Home > Essays > Some considerations of doing free work for friends
You wouldn't treat a corporate client offering you a few hundred dollars the same as you would treat a friend. You're working for your friend for free as a favor because you're friends and you like to help them out from time to time.
But with both the client and the friend, it is important to have expectations clearly spelled out so as to avoid unpleasant surprises.
With the client, there really should be a written contract. Friends you can take at their word. But if you can't, maybe they're not actually friends, maybe you should be treating them as clients, and there should be a written contract.
With a friend, there has to be the understanding that you're doing this for free and that you will go where your creativity takes you. If the friend is insisting on something very specific, then there needs to be an agreement to payment before any work is done.
Mixed signals are the beginning of horror stories. Here's an example: let's say "Alex" is a photographer, and "Jennifer" is a musician. Jennifer is in a band that will play a concert at a very special venue. Jennifer wants Alex to take pictures of her playing at that venue during the concert.
At the same time Jennifer tells Alex to "feel free to snap away," she also keeps talking about how she wants Alex to take a photo of her very close when she's playing an important solo during the concert, wearing a nice, new blue dress.
Alex explains that he doesn't want to ruin the important solo for the listeners by blocking their view of her at that moment. But Jennifer just keeps saying "snap away!"
After the concert, Jennifer is angry that Alex didn't get the shot that Jennifer wanted. "If you wanted that shot, this should have been a paid assignment, and we should have worked it out with the venue and the audience," Alex says.
"I was going to pay you," Jennifer responds. "I didn't know that," Alex says. And that's true, Alex didn't know because this is the first time Jennifer even mentions payment.
Something tells me that if Alex had gotten the shot Jennifer wanted, Jennifer would have just said "Thank you" and that would have been it. There would have been no payment.
Let's keep going with this branch of the scenario in which Alex takes the photo Jennifer wants. Jennifer thanks him, and a few months pass by.
Then, one day, at the record store, Alex sees a new album by Jennifer's band, with his picture of her on the cover. And it's a bestseller, so it would be fair to give Alex a little cut, but he doesn't even get a credit anywhere on the packaging.
The moral of this story: if you're going to do free work for friends, you need to agree with them that you're doing the work for free, that you're not required to deliver anything specific, and that any use of your work beyond what you originally agreed to will require a new permission and possibly negotiation.
If they can't agree to that, then maybe you need to treat them as clients, with the assignment and payment figured out before you do any work at all.