The answer to the question “who are them” is rather easy: they are members of our global community who have helped as volunteers in several instances, such as the organization of community events in Albania and Indonesia, including the LibreOffice Conference in Tirana in 2018 and at least two LibreOffice Asia Conferences, the organization of other LibreOffice Conferences, and several major announcements of LibreOffice.
In addition to being volunteers, they also are professionally skilled in visual arts, which makes them ideally suited for the kind of consultancy that we need to escalate our current visual identity and enrich our announcement with visual images.
Several members of the team have worked with these volunteers, have met them at events, and have developed a good relation with them. Based on these good relations, I have discussed with them the opportunity to work as consultants for TDF and LibreOffice based on a reasonable monthly retainer (professionals can’t always work for free, especially if we want them to provide their best not only in terms of visual skills but also in terms of strategic communication consultancy.
The monthly retainer we have set is extremely competitive for professional consultants, especially if you think that we will have a team of people working for TDF. Tendering the task would probably end up in a higher project cost (a monthly retainer is rather unusual for visual agencies, but gives TDF the possibility of having a predictable budget for the task, and has been accepted based on the good relations we have developed over the years).
A global agency focused on brand and visual support for announcements, apart from not knowing the open source environment, and as such missing most of the fundamental background we need to avoid spending days to provide a brief, would cost in the region of 100K euro per year. I am not working in the same professional area, but the daily cost of a professional in public relations would be between 2K euro and 5K euro according to the level of experience, and is not completely different from the cost of a professional visual consultant.
I will work with the two agencies to help them provide the best results for TDF, and will be supported by Mike Saunders for this task, and knowing the people I am sure we will be able to provide good results. Timing, unfortunately, is tight, as we should have started working on TDF branding, on a refresh of LibreOffice branding, and on better support for major announcements a long time ago.