I've heard this question many times since March 2020, as both professional and personal contacts wondered how I was faring as an independent writer working mainly for nonprofits. With the benefit of hindsight, I can best sum it up this way:
March-August 2020: ACK! No one is reaching out or responding to inquiries, and most of my booked projects are on hold. This is bad. This could get very, very bad.
September 2020-January 2021: OK, OK. Clients are seeing that this is the so-called "new normal." They're coming back to life. They're using Zoom and WebEx and Microsoft Teams. They're getting creative about photography (self-portraits and solo shots). They're bringing projects back and that means they need creative input and content. Some glimmers of hope are visible.
March 2021: Well, it's been a year of this and we're dealing with it. My project load pretty much gets back to normal--and so far, 2021 has been a good year! What I miss most is getting out of my office and seeing clients in person. I hope that will return soon.
I want to say a special word of thanks to new clients who brought me on as a project team member over the past year, including Masters Group Design, Cancer Today magazine, The Foundation for Delaware County, and the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health at Stanford Medicine. I'm also grateful to ongoing clients such as Breastcancer.org, art270, Snavely Associates, and Penn Medicine-Chester County Hospital. We're all in this together and we're making it work, one week at a time.
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