects the firm sending it.

Start with the outcome, not the deliverable

A brief that names a deliverable gets priced as a deliverable.

“A new website” is a purchase order. “Twelve enquiries a month from firms turning over more than £2m, by next September” is a brief, because it tells a supplier which of its people to put on the job and lets it say no. It is also the version you can hold anyone to, since the contract will reference the brief rather than the conversation you had about it.

The four lines only your firm can write

An agency cannot supply these for you, and most will not think to ask.

Ownership. Section 11 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 makes the author of a work its first owner unless it was made in the course of employment. An agency you commission is not your employee, so the default is that it owns the design and the code you paid for. Nearly every agency will assign it when asked. Ask in the brief rather than at contract stage, because at contract stage it is a change and in the brief it is a line every supplier quoted for.

Client data. If the supplier will see client names, matter details or contact records, UK data protection law requires a written contract between your firm and that supplier, and the ICO sets out what it must contain. Say so in the brief. Suppliers who have one ready will say so in the proposal. The ones who ask what you mean have told you something useful before you have paid anybody.

The regulator. This is the line no agency-written template contains, because the agency does not know it applies. A law firm publishing the availability of certain services must publish price and service information on its website under the SRA Transparency Rules, so the site being quoted for has a mandatory page in it. A financial advice firm's marketing is a financial promotion, and an authorised firm must ensure it is fair, clear and not misleading. An accountancy practice is bound by ICAEW's position on marketing, which requires that claims are not exaggerated and can be substantiated. And any firm running email or telephone campaigns is inside the ICO's rules on electronic marketing, whoever presses send.

Name the body in the brief and the agency prices in an approval loop. Leave it out and it writes copy you cannot sign off, then bills you to rewrite it. Our piece on what to walk away from treats a supplier who shrugs at this as negotiable rather than terminal, but only if it fixes the gap before the term is agreed.

Sign-off. One sentence: who approves work, and how long they need. It is the cheapest line in the document and the one most often missing, and it is the one that decides whether month three is a delivery review or an argument about whose delay it was.

Write it so proposals can be compared

Four proposals for one brief should differ in price and approach, never in what they are quoting for. That only happens if the brief tells every supplier which questions to answer and in what order. Without it you receive four documents in four house styles, and the comparison becomes a reading exercise you do not have time for.

The questions in what to ask a digital agency, and how to verify each answer work as the required-response section of a brief, not only as interview material. Put them at the end and say plainly that a proposal not answering them will not be read.

How long it should be, and who should write it

Two to four pages, written by whoever will be accountable for the result. The agency-published guides converge on that length and they are right about it. What they do not say is who should hold the pen. A brief written by somebody who will not be in the review meetings produces a document nobody in the practice will defend when a supplier pushes back on it, which is most of what goes wrong in month two.

When not to send a brief yet

Two conditions make a brief premature. If the partners have not agreed what the firm is trying to win, the brief will say so in a way that is obvious to every supplier reading it, and the proposals will hedge accordingly. And if no budget range has been settled, leaving it out does not protect your negotiating position, it just guarantees the range you get back is too wide to compare.

There is also the case where no brief is needed because no agency is. Where the work is one job unlikely to recur, a freelancer is usually better and cheaper, and saying so costs us the introduction. Our page for professional services firms sets out what we assess before recommending anyone, and the wider guide to choosing a digital agency covers the decision this brief follows from.