Client onboarding questionnaire for agencies

Every agency re-learns the same lesson: the questions you don't ask in week one become the revisions you eat in week six. The brand voice you assumed, the approver you didn't know existed, the logo file that turns out to be a screenshot of a logo.

This is the questionnaire we settled on. It's deliberately short, clients abandon long forms, but every question earns its place by preventing a specific, recurring failure. Copy it, adapt it, send it before the first brief.

Section 1: Who decides

The single highest-value section. Most onboarding pain is approval-chain pain.

1. Who gives final approval on content? (One name. If the answer is two names, ask which one wins.)
2. Who else reviews before them, if anyone?
3. What's a realistic feedback turnaround for your team? (24h / 48h / longer. Get them to commit to a number you can build deadlines around.)
4. If we don't hear back within that window, do we ship or hold? (Asking this on day one feels bold and saves the relationship later.)

Section 2: Voice and red lines

5. Describe your brand in three adjectives, and three adjectives it must never be. (The negative list is the useful one.)
6. Link two pieces of content, yours or anyone's, you'd love to have made. What do you like about them?
7. Link one piece that made you cringe. Why?
8. Hard red lines: topics, words, competitors, claims we must never touch.

Section 3: Assets and access

9. Brand kit: logo (vector), fonts, color codes, or whoever we should chase for them.
10. Raw material: where does footage/photography live, and who adds to it?
11. Channel access: which accounts will we publish to, and who can grant access?
12. Existing guidelines: any brand book, tone-of-voice doc or compliance rules we must read first?

Section 4: The work itself

13. What does a successful first month look like, concretely? (Posts shipped? Leads? Views? Get one measurable sentence.)
14. Publishing rhythm: how many pieces per week/month, on which channels?
15. Recurring moments we should plan around: launches, seasonal peaks, events.
16. Anything currently scheduled or promised that we're inheriting?

Section 5: Working together

17. Where do you want day-to-day communication to live? (Then hold them to it.)
18. Who's our day-to-day contact when the decision-maker is busy?
19. What did your last agency or freelancer get wrong that we should know about? (Clients answer this one generously, and the answer is a map of their sore spots.)

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How to use it

• Send it before the kickoff call, not after. The call becomes a review of their answers, twice as useful in half the time.
• Make answering frictionless: a form link they can fill on a phone beats a DOCX attachment every time.
• Store the answers where the work happens, so an editor opening the first brief sees the voice, the red lines and the approver without asking.
• Revisit question 13 monthly. The definition of success drifts; your reporting should drift with it.

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In Cadenus, this questionnaire is a built-in feature: each client gets an onboarding link, and the answers live on their client hub next to every brief, visible to whoever picks up the work. See how the rest of the client relationship runs in client approvals.