DOLLARS & SENSE

The holidays have passed, so whatever you did (or didn't do) to thank your clients for their business is already done. We were at a real crossroads this year when we were thinking about how to say thank you for all the great work we had the opportunity to do in 2012. Cards? Gifts? We wanted to do something different this year that would make a statement and make a difference.

In Pencil Points issue #27 (December 2011) we offered a number of great ways you can say thanks for the business. A personal note, a holiday card, or a holiday gift. These are all great and perfectly viable ideas, and over the years we've done them all. But as our businesses have grown, so have the logistics behind thanking our clients for that growth.

We used to send holiday cards to everyone on every team at every client. As you can imagine the list got pretty long. In some cases there were 15 or 20 cards going to people at just one client, so we sent hundreds of cards sent overall. And once you start sending cards to everyone, it gets tougher to know who is okay to leave out. The time and effort involved rendered this approach to thanking clients too burdensome to maintain. Thanks to our friend and colleague Flo Witte, it's gotten a lot easier and less expensive to send cards to clients whenever you want. Flo started her own SendOutCards business, and we were glad to see a number of our colleagues use her service this past year.

Then there are the gifts, another perfectly reasonable way to say thank you. But when you have a large freelance business, it gets trickier to know just what type of gift to send. Does everyone get the same gift? Do you give bigger gifts to bigger clients? Or do you give a personalized gift to each person on your list? Depending upon the size of your list, gift giving can also get out of hand if you're not careful. And although the Sunshine Act doesn't cover this sort of thing, we don't want to be too extravagant.

This year we tried something new and were really happy with the result. We sent an email card (which cost nothing to produce or send) and in it told our clients that in honor of the wonderful working relationship we enjoy with them and look forward to continuing, we have made a charitable donation to AMWA to help the organization continue its mission of promoting excellence in medical communication and providing educational resources in support of that goal. The message was that we want our clients to always have access to top notch, professional medical writers and editors. The message was well received by our clients, and we got to make a nice, tax-deductible contribution to an organization we love and support. 

Registration just opened for the AMWA-DVC 2013 Freelance Workshop, being held Saturday, March 16 at the Hilton Philadelphia Airport, and we're excited to be presenting! Cyndy is hosting a roundtable on Novel Ways to Market Your Business, and Brian is one of the panelists in an open session on The 60-Minute MFBA* (*Master of Freelance Business Administration). We'll also be at the Author Table. We hope you'll join us for this outstanding educational and networking opportunity. Click here to register and click here to view the registration brochure. 

The AMWA Annual Conference is the ultimate resource for medical communicators around the world, offering educational and networking opportunities beyond compare in the field. We're looking forward to presenting there. Now you can become a greater part of the AMWA conference experience by submitting a proposal to share your expertise with your colleagues in Columbus!