What to ask your agency about ownership of digital assets

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on ownership of digital assets, these questions are worth asking early.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Domains and accounts should be registered to you. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Get it in writing before work starts. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

How to tell if yours is fine

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about ownership of digital assets before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.