The ‘Freelance Fellowship’ was originally a nickname for the team of independent content creators that worked on producing Fourth Estate’s Creative work. We wanted to open up to a wider pool to find people with the right skills, knowledge and talent to help us do our best work while offering more. The platform website needed to communicate our sincere belief in understanding individual freelancer’s needs and interests, finding work that’s right for them and treating them fairly. Our key message was summed up in the tagline: “Work for yourself. Together” and the subtag: “Join the community that matches freelancers to fulfilling assignments”.
We knew that for convenience of both use and access we wanted to create a simple, responsive website that would work well whether our freelancers were on desktops, laptops, tablets or on their mobile. We created a membership platform that people can easily register on, be approved and then update their profile and experience and upload their portfolio of work for us to review.
We don’t make any assumptions about the audience. We know that they are looking for freelance work (and we have tried to convey through the content on the site that we understand some of the more perennial challenges that freelancing brings), but we also know they will all be different – with different skills, experiences, backgrounds, locations and working habits, so we wanted to capture as much of that detail as possible to tailor our work to the individuals signing up.
Our goal is not to build a huge marketplace, but a small community of talented individuals, so we are leaving the promotion of the platform to a small social media presence and word of mouth from our existing team.
