Local public relations professionals shared money-saving ideas today at PRO iNK’s Cafe Think, a lunch and learn for local communications leaders.

Here’s a recap of ideas for saving money when working with a design firm. Remember that time is money. The key is helping your agency be more efficient with their time and thus more cost-effective for you. A few tips:

• Have copy approved and carefully edited before you submit for design.
• Carefully outline key objectives, audiences and communicate clearly.
• Be sure key decisions makers are involved early on so you have their input before having to make huge changes.
• Update your team about deadlines and rush charges. You can sometimes talk a CEO out of costly changes by saying, “we can certainly change that, but it will cost $$$.”
• Organize and label materials carefully.
• Give written instructions with each project, including clear deadlines, message points and key contacts.
• Designate one person in your organization as the contact with the agency.

When entering into a business relationship, consider the following business strategies that can save money.

Consider a retainer relationship with clearly defined tasks and projects. This kind of arrangement generally gives you 24-hour “guidance” from your firm. They are thinking of you all the time and will generally wind up working more for you than on a by-project basis.

Have a regular firm or two that you work with so if you need to ask for a budget favor, they are more inclined to give you one.

Know if budget or quality is more important and communicate that upfront. For instance, “I have $3000 to do this project. What can we do for that budget?” or “This is what we want to do – this is the quality we want, just tell us what it will cost to replicate this idea.”

Understand general costs for printing materials. Consider digital versus offset. Know the real cost of printing materials in your office (cost of toners and maintenance). Know what quantities you will need so you can plan whether to print digitally or offset or just run a few copies on your office printer. Use PDFs when appropriate, rather than printed materials, but understand that some customers may not print out those PDFs and could miss your message entirely. Ask your printer for help in consolidating a number of pieces on one press run or one press sheet.

Ask for options when pricing a project. At PRO iNK, we generally give clients a low, medium and higher priced option, with clearly defined items in each option.

Consider spreading work over a set period of time, to spread out your budget. For instance, itemize all the projects you need completed and then plan to complete them over six months, a year or two. Then pay for them on a monthly basis, so you will know an exact amount to pay per month.

Thanks for sharing your ideas and energy today and helping us eat up that TooJay’s food: Janeen Piotrowski, FloridaWorks; Morgan Dunn, Exactech; Steve Shepherd, Alta Systems; Devon Chestnut, Cox Communications and Lindsay Brennan, Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce.

Check out our Facebook page for a budget-cutting exercise.