Community Survey: Measuring the Might of WIMP!

It’s time for WIMP to take the pulse of our local creative economy. Our little community isn’t so little any more, and while the WIMP leadership (your “Wimptators”) feels in tune with our group, intuition doesn’t scale the way real data does. We want to better understand our demographics, benchmark our progress and, perhaps most importantly, shine a light on the tricky issues of compensation and contracts. That is why we are in the midst of conducting our first annual Community Survey.

Where WIMP Is Now

Discover whether you’re leaving money on the table, or perhaps that you’re charging as much as the market can bear.

The WIMP community is now over 800 people, mostly in the North Bay, 50% of which are freelancers. Yet, many local businesses needlessly send contracts for web development and design out of county and out of state. And freelancers, a population that is projected to outnumber regular employees by 2020, still don’t factor into long-term economic policy, school curriculum, and government reports on employment.

By taking our survey, you help us change that. While we know we’re playing the long game here, this survey will also deliver short-term value, and not in an abstract hand-wavy fashion.

In early 2015, we will publish a report based on the survey responses. That report will be full of useful information, but there are two things everyone is expecting to see:

• How much people charge, and,
• An analysis of modern creative contracts.

Money is the real elephant in the room, especially for freelancers and small agencies. It is impossible to know what is fair and what is competitive without sharing data. And sharing pay data in-person can be risky, not to mention uncomfortable.

Enter WIMP’s Community Survey, which we conduct anonymously in order to protect your privacy. And since we are surveying freelancers, employees, students, professionals, business owners, designers, developers, marketers and other creatives, we can correlate compensation with context.

Why You Should Care About A Survey

The report and analysis will help you figure out where to set your rates. You can discover whether you’re leaving money on the table, or perhaps that you’re charging as much as the market can bear. However, that insight is impossible without this survey and your participation!

And how about those contracts? I am not a lawyer (IANAL), but I think it’s safe to say that boilerplate contracts are generally terrible. Templates available from reputable trade groups like the Graphic Arts Guild (GAG) are passable at best.

We live in a mixed media world and our contracts should reflect that.

With your help, we will put together tailored contract templates that reflect the needs of a modern digital media professional. For standard clauses such as payment, termination, and arbitration, we want to find the best of the best. And we want to craft state-of-the-art clauses for things you may not have considered including IP transfer, warranty, maintenance, and more.

The Rising Tide

All of our ships rise with this tide. Please, take a few minutes to answer our survey and also share it with friends and coworkers in the industry. Whether you’re a “WIMP member” or not (you probably are), whether you’ve been to an event or not, whether you’re based out of the North Bay or not, we want to hear from you.

Help us make 2015 the year we stop running our careers on guesswork. Let’s make some data driven decisions!