Essential contract guidelines for navigating influencer collaborations

Influencer partnerships and collaborations can feel risky, but one way to mitigate that risk is to get the relationship, non-negotiables and expectations down on paper with a formal contract. Whether your collaboration includes monetary exchange or is more of a barter arrangement, this is an important step in the process.

Through the Election + Influencer Learning Cohort supported by the American Press Institute and the Knight Election Hub, we worked with a small team of lawyers to draft a contract for these new working relationships. We then shared the contract with our six newsrooms in the learning cohort for feedback and sought advice from several audience development consultants and newsrooms with experience working with influencers  before kicking it back to our lawyers for adjustments.

The template includes highlighted sections that we suggest you edit to meet your needs and reflect your collaborations with trusted messengers. There is also standard language, not highlighted, that we recommend leaving as drafted. You may have your own legal team or standard contract and sharing this template with your team, or blending it with your standard language, as a starting point for your creator collaborations is also a good use of this general influencer contract template.

The link below will take you to “forced copy” in Google docs. From there, you can update, edit, etc.

Based on what we’ve heard from our newsrooms and consultants helping newsrooms collaborate with influencers, we’ve also compiled a list of topics you’ll see reflected in your work agreement and advice or reasoning for these contract additions.

• Deadlines: When are the deliverables due? How quickly do they need to respond to feedback? Is there a grace period with deadlines? What happens if they miss it?
• Outlet approval, including prior review: Will your newsroom review scripts before the content is created? Do you want to review captions, hashtags, and account tags? Many influencers aren’t used to taking feedback before they post, so if that is your expectation, spell it out clearly.
• Termination or “kill clause”: If content doesn’t meet your newsroom’s standards, what next? The contract could stipulate that the contractor reshoot the content or that it be killed for a kill fee, similar to what newsrooms do with freelancers.
• How long the video will stay online: Adriana Lacy, newsroom consultant, notes that while a newsroom would consider it unethical to take down a video posted to social media, influencers sometimes do, especially if they get low engagement. She usually stipulates that videos stay up for one year.
• Payment terms: Are you paying an hourly rate, a flat fee for meeting the deliverables, or a variable fee based on metrics such as reach or conversion? Verite News pays an hourly rate to its two influencers with a 2-hour minimum, while Technical.ly has a creator on a retainer. Most others we interviewed did a flat fee and warned against tying payment to specific social metrics, which are unpredictable and hard to measure.
• Control of the video: Make sure that your newsroom retains the rights to whatever content the influencer records for you so that you can reuse it in the future.
• Specific editorial guidelines: Does the script have to follow your newsroom’s style guide? Are there certain behaviors that are off-limits, such as sensational “Would you believe…?” introductions? Do you want them to strike a certain tone? Liz Kelly Nelson, an audience development consultant and founder of Project C, notes that you might have to specify things you wouldn’t normally consider, such as whether they can curse in the video. Elaine Ramirez, who worked with influencers to help launch a social media account for CoinDesk in 2021, said they specified that the influencers could not promote any particular cryptocurrency coin in the videos they produced for CoinDesk.
• Branding guidelines: Do you want them to talk about your work in a specific way or use a specific name? Do you want them to follow your visual style?
• Credits: If the creator will be using photos or other visual content from other sources, you’ll want to specify that they confirm the visual elements are under a Creative Commons license or they – and your newsroom – have explicit permission to use them.

It can take weeks for a contract to go through legal review, especially if it’s detailed. But it’s crucial to safeguarding your organization’s reputation and resources, so get started on this early by having the conversation with your trusted messenger — essentially onboarding them to your news organization and the project process — and getting the paperwork sent and signed well before the storytelling or story amplifying begins.