How to work with a small budget

I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve heard, “But our budget is too small for that!”

Resource can be a constant struggle in education. We’re so committed to delivering the best experience for our students that sometimes our efforts and finances are focused elsewhere. Yet for those students, from recruitment to graduation and beyond, content design and strategy are fundamental assets that need to work. And when you’re working with a limited budget, it’s easy to become frustrated.

But a small budget doesn’t have to mean mediocre work.

I spoke with Pickle Jar Communications CEO & Leader Tracy Playle about her experiences - and asked for her advice on delivering quality while considering a small budget.

After working with over 300 clients across the globe, you must experience a wide range of budgets. What would you say are the ranges you generally see?

The ranges are really significant and a lot of that can be down to the structure of a department. So some of the variables might be if the budget is just allocated to a PR or communications team. At the lower end, I remember once a PR team telling me that their entire annual PR budget was about £10,000. Obviously not including salary costs, but that kind of figure. Through to bigger teams where the structure and the budgets will include marketing, recruitment and potentially even admissions. And then you can be looking into the millions in terms of the scouts that they've got.

Usually when I'm working with marketing and communications team, quite often they'll be working with budgets that are in the hundreds of thousands. But then there are definitely some where they are less than that. They're less than six figures for the entirety of the brand marketing and communications work that they need to do without the salary costs. And that's not a lot of money to do the kind of work they need to do.

If you were in charge of a project with a small budget, how would you try to plan how to utilise that?

I think one of the first things that I would take a look at is instead of thinking, okay this is definitely the budget that I've got and this is therefore all I can possibly spend. The first thing that I'm going to look at is how can we get creative about expanding that budget. So I'm going to start having some pretty difficult conversations with senior managers and senior leaders that signed off on those budgets. I'm going to have some real expectation management conversations with them and I think this is one of the places where in our sector we don't have enough of these conversations. And that comes across both in terms of the scale of the budget and also the amount of resources from a team structure perspective that we have.
So what we tend to do in our sector is we just keep squeezing and squeezing ourselves and we still try and deliver everything that we think we should deliver. And what that does is that actually, it trains our senior managers to believe that we can. But that's often reliant on us working ridiculous hours, compromising on the quality of the work, and burning out. So the other thing that I'd be really looking at doing is making sure that we are being very real with our senior leaders. Saying because we've got a small budget, these are the things that we are not going to do. Not making any compromises, just that we’re not going to do them.

The third place to look is to look at pooling budgets with other departments. Having a very real conversation with those other departments/faculty leads around where we can access other budgets that they might have access to as well, to try and pool in. And then from there, if we then know exactly what our budget looks like and it is still feeling like a very small number, it's really just about taking a look at strategic priorities within that and thinking about what can and can’t be achieved. And I honestly think that when you've got a small budget, the requirement on you to be a lot more brave and bold in what you do comes into play.

If you had a budget which didn’t cover a project, how would you prioritise key areas to work on?

I will be going to the organisational strategy, these are what the organisational strategy says that we're going to be focusing on. Therefore this is where I intend to place my budget and this is how I intend to support that. Take that back to the senior leadership and say this is what you said our priorities are. This is therefore where I'm going to focus and seek their approval around that. They're probably going to argue with it, what about this, but what about that?

Those are the kind of things when you need to be pushing back and declaring what those priorities are and really hold them to account for that. Also, recognise the impact of waiting for the team to know that and be really clear with those senior leaders as to what actually is the decision that you need from them, in order for you to be able to do a good job.

Have you got any tips on thinking outside the box when you have a small budget?

Typically within our organisations, we actually are sitting on an absolute goldmine of amazing content. What we tend not to do a very good job of is archiving that content and tagging it in a way that's accessible for us to be able to reuse or repurpose. Taxonomy is a system of being able to recognise what those stories are and what they're about to be able to access them and then the creativity to be able to take a story and repurpose it into a different format.

We don't always need to have been the people that have created the content in the first place. It could be an article on a newspaper site or something that's actually just out there in the world that we recognise is going to be useful, interesting and relevant to our audiences. You can actually make yourself a go-to organisation by being a really outstanding content curator which can often be lower cost than feeling that we've got to create the content every single time. But there does need to be a better investment in our sector in taxonomy, tagging, storing of content, archiving of content, labelling it up so that we can actually access it, to be able to reuse it and aren't just relying on the horrendous kind of internal search tools that we might have on our websites or in our file storage systems.

How do Pickle Jar Communications take small budgets into account with clients?

We try to make sure that we have something to offer everyone no matter what their budgets are. Our products and services range from completely free to six-figure projects.

We offer free workshops, often online free for people to sign up to and attend, blog posts, and occasionally run webinars and networking through ContentEd and online events.

People can buy my book, “The Connected Campus” which is all about how to develop a content strategy.

Then we also offer some lower-budget training courses through the ContentEd online platform.

Annual conferences we run; ContentEd Conference and Utterly Content.

Another thing we offer is coaching. We coach leaders and directors, and part of the coaching is to have them build the confidence to be able to ask for those bigger budgets, to ask for more resources, to ask for something to be different, to build the confidence to make more bold or creative approaches with the budgets that they've got. Some of our work is not just about spending the budget that you've got, but working with us to help you overcome your own personal and internal or cultural barriers.

Commissioning bespoke training, or let's say you're developing a strategy, but you can't afford for us to do the whole strategy. You might just commission us to come and do the audience research for you, or the ideation or do a channel plan or an audit etc.

Or you may require us for building blocks, comprehensive strategies, plans and campaigns.

Want to learn more about how we can help your organisation within your budget? You can find our list of services online, and you can get in touch to discuss your needs.