Your Next Commission Comes from a Shortlist, Not a Form

A public agency posts a request for qualifications for a new fire station. Eleven firms respond. A committee of five reads the submissions against a published scoring sheet, ranks them, and invites three to interview. Nobody on that committee filled in a contact form, downloaded a guide, or clicked an ad. The commission was decided by a document and a room.

That is the pipeline most practices actually live in, alongside repeat clients, referrals from contractors and developers, and the slow compounding effect of published work. It is also why most marketing advice aimed at architects lands wrong. That advice is built for businesses where a stranger discovers you, converts and buys. In your practice, the buyer almost always knows your name before your website loads. Marketing’s job here is to hold up under inspection and to make you easier to score.

Selection is a scoring exercise, and in public work the law says so

Federal policy for architectural and engineering services is to publicly announce requirements and to negotiate contracts on the basis of demonstrated competence and qualification for the services required, at a fair and reasonable price (40 U.S.C. Chapter 11, better known as the Brooks Act). Price is not part of the initial ranking. Agencies shortlist the most qualified firms first and negotiate fee afterwards. Most states run their own version of the same statute, and federal-aid highway design contracts are awarded the same way (FHWA guidance on Brooks Act requirements).

Scoring sheets vary, but the criteria repeat: relevant project experience, the qualifications of the people actually assigned, past performance, capacity and schedule, local knowledge. Every one of those is an evidence question. What a committee needs from you is not persuasion. It is proof that is easy to find, easy to verify, and organized the way they are already reading.

Private work runs a softer version of the same process. A developer’s project manager assembles a longlist of six from memory, one peer recommendation and a search, then checks each firm before anyone gets a call. Same scoring, no published sheet, and you never see the ones who dropped you at the checking stage.

Your website is a reference check, not a funnel

Look at who actually arrives. A committee member verifying a claim in your submission. A juror. A developer’s assistant compiling that longlist. A candidate deciding whether to answer your recruiter. A journalist on deadline. Every one of them arrives holding your name already, and every one of them is doing the same thing: checking whether the practice is what it says it is.

That reframes almost every decision. A homepage that spends six seconds loading a reel is not slow, it is evasive, and it is being watched on a phone in a meeting with a competitor open in the next tab. A projects page of beautiful uncaptioned images is not restraint, it is a missing answer. A people page of first names and portraits with no registrations, no jurisdictions and no project roles cannot be scored at all. A contact page with a form and no phone number fails the one visitor who has a question and a deadline.

What works instead is unglamorous. Project pages built as evidence, each carrying the facts a panel needs. A downloadable one-page sheet per project that a business development lead can paste straight into a qualifications package without rebuilding it. A team page updated the week someone gets licensed rather than the week before a website redesign. If any of that requires a developer ticket, a site organized around project evidence rather than a homepage reel will pay for itself faster than another campaign.

Caption projects the way a panel reads them, and credit them the way the code requires

Every project page should carry the same fields, in the same order, so a reader comparing four of your projects is comparing like with like:

• Typology and program, in the words the RFQ uses
• Client and client type: municipality, developer, institution, private owner
• Size, completion year, and delivery method
• Jurisdiction and any approvals that mattered
• Certification and performance outcomes where they exist
• Your firm’s role, stated exactly

That last one is the part that gets practices into trouble. The AIA Code of Ethics requires members to avoid misleading claims about qualifications, experience or performance, and to accurately state the scope and nature of their responsibilities on work for which they claim credit. The AIA itself notes that failing to give appropriate credit is among the most frequent violations of the Code (AIA guidance on attribution of credit).

The common route to a complaint is not malice. It is a founding principal publishing work they led at a previous firm, on a new website, with the role left implicit. Write the credit line. Architect of record, design architect, associate architect, and the principal’s personal role with dates. Panels read a lot of portfolios and they know precisely what a vague credit is hiding, so accuracy reads as professionalism rather than modesty.

Photography and awards are one production line, not two budgets

Very little downstream is possible without a proper shoot. Award submissions require it. Publications will not run phone photographs from the punch list. Project pages built on renderings tell a panel you have not finished anything lately.

So treat one shoot as the input to six uses: the award submissions, the press pitch, the project page, the one-page sheet in your next qualifications package, the lecture or conference talk, and a year of social posts. Award deadlines cluster, most of them are published a year ahead, and a submission calendar set in January is the difference between entering the work and remembering it in October. Awards matter less as trophies than as third-party validation a committee can point to when it defends a ranking, and as the single most reliable recruiting asset a mid-size practice has.

Two practical traps. Settle photography usage rights in the commissioning agreement rather than discovering at submission time that your license covers your website and nothing else. And get the client’s permission for publication in writing early, because confidential or security-sensitive projects have a way of becoming your best unpublishable work.

What paid media is honestly for in this category

Not institutional commissions. No amount of search spend puts you inside a qualifications-based selection you were not invited to, and an agency promising otherwise is selling consumer mechanics for a procurement problem.

What it does well is narrower and still worth money. Recruiting, where a targeted campaign against a live job posting competes with the firm down the street that pays more. Staying visible to people who visited your project pages during a selection window, which is the one moment retargeting is genuinely useful. Entering a new city or state ahead of its RFQ cycle, so that your name is not new when the announcement lands. And the segments where a form actually works: custom residential, tenant fit-out, small commercial, accessory dwellings. Those are different buyers with a different process, and they are the only part of your practice where a lead metric means what a marketer thinks it means.

Positioning is the only thing that moves your score

Relevant experience is the criterion you cannot argue your way past. A practice that does everything scores as relevant to nothing, and the second-best generalist on a shortlist does not get the commission.

Narrowing is a business decision before it is a marketing one: a typology, a client type, a delivery model, a jurisdiction, or a technical capability such as mass timber or laboratory planning. Marketing only expresses the choice. The test is whether the first hundred words of your qualifications package and the first line of your homepage say the same thing, and whether that sentence is one a committee member could copy into a ranking justification without editing it. Most firms fail that test, which is why deciding what the practice is for before redesigning how it looks is the sequence that saves money.

The objection is always the same: narrowing feels like turning off revenue. It reads that way for about two quarters. What it actually does is move you from the middle of every longlist to the top of a shorter one.

Count invitations, not sessions

The metric that matters most is the one nobody instruments: unsolicited invitations to submit. Track how many RFQs and RFPs you were asked into, your shortlist rate from submissions, and your win rate from interviews. Add referral source captured at first contact, by whoever takes the call, in one required field. Add qualified applications per open role. Add branded search and direct traffic, which rise when your name is circulating in rooms you are not in.

Sessions, bounce rate and impressions tell you almost nothing here, because the audience is small, high-value and already aware of you. A month with fewer visitors and two more shortlists is a good month.

The honest summary is that digital work does not generate commissions in this profession. It removes the reasons a panel, a juror or a developer would set you aside, and it makes the evidence you already own usable in the moment someone is deciding. If you want to know which of those reasons currently apply to your practice, an outside read of how the firm shows up right now is a cheaper first step than a rebuild.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should we hire a marketing coordinator or an agency?

They solve different problems. A coordinator owns the submission calendar, keeps project sheets and resumes current, and assembles qualifications packages, which is continuous internal work no outside party can do well. An agency is better suited to the positioning decision, the website, photography direction, campaign work and the parts that arrive in bursts. Practices that hire an agency without anyone internal owning submissions usually end up with a handsome site and the same win rate.

What should a small practice do first?

Fix the evidence before buying attention. Get the last three completed projects photographed properly, write full credit lines and project data for each, publish them as pages a panel can read, and update the team page with current registrations and roles. Then set the award submission calendar for the year. That sequence costs a fraction of a campaign and it improves every conversation you are already having, including the ones you never learn about.

Does an architecture firm need a blog?

Only if the writing does something a project page cannot. Technical posts on a specific building type, a code change, a delivery method or a material tend to earn attention from the people who write RFQs and from journalists looking for a source. Practice-news posts and general design commentary earn very little. If nobody in the office will commit to producing something with a point of view, the honest answer is to skip it and spend the time on documenting projects properly.

Does social media win commissions?

Rarely, and almost never directly. Its real value is peer visibility, recruiting and staying present with developers and consultants who already know you. Treat it as distribution for work you have produced anyway, not as its own content programme. The exception is the private residential end of the market, where a strong visual account genuinely does bring inquiries, though it also brings a volume of unqualified ones you will need a filter for.

How do we market work we cannot publish?

Confidential, security-sensitive and residential-privacy projects can still carry weight if you handle them consistently. Ask at commissioning what may eventually be shown and record the answer. Where imagery is off the table, publish the anonymized facts a panel needs: typology, scale, delivery method, jurisdiction, your role and the outcome. A described project with verifiable data does more in a qualifications package than an unattributed photograph does anywhere.