This is a tricky area. We are a design company and we don’t free-pitch for creative work but we do web development as well and are often asked for in-depth proposals. We do usually do the proposal work but I have been thinking recently it is akin to free-pitching.

We are lucky in most of our work is repeat work with clients we have long-term relationships with, which is the ideal. I’m not sure how we would handle this if we didn’t have that back-up; working for free just isn’t sustainable.

I find a lot of RFPs are trying to jump the gun and clients want and need to know everything that might happen before it has even begun. This just shows a lack of trust and fuzzy thinking. Do clients have no idea what they are trying to achieve or what they will get? It appears that reputation and previous work don’t mean much — nothing can be left to chance. Which is ridiculous as I find most projects (creative to web development) tend to have an organic nature to them, changing and developing over the course of the project.