Overview
Every campaign on 1stCollab has a monthly budget assigned to it. Here are a few important points about how budgets work:
Budgets for next month is locked on the 1st of the current month. In other words, on January 1st, your campaign budget for February is locked and cannot be decreased.
We lock in budget a month in advance so that we can ensure there is a consistent flow of creator content going live. For example, if we allowed brands to zero out a campaign budget for February on January 31st, we wouldn’t be able to get creators into contract until the beginning of February. This means there’s likely not going to be any content for the first few weeks of February since creators would go into contract, and then need a few weeks to produce content.
1stCollab will spend up to the current budget set for a given month. This includes platform fees and fees to creators.
Note that while we aim to never exceed the budget for a month, agreements that are late and roll into the next month could cause the next month’s total fees to exceed the budget. This should be very rare and also result in under budget utilization for the prior month.
Budget is used (and a brand is billed) when a contract is complete. So if a contract is fully complete, and all the deliverables have been verified on January 30th, the January campaign budget will be used to pay both the creator fee and the 1stCollab platform fee.
Viewing Current and Future Spend
Total spend for a brand and spend by campaign can be viewed in the Contracts section in the Budgets tab. Here you’ll be able to view budgets cut by month for the entire brand or for individual campaigns. There are multiple columns that comprise the total budget:
Pending signature. These are contracts that have been sent to the creator and are awaiting from the creator or a representative of the creator’s
In Production. Contracts that have been signed but not completed. The creator is currently working on the deliverables outlined in the contract.
Complete. Contracts where the creator has completed all the deliverables outlined in the contract.
Platform Fees. 1stCollab Fees (costs not paid to the creator).
Total. Sum of each of the above rows. Note that the total you’ll be billed at the end of the month will be the sum of “Complete” and “Platform Fees”. Contracts either “Pending Signature” or “In Production” will either be archived or rolled over in the next month.
To get more details about the exact contracts that make up any given month’s spend, go to the Contracts view to see a breakdown of contracts and information about each contract.
Modifying Campaign Budgets
To modify the budget for any campaign, head to the Budget Overview by clicking on Campaigns in the left nav bar. There you’ll see a list of campaigns. Click on the pencil icon next to the budget column to modify the budget:
Clicking on the pencil will open up a drawer showing the next 12 months of budget and current spend against that budget.
There are a few things you’ll be able to do:
Edit the budget for an individual month.
Note: For the current month and the very next month, you’ll only be able to increase budget.
Edit the budget for a month and all future months. You’ll be prompted if you want to apply the budget to all future months once you click out of the Budget textbox.
Pause the campaign. This will zero out budget after the next month and pause future outreach.
Resume the campaign. This will restart outreach for the campaign. You’ll be asked to define a new monthly budget for the campaign at this point.