The AURA Working Well Together Charter

We believe that the way clients and research agencies work together can make a real difference to people’s confidence and well-being. Aura members who sign up to the Aura Working Well Together Charter have committed to a set of standards they will live up to when you work with them. These behaviours are designed to mitigate some of the more stressful aspects of day-to-day working between people in our industry. Our work together is valuable and sometimes high pressured, by its nature, and we can’t promise to remove all of that; but the charter is a declaration of mutual respect and empathy, co-created with our members and some of their agency partners, aimed at eliminating unnecessary pressure – which will lead to better work and stronger research partnerships.

When we ask you for a proposal…

We’ll respect your time

• Any brief we send you will be approved by our stakeholders and ready for us to work on together
• It will include an indicative budget (or, if not, we promise to be available to discuss)
• We’ll be clear about what we want in the proposal
• We’ll be open about your chances of winning the business, e.g. how many agencies were invited to pitch
• We’ll give you a reasonable time to develop your proposals and be clear on the timetable for reviewing and commissioning the work
• We won’t ask for or expect a tight turnaround if we don’t need one

When we work with you it’ll be a partnership…

We’ll commit to open and honest conversations at all times

• We’ll share our preferred ways of working and expectations before we start
• We’ll agree priorities up front on how to balance speed, quality and cost
• We’ll encourage you to tell us straight away if what we’re asking for is impossible or ill-advised, and we’ll be available for a conversation
• We’ll talk about timings and budget if the brief shifts significantly and/or a project is cancelled part way in

We’ll leave you to do your best work by managing our side of things well

• We’ll do our best to be your single point of contact at key sign off moments
• We’ll ensure stakeholder expectations are managed
• We’ll arrange access to stakeholders where it will help the output
• We’ll take responsibility for internal stakeholders delivering on their commitments to research deadlines
• We’ll help make it easy for you to get paid in a timely manner

We’ll treat you as an extended part of our team

• We’ll give you access to stakeholders and contextual information when appropriate
• We’ll be open to discussing the best presentation formats and channels and encourage face to face debriefs where we believe they will deliver greater impact
• We will never refer to you as just “our supplier”
• We’ll co-own all deliverables and make ourselves available to help you shape them

We’ll respect your right to disconnect

• We’ll talk about how we work and the hours we keep as part of the kick off
• Unless agreed in our ways of working, we won’t contact you or expect a reply outside reasonable office hours
• When we ask for things, we’ll always tell you when we need it and won’t ask for a tight turnaround if we don’t need one

We’ll commit to proper feedback

• We promise you’ll hear back if you send us a proposal and tell you when we’ll do that in the brief
• We’ll share constructive feedback if unsuccessful and be available for a conversation if you want one
• We’ll have a project wash up session at the end of every project to share joint learnings on what went well and less well
• We’ll share with your team any internal feedback we receive on the project