Capture everything needed to scope and kick off a project — goals, target audience, budget, timeline, deliverables, and reference assets. Replace unstructured email chains with a form that gives your team context before the kickoff call.
A project brief form is the intake step that turns a vague request into a scopeable engagement. Before any kickoff call, it collects the things an agency or internal team actually needs to quote and plan: the goal behind the project, who it's for, roughly what the client can spend, when they need it, and what they expect to receive at the end. The real problem it solves is the discovery gap — the days lost to email threads asking "what's your budget?" and "who's the audience?" one question at a time, and the mis-scoped proposals that come from guessing at the answers.
A well-designed brief separates the strategic questions from the logistical ones. This template asks for Project Goals as a free-text field with a 30-character minimum, which is deliberate: a one-line "we need a new site" is worthless, and forcing a fuller answer makes the client do the thinking before you're on the phone. It pairs that with a Project Type dropdown (website, mobile app, branding, campaign, and more) so the form routes and the budget and timeline read as ranges rather than exact figures — because a client who won't commit to a hard number early will happily pick a bracket. The single most useful field most home-made briefs omit is Competitor / Inspiration References: what a client admires (and what they want to avoid) tells you their taste and positioning faster than any adjective they'll give you.
Deploy it as the gate in front of your calendar. Put the form URL in your "work with us" link or embed it on the site, and make the kickoff call bookable only after the brief is submitted. Every response lands in your dashboard with any assets the client uploaded, so the person running the call reads context instead of extracting it live.
All fields are fully customizable — add, remove, or reorder after opening the template.
The template enforces a 30-character minimum on the goals field for a reason: it blocks the reflexive "redesign our website" answer that tells you nothing. A client who has to write two real sentences about what success looks like arrives at the call already half-briefed. Don't remove this constraint to make the form feel shorter.
Asking for an exact number scares people off; a dropdown of brackets (Under $5k through $150k+, plus "To be discussed") gets an answer from almost everyone. Budget shapes every design and engineering decision, so even a wide range lets you disqualify a mismatch before you write a proposal. Leave the field optional so a hesitant lead still submits the rest.
The Competitor / Inspiration References field is where taste, positioning, and hidden expectations surface. A client who names three brands they admire has handed you a mood board and a competitive frame in one answer. Read it before the call and you'll steer the conversation instead of interviewing them.
Free-text scope invites drift. The Deliverables Expected checkboxes (design files, developed product, documentation, training, ongoing support, analytics setup) make the boundary of the engagement concrete on the first read of the brief. What's unchecked is as informative as what's checked — it flags where expectations and your proposal might diverge.
This template's asset upload allows PDF, DOCX, PPTX, ZIP, JPG, and PNG up to 20 MB — because clients hand over existing brand guides as PowerPoints, logo packs as ZIPs, and old briefs as Word docs. Narrow the allowed types and you'll bounce submissions and lose context. Uploaded files land in your dashboard attached to the brief, so nothing gets separated from the request it belongs to.
The brief only saves time if it's mandatory before the kickoff. Share the form's URL as your intake link, or embed it on your site, and make the call bookable only once it's submitted. Turn on the per-submission email notification so a new brief pings your inbox and you can qualify it the same day.
All 12 fields included. Customize and publish in minutes.
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