I am glad this is helping you.

yes, taking the burden of the client is super important! Because many are willing to share their experience, they just don’t like wasting their time with that 🙂

And I think the verbal feedback is always more authentic than the written one.

From my experience, just asking for a written feedback (without the suggestions from the verbal feedback) returns either no response, or way too much text in a complicated artifical voice.

Hi Denali,

wow, what a week – thanks for sharing your achievements and congrats!
Too bad you got a rejection. And I don’t know how to say that without it sounding much like a cliche – but I share the opinion that you can learn a lot and grow. And the first rejection feels much worse than the second or third, when more and more proposals will be accepted. Keep it up 🙂

Hi Sigrid,

how exciting! I totally think that art and science can go together. My background is biology and I know that there are many initiatives like “visiting artists” for research institutions. If you are interested in biology and art there is certainly a ton of things and opportunities out there. In March there is the VIZBI conference (fully virtual), which you might want to check out.
Let me know if this could be your thing (maybe biology isn’t at all) and I could give you some further ideas and resources.

Hi Michelle,

For my workshops, I usually ask at the end for feedback. I keep it a rather open question, but also give them one specific thing to think about, like “I would be interested in your feedback: what are your thoughts about this workshop and specifically, what was the most valuable thing you learned today?”

This means, you will get also input on your teaching style and not just the content. And this way you’ll get feedback like “I loved the interactive teaching style, you did not loose my attention for a second”. I think that kind of feedback – HOW you did the job and not just WHAT they learned, is important as well. Who wants to sit in a boring workshop?

After I asked for verbal feedback, I take some notes and identify those that seemed to have a real good time and are rather enthusiastic. I contact them later via email and ask if they would write me something for my website, often I include some phrases what they said.

Your situation is different, but I think what could be transferred is probably: approach clients that seemed to be really happy and expressed that. Ask them if you could ask them a few questions about what they liked about working with YOU (personally), and what kind of difference your work makes. I did that for my illustrations. And I asked for a short (I think this is key) phone interview to get their feedback on the collaboration, like a customer survey. I took notes during that interviews, wrote down a few sentences that sounded good and asked later via email if they would agree that their experience is shared as a testimonial.

Here is the explanation of the uncommented drawing (upload didn’t work at first, then I needed to run to get the kids):

I had an epiphany while doodling and trying to analyze and break apart the FBAs for me: Stephanie described the benefits in a way that addresses the emotional side. The first thing that came to my mind was drawing happy faces in Stephanies benefits section. And then there are different reasons why the people are happy (they are comfy, the get compliments, they relax), but I think the B’s are actually about how your service would make the people feel better.

So here is an idea: Why not think of benefits in terms of drawin happy clients’ faces and think about why they are smiling? What do you think?

I had a hard time with this FBA thing, as well. I will give the happy faces approach a try and let you know how it went. As a (too) rational person I have difficulties to adress the stuff that is not about the pure facts.