About 15 minutes to set up · claude.ai only

Turn a vague client request into a real brief

Today

The client sends three paragraphs, a competitor link, and "something like this but for us." It sits for two days because writing the brief takes an hour of quiet you do not have, and meanwhile a designer starts building on a guess.

With Claude

You paste their message and get a first draft brief with the audience, the single message, the deliverable list, and the questions that still need answers before anyone opens a design file.

The prompt

Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.

You are writing a creative brief for my agency, built from a messy client request.

The client's request, exactly as they sent it: [paste the email, Slack message, or call notes here]
The client: [company, what they sell, who buys it]
Brand rules we already have: [paste the guidelines, or write SEE PROJECT KNOWLEDGE, or NONE]
Budget and deadline, if known: [paste, or write TBD]

Produce the brief with these headings:
1. The job to be done, in one sentence that starts with a verb.
2. Audience: who specifically, and what they currently believe.
3. The single message, in one sentence. If the request contains more than one message, say so and recommend which to lead with and why.
4. Deliverables, with formats and sizes, limited to what the request actually needs.
5. Mandatories and constraints: legal, brand, channel limits, anything fixed.
6. What success looks like, written as an observable outcome rather than a number, unless the client gave me a specific target.
7. Open questions, ranked by how much the answer would change the work. Write them as questions I can paste straight into a reply to the client.

Do not fill a gap with an assumption. If something is missing, it belongs in the open questions.

What to skip in agencies

  • Anything your MSA or NDA does not clearly allow. Plenty of agency contracts restrict sending client material to outside tools without written approval, and some now carry specific AI clauses. Read the agreement, ask, and get the answer in writing before you paste a client's data. Your plan is part of that conversation: on Free, Pro, and Max accounts the model training setting is yours to control in Privacy Settings, while Team and Enterprise accounts sit under Anthropic's Commercial Terms instead.
  • Any number in a client-facing report. Claude should never produce a metric, a percentage, or a dollar figure for you. Paste the export from your own reporting tool and let Claude write only the narrative around figures you supplied. One invented performance number in a client report costs you far more than the report saved.
  • Live account work. In the browser, Claude cannot log into your ad platforms, project management tool, or time tracker, so it cannot pace a budget, reconcile hours, or tell you what happened in an account yesterday. It knows only what you paste into the chat.

Want all 4 workflows for agencies in your inbox?

Every prompt on this page plus the rest, so you still have them on Monday. One email, then four short ones on making it stick. Unsubscribe any time.

Or answer four questions and Claude writes three workflows for your specific business rather than the industry generally.

Before you try it

More for agencies

Full guide for agencies