GLOSSARY

Our glossary has been lovingly curated and compiled to give you a comprehensive and clear understanding of words you might encounter while taking the leap into making a career out of being creative. But we're not just giving you definitions, we're going beyond the basics to cut through jargon and bring in important context that helps you grow your knowledge and empower you to be better businessperson, ally, and creative professional.

The Wheelhouse Glossary is intended to be living document—ongoing, dynamic and updated frequently with new words and concepts added all the time...so check back on the regular!

Equity words

LEILANI LEWIS

  • Anti-Racism is defined as the work of actively opposing racism by advocating for changes in political, economic, and social life. Anti-racism tends to be an individualized approach, and set up in opposition to individual racist behaviors and impacts.

  • BIPOC is an acronym that stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

  • Ghettoising is to treat a particular group in society as if they are different from the other parts of society and as if their activities and interests are not important to other people.

  • Racial equity is the condition that would be achieved if one's racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical sense, how one fares.

Crowdfunding Words

WHEELHOUSE STAFF

  • Backers are the people who support your campaign financially (used on Kickstarter and Indiegogo). On Patreon they're called patrons.

  • Rewards are incentives you give during a crowdfunding campaign to incentivize your backers on Kickstarter and Seed&Spark. At Indiegogo rewards are called perks, and on Patreon they're benefits.

  • Tiers are different membership levels in which you can price your content and projects on Patreon.

  • Equity crowdfunding is a hybrid between crowdfunding and VC investment, where ‘the crowd’ becomes the potential investors to an early-stage start-up in exchange for shares or a stake in that company.

  • VC investment stands for 'Venture Capitol' a traditional way of investing in start-ups and new businesses. Usually investors are big companies, wealthy families, or large institutions.

Branding & Marketing Words

ANDREA PARRISH

  • Your “brand” really is just the collection of feelings and ideas that you want someone to consistently have when they interact with you. Much like building a friendship over time, the more often someone encounters a similar experience with your brand, the more clearly they’ll understand and remember your work.

  • In social media planning, content focus means listing what things you want to post about, and then placing your posts about those topics on a calendar.

  • A network focus means planning day-by-day what you’ll post on each network.

  • Metrics are how you measure the performance of your social media to help guide your strategy. Most social media networks will give business accounts access to some kind of metrics.

  • KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators—information gathered from research and metrics. Sales, reach and impressions, engagements, or audience size are all KPIs that could all indicate success, depending on your marketing goals.

  • Once you understand what your brand’s about, you can create general guidelines for how you communicate - for and about your business—your brand voice. Guidelines will help ensure that across networks, your posts always sound like they were written by the same person, even if they’re not.

Money & Tax Words

DIANE BUXTON

  • Think of income as everything you make regardless of production costs. It's the whole enchilada! Also called "gross revenue."

  • But actual profit is what you're left with after all the bills have been paid: your expenses (in the form of overhead and operating expenses). So...part of the enchilada. Also called "net revenue."

  • Business deductions are any expense that is “ordinary and necessary”—meaning anything that people in your line of work typically spend. Check out our list of common business deductions for self-employed creatives.

Business Planning Words

WHEELHOUSE STAFF

  • Assets - Assets are things of monetary value that you own that can be exchanged for cash. While most personal assets are things like houses or boats, a business’s assets are categorized as things that sustain growth and continued production. Assets include cold hard cash but also your investment portfolio, accounts receivable, inventories, and prepaid expenses.

  • Executive Summary — The Executive Summary is usually the first thing people see when they read your business plan, your first impression. It usually includes a business description, and the company’s vision, mission, and value statements.

  • Mission Statement — The mission statement describes your business's purpose in the world, and represents your motivation for why you started this enterprise in the first place. It’s only a few sentences that answer the “why” of your business’s existence, but they need to be meaningful. Usually it's a big picture statement that connects your product or service to the world at large, and how your business will make it better.

  • Vision Statement — The vision statement includes your business’s future goals, and your hopes of what you’d like your business to achieve.

  • Value Statement — Think of this part as the heart and soul of your business—the values and ideals you’d like your business to represent and uphold.

  • Market analysis — Market analysis uses a combination of hard-data demographics, identifying target audiences, market growth potential and trends. The process of identifying not only your ideal customers or clients, but also your competition.

  • Cash flow - Cash flow is all the money coming in and going out of a business on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Intellectual Property Words

WHEELHOUSE STAFF

  • Copyright - is a type of intellectual property that protects original, artistic, and creative works, whether published or not (examples include literary, drama, music, and artistic, film, poetry, computer software, and architecture).

  • Trademark - protects items or qualities that identify a particular business: "words, names, symbols, sounds or colors that distinguish goods and services from those manufactured or sold by others and to indicate the source of the goods." Trademarks can include brand and product names, slogans, and logos.

  • Fair use - a doctrine in copyright law that provides for the legal incorporation of copyrighted material in another creator's work. It’s meant to be broadly interpreted to promote free expression, but also protect against copyright infringement. There’s a four factor test that many courts use to determine fair use outcomes.

  • Intellectual property - is a set of rights given to owners of anything that qualifies as “creations of the mind,” intangible and non-physical assets, yet of high value. This ‘umbrella term’ includes anything that can be copyrighted, trademarked, or patented, like inventions, artistic works, brands, symbols, names and images.

  • Copyright infringement - is when someone copies, reproduces, distributes, displays, or performs another person’s copyrighted work without permission of the original owner.

  • Attribution - is credit to the copyright holder or original owner of the work, sometimes as laid out as per the terms in a license.

  • Copyright free - means a work is completely free of copyright, and you can use it as you like, with no restrictions on usage, monetization, or attribution (depending on the license). If the work is not in the public domain, always double check the terms of the license from where you found it.

  • Royalty free (RF) - the work is copyrighted BUT can be used without the need to pay either royalties or license fees. Usually it means attribution and includes restrictions on the license in terms of copyright.

Contract Words

WHEELHOUSE STAFF

  • EIN - Employer Identification Number (EIN), or Federal Tax Identification Number is used by the IRS to identify a business for tax purposes. You can apply for an EIN on the IRS website even if you don’t incorporate as a business or LLC. And FYI: You do not need an EIN number to be self-employed, you can use your social security number instead.

  • “Scope Creep”- when the initial plan or scope for a project’s requirements and tasks change, adjust, or get bigger (without your wallet also growing in size). This can happen if your contract does not clearly outline expectations and deliverables which is one of the 5 freelance pitfalls to avoid.  

  • Net 30 - Net 30 is a ‘trade credit’ term indicating that a person will be paid within 30 days. It often will show up in a contract or an invoice to show the client when the payment is expected/due. Look for a Net 30 in the ‘compensation’ portion of your contract, and make sure to include it in your invoice, too.

  • Kill Fee - A ‘kill fee’ is basically a cancellation fee that guarantees you get at least some percentage of payment if the project gets canceled.

  • “Work for Hire” - is a term used in copyright law that means that the employer—not the employee or contractor—is considered the legal owner of that work. Also known as ‘corporate authorship,’ it means anything you create for the company is copyrighted to them if it falls under one of these nine categories.

  • NDA - a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is a confidentiality agreement which protects a businesses’ confidential, proprietary information, or trademark information.