The Not-So-Secret Diary of a Copywriter: On writing for free

I don’t normally spend a lot of time looking back at past projects, but when I hit another anniversary of starting the business recently, I did have a bit of a reminisce – and a whole chunk of work I’d sort of filed away under ‘pandemic’ popped into my head.

It’d be easy to assume that work tailed off in the pandemic, and in some ways that was true. One of my biggest clients at that time, for example, supplied professional products to hair salons. Needless to say, that tailed off a bit. But at the same time, businesses who had long standing plans they’d never got around to came out of the woodwork and I stayed pretty busy.

But those aren’t the pieces of pandemic work I really want to talk about. Instead, I was pondering the small projects – mostly done pro bono – that made a big difference at the time.

The kids’ nature trail that gave families something to do during the first lockdown. The web copy for a couple of very small local charities that set up to provide shopping to vulnerable people and counselling to frontline responders. The copy to support a local refill store that opened up on our high street at that time, helping them get their online presence up and running in a hope that they’d stay in business for the sake of our local economy AND the wider planet (and yes, it’s still going strong today, four years on).

Those projects didn’t take me long, and they either didn’t pay (or in one case, just about covered my costs). But they made a real difference to people local to me, and they made me feel connected to my community, taking the edge off that feeling of powerlessness that set in as the world closed down.

You’ll often hear people say ‘don’t work for free’ in copywriting circles. There’s wisdom in that – it’s all too easy to be taken advantage of. But there are also upsides to working for free, when you do it on your terms, and with boundaries.

Even before the pandemic, I’d always given a couple of days’ work free each year to a not-for-profit organisation or ethical business in its earliest days. So I say think it through, work out your boundaries – and go for it.

Note: Please don’t ask me to work for free. That’s one of the boundaries I have around this. I seek out and choose who I offer this to, not the other way around.