Last month, I enjoyed speaking alongside 3 other presenters to discuss “Doing More with Less” at Viget Labs’ DesignShare event, an invitation-only professional development event series for web designers. Most of my clients are non-profits, so I interpreted this topic as squeezing as much value as you can into a tight budget. I believe in my clients’ work and want to do as much as I can to help. But I have to balance that with my own reality of feeding my children and keeping the lights on. So how can we do a great job on projects with tight budgets and still be fair to ourselves?

The first thing to do is to frame the discussion in a positive way while figuring out where your limits are. Decide how low you can afford to go before a project isn’t worth it for you. The answer will be different for everyone, depending on your overhead costs, level of experience, how busy you are, etc. This post isn’t about those times when someone asks for a fully-featured custom-designed website with $500 in their pocket. Those are the obvious cases where most professionals would walk the other way.

More often, the budget in question falls into the gray area of being somewhat workable but really too tight for you to give the client everything they initially request. In these situations, I try to look at the budget as a glass half-full, thinking about what we can do for that amount of money and approaching negotiation from there. Remember that you and the client both have the common goal of creating a site you can be proud of. This post is about figuring out how to trim, adjust and compromise to help tight budgets go further.

When faced with a budget that’s really too tight for comfort, I suggest focusing your adjustment efforts on the following 3 areas:

• Scope of work and requirements (e.g., tasks, features, user needs)
• Your internal process and workflow (e.g., tools, processes, work habits and policies)
• Financial management (e.g., payment methods, terms, timing and policies)

Scope of Work

• Teach your client to fish. Clients can save a lot of money if there are parts of the project they can do themselves, e.g., basic photo research or content entry (if their site is built with a CMS).
• Break the project up into smaller chunks and prioritize.
• Ask if you can you drop some tasks or postpone certain features, maybe until the next fiscal year or after the site gains traction / advertising revenue.
• If you originally budgeted for three different design directions for your first round of comps, see if the client would be willing to reduce it to two or maybe even one if it’s a smaller project and you’re very clear on what they want.
• Work with scope creep productively. When your client asks for something you know isn’t in the budget, instead of saying no outright or eating the cost unfairly, ask whether they’d like to drop a feature/requirement to make room for it or accept the additional cost.

Your Process and Workflow

• Review your tools and process often. It’s easy to get into habitual “we’ve always done it this way” thinking, but new timesaving tools come out all the time so it’s a good idea to step back occasionally and see if you’re being as efficient as you could be.
• See if you can create reusable foundations for recurring projects that will save you time on future projects.
• Ask your client to do their part to streamline the review and approval process as much as possible. Make sure it’s clear who the decision makers are and limit them to 2-3 people if you can. When you’re trying to pack as much value into a budget as you can, excessive back-and-forth and “design-by-committee” situations are notorious budget-wasters that leave you less room to do the actual work they’re hiring you to do.
• Whenever possible, use the phone instead of your feet. Unless there’s a specific reason to meet in person during the project, I visit most of my clients in person at the start of our relationship, and then we use email or the phone the rest of the time. This means less time spent in transit and more time doing productive work.

Financial Management

• Decide whether you can accept smaller payments over a longer period of time. If you typically take a 50% deposit upfront with the rest payable on completion, maybe you can accept a smaller initial deposit and spread the payments out more.
• Consider any possibilities for non-cash payment for all or part of the project. This might work if your client offers professional services you could actually use. (e.g., legal services, office organization) Barter situations can be tricky if your hourly rate is significantly higher or lower than your client’s, but sometimes you can take the edge off of the budget squeeze by accepting at least some of your payment in trade.
• If the project is an unusual learning opportunity, can you absorb some of it under your own training budget? (You do have a training budget, right?)
• Consider offering your client a discount or partial fee waiver in exchange for active exposure or promotion. Ask them to tweet nice things about you, blog about how you helped them create their great new site, or send you a certain number of referral contacts. (One client had the great idea to do a video testimonial for me! I can’t wait.) See if they’d be willing to let you post a small ad or link to your site in their website footer. If the project involves a sponsored event, maybe you could waive some of your fees as an in-kind donation and be listed as a sponsor.
• Some foundations provide capacity-building grants to qualified non-profits to help them develop professional communications materials. (I’ve done several of these kinds of projects) If your client does good work for the community and clearly needs professional materials but can’t afford them, encourage them to research and apply for grants like these.

These are only a few of the many possible ways to stretch a tight budget further. Do you have others? I’d love to see them in the comments area below. The art in making all of this work is keeping one eye on the big picture and the other on the details. If you try to be flexible but fair to both sides, you can do more with less while still making your own ends meet.