Well, for my money, yes they are. Very much so. Not only is an unsolicited testimonial worth its weight in gold because it is someone else saying something good about you, but it is so nice to have that feedback occasionally.

Not just for me and the other guv’nor, but for everyone involved (stakeholders as I believe they call them now); you get that feel-good factor when someone says something nice about you, or if you have genuinely helped another organisation do something well or look really good.

How about this one:

“Thank you for all your patience, good humour, coffee, squeezy cows and - of course - smart design work”. Is it significant that the design work comes last of all? Perhaps - after all, there are many competent design agencies out there turning out fab looking stuff. But one thing I have learned is that however smart your work is, it doesn’t work if it arrives after the event or is the product of a less than satisfactory client/supplier relationship.

But should a testimonial be accredited by name? Again, yes - otherwise, how effective is it? Surely it is better to have a name put to a comment than it to be credited to ‘Anon’ or ‘Mr P, marketing manager of BC Ltd’.

And sometimes a specific comment like ‘the website looks great’ is fine but a broader one like “we are always grateful to Cradduck Design for jobs consistently well done” or “I have thoroughly enjoyed working with your team: dynamic, hard working, inspirational and always conscious of my needs” says even more about us as a team of enthusiastic business people with our fingers on the pulse than about our ability to come up with the right visual images.

And we always encourage our clients to use them. Most of our work comes through recommendation which is really only a testimonial that someone has been kind enough to pass on to a third party. It works for us and it works for a lot of our clients too.

We’ve had a number of great testimonials arrive lately so they are all posted up on this site under What you’ve said about Cradducks (part 2)

Keep ‘em coming, folks!