Preparing an agreement for a Creative Practitioner

It’s important to set down and agree terms by which a Creative Practitioner will be providing services for you. This will help define agreed roles and responsibilities required by both parties, before the contract starts.

Please see ‘Commissioning a Creative Practitioner’ for general guidance about the need for a written agreement with any creative practitioner you are commissioning. It’s important to set down and agree terms by which the person will be providing services for you. This will help define agreed roles and responsibilities required by both parties, before the contract starts.

Access our sample creative practitioner agreement

If you are University of Exeter staff or a student, please use this guide in conjunction with a sample 'Creative Practitioner Agreement' which you can access and download via Sharepoint. It will help you prepare the information you need to complete the template. This should be amended to reflect the individual arrangements you are making with a creative practitioner, and be checked by the Legal Department before being signed by either party.

If you are using our sample 'Creative Practitioner Agreement', then the above information falls into the following sections:

Schedule 1 to the Agreement (the Services)

Title of contract/work to be completed (this may be the title on the original brief/ call-out)
Communication: How do you expect the creative practitioner to communicate with you and how regularly.
What items do you want to be updated on, when, and in what format?
What major milestones are there in the project (what needs to be done on or by what date?)
A digital copy of the original brief for the commission, to add to the end of Schedule 1.

Schedule 2 of the Agreement (The Fee)

Are you going to pay the fee in instalments?
In establishing timings and amounts of instalments, consider the creative practitioner’s cashflow – do they need part of the money to enable them to buy resources to take them to the next step of the commission?
Do you want to reserve say 10% of the fee until the very end of the commission, to ensure it is completed?

Schedule Three of the Agreement (Data Protection)

Complete the table in Schedule 3, to state what personal data the creative practitioner might collect, for what purpose and for how long. (This may not apply to all agreements, depending on the nature of the commission).

What type of personal data with the creative practitioner be handling? (eg name, address, email address, age), photographs, video and audio recordings of identifiable people.)
What groups of people (data subjects) will the creative practitioner be getting data from? (eg students, members of the public, University staff, children under 18 , vulnerable adults)
What sort of data-gathering work will be taking place and for what purpose? (eg developing contact lists of people involved in a project, collecting and storing photographic or video consent forms for images which will be published online).
How long will this information be held? What will be held for the duration of the contract and what will be held after the contract ends. (eg photographic and video consent forms may need to be held after the actual contract ends, if the images are to be used in future.

Find out more about the University’s data protection policies at: www.exeter.ac.uk/departments/crg/ig/policy/

For advice or queries about managing information and data protection please contact the University’s Information Governance department at: informationgovernance@exeter.ac.uk