Hi Richard - below is what little I can contribute…
- Awards. Do you pay to enter or do they kick in? Do you get specific permission to enter design or other competitions or have it as a part of a general contract clause?
We’ve only entered one contest on our own dime and generally if a client is still keeping us in the loop we contribute to entries they submit and would promote wins on our site if we could ever keep the da*n thing up to date - our contract has a ‘mutually beneficial, consistently positive exposure’ paragraph that is meant to ensure that we talk nice about our clients and that they talk nice about us (yeah, right).
- Do you ever write press releases about your work or winning awards and if so mention specific clients or projects? Do you get their permission before doing so? Aside from courtesy and professionalism, any sort of legal need to get permission?
Our services include communications and we have done internal press releases, we avoid anything proprietary and include anything in public domain, otherwise we ask our clients nicely for cooperation.
- Do you include all clients (aside from the crappy ones of course) in a client list on your website, etc. Or do you have any special arrangements not to list certain clients and how do those terms work (ie. do they pay extra to be secret? Contract clause?)
We include the good / happy / cooperative ones & forget to include the schmucks.
- Do you get specific permission from clients to feature projects in your online or print portfolio or promotional pieces if that work is already in the public domain? Any restrictions on process sketches, etc? Is this as a clause in your contract (ie. client must approve), or done via other means?
Same as above, we avoid proprietary, include publicly shown and have a paragraph in our standard contract detailing our rights to do so.