It’s an irony that agencies often have trouble communicating with their most important stakeholders of all: their clients.
“There’s often a disconnect between client and agency,” says Stan Didzbalis. “Clients feel their agency doesn’t understand their goals; the agencies say they don’t know what their clients want.”
Enter AgencyLink, co-founded by Didzbalis and Sheila Corriveau. The duo combined their extensive public relations experience to help agencies and clients communicate with each other before communicating with their audiences.
To that end, Corriveau and Didzbalis put their focus on the client rather than the agency. Didzbalis says that clients often don’t understand how agencies operate, or how messages are conveyed to their publics. “We actually just ran a workshop called ‘How To Be A Better Client’. It helps them understand their part in the process.”
In addition to workshops, AgencyLInk provides relationship coaching, agency integration and contract negotiation. The bottom goal is to build better relationships between agencies and clients.
There’s also a free agency registration service where agencies can register their information on the AgencyLink database. “It streamlines the agency search,” Didzbalis says. ” Some of these searches can be hugely time consuming for agencies, and this helps connect them with potential clients a whole lot faster.”
The database includes the “CultureLinK’ tool, which asks clients and agencies a series of separate questions see if there’s a cultural fit. It changes the agency selection process from getting the account to finding out if there’s a relationship first.
“Sometimes with agencies, there’s growth for growth’s sake without seeing if there’s a fit, ” Didzbalis admits. “This changes all that.”
Since its May launch, AgencyLink has enjoyed a steady growth as more clients and agencies take advantage of their middleman services. “We’re filling a niche,” “Didzbalis says. “We’re really the first to bring these services to Canada on a full-service level.”
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