Our case for giving someone a free lunch

Pro bono work is good for your conscience AND (if you do it right) your business

July 08, 2025

Awhile back, I saw another professional comms person lamenting the state of the world (as we all do every morning now). He ended his thought-train with, “Okay, time to go send my silly little emails about games!” Sending our silly little emails has become an online cliche, but I did have some real advice for him: find a pro bono project. 

At PSE, we’ve dedicated a solid amount of time each week for volunteer projects that address issues we feel are important. While it doesn’t fix everything, these projects have sure made this bad year a bit better. 

So here’s my advice on why this is a good thing for you to take on, and at the end, a few pointers that we’ve learned on how best to make it work. 

  • It feels good to do something good. Pro bono projects may pay only in good vibes, compliments, and the possibility of future connections. Still, they’re actually a really good deal for you. All of those things I just mentioned are valuable commodities! Not to mention, the inherent value of getting to promote or incept a project that you believe will make life better makes some of the other, less world-changing work worth it.

  • Working with people you think are interesting is good for your own personal and career growth. If their ideas are good enough to work on for free, someone will eventually pay them for that, and you’ll have forged a professional relationship—or better, a friendship—with someone smart. For media relations folks, projects like this also often allow you to work with different reporters and forge relationships that you can use later, when needed.

  • As comms professionals, sometimes our work begins to feel rote or repetitive, focused on best practices and the same metrics we’ve been looking at for awhile. Pro bono projects allow a little more experimentation, because they’re often not limited by the same ROI concerns. Want to create some wacky illustrations, or try out a new pitching method? This is a great way to do it without torching your income. Often the work is better, because it’s riskier! Great case study, here you are.

  • As a volunteer, you have an opportunity to set a better client-agency relationship, dictated by mutual needs, and that’s good for everyone—including the rest of your client base. Coming into a client relationship on a more confident foot translates to the rest of your work, and how you set collaborations and boundaries in the future. 

Finally, a few suggestions for how best to work together, gathered from our 15+ years of experience:

  • There’s no such thing as “pro bono clients” vs “real clients”—they’re all your clients! If you go into a project delineating a new client as less important, and keep pushing off the work, you won’t get enough done to make the time worth it for anyone involved. Be realistic about your availability and time at the get-go, plan accordingly, and treat everyone with respect.

  • That said, boundaries are important, and some volunteer gigs can spiral out of time and scope control. Set a real contract and scope of work, with limits on hours and/or duties, to make sure everyone has a clear picture of the project ahead of time, and an out clause if it’s needed.

  • Have fun with it! This is your time to do work you care deeply about, and to flex some creative muscles. If that’s not how it’s working out, you’re allowed to rethink the plan.

And if you’d like to work with us, in any capacity, hit the silly little email button below!

Oh, and one more thing…

Because the last word is rarely the end of the conversation.

Pebbles of the month

Much like penguins, we enjoy bringing you little gifts to show we care:

In less than a year, a river in the Pacific Northwest came back to life after dams were removed—allowing salmon, beavers, otters, turtles, and more to return to their native habitats.

ProPublica is now hiring a Local Reporting Network Fellow in five different states, with a salary of up to $75,000 plus an allowance for benefits.

The Wall St. Journal’s recent report about the barely-trying “safety training” of AI models is the latest piece to unintentionally raise the question: what’s the point of all this, anyway?

Books are still good

Here’s what one of us is currently reading:

“Rivals screamed at him like a giant flock of crows, he wrote. It felt like being in the middle of a huge sandstorm when they attacked him, or being savaged by animals: ‘they were like a swarm of wasps suddenly flying in one’s face.’”

Everyone has a different idea of what constitutes “a great beach read.” If you’re a fan of wide-ranging historical epics packed full of weird, amusing details that make you view our contemporary world in a different light, then this Oxford historian’s 2015 book makes the perfect interlude between swims and naps. 

Frankopan’s objective was to help the reader understand how interconnected human societies have been for thousands of years, and The Silk Roads is packed with tidbits that drive this point home (like how a minor 8th century British king stamped his coins with Arabic phrasing to piggyback on the prestige of the Abbassid Caliphate, which stretched from North Africa to Central Asia). 

The most thought-provoking parts of the book, though, come from passages like the one above. For as much as we imagine ourselves to live in a uniquely disorienting age, there’s some comfort in knowing that people* have always felt a little overwhelmed by the state of the world these days.

*The quote above cites the writing of Gregory of Nazianzus, an archbishop of Constantinople in the fourth century.

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