How to optimally prepare for your Fair Licensing onboarding meeting.

To ensure a seamless onboarding call or meeting with PIXRAY, it is important to complete certain preparations beforehand in order to avoid any potential obstacles from occurring during the meeting.

The basis of all following steps is to create a Fair Licensing account. Take this step first.

#0 Create a Fair Licensing Account

Please go to https://portal.fairlicensing.com/account-creation and follow the sign-up procedure. Please accept the TOS after logging in. Please let your contact at PIXRAY know once you have created your account so that we can connect your Fair Licensing account with our search system.

Mandatory preparations that typically require the involvement of other departments

It is highly recommended to start working on these tasks early on as they often involve the tech, finance and marketing or design department. These tasks are crucial for the setup process and must be completed before the onboarding meeting.

#1 Connect your Stripe Account

You will likely need to involve your finance team into this step.

You will need to connect a Stripe account in order to receive payments from website owners. Without a connected Stripe account we will not be able to finalize the platform setup in our onboarding meeting.

Please log into the Fair Licensing Case Management Portal and go to Settings->Account->Payment Setup and click the "Connect Stripe Account" button. In the next step you may choose to create an entirely new Stripe account or use an existing one to log in to.

If you chose to use an existing account, make sure that you use an email address/password combination of a user that has a user role "Administrator" or "Account Owner" as only those types of user may connect an existing account to Fair Licensing.

In the latter case a sub-account of your existing Stripe account will be created when connecting with Fair Licensing so that your Fair Licensing transactions and your other transactions will be fully separated. When prompted, please confirm to carry over the settings of your existing account to avoid having to go through the full Stripe verification process for your company again.

Please make sure that your Stripe Account is fully verified. Stripe may ask you to provide information about your business in order to complete the verification. The types of information requested varies from country to country and may involve company registration information and/or information about the directors of your company. You will also have to provide a bank account to which Stripe will transfer payouts.

Check the documentation on stripe.com for further information.

Once your account is connected and the verification is completed, please contact your Fair Licensing account manager to confirm the setup.

#2 Create a CNAME DNS Entry

You will likely need to involve your teach team into this step.

You can either run the Settlement Portal (i.e., the portal that the website owner logs in to in order to resolve the case) in your own domain on fairlicensing.yourdomain.com or in the fairlicensing.com domain on yourname.fairlicensing.com (the former is only available in Pro and Enterprise accounts).

We strongly recommend to run the settlement portal on fairlicensing.yourdomain.com as this provides additional proof for the legitimacy of your claim. In this case is necessary to create a CNAME record in your domain's settings (typically available through your hosting provider). 

Please create a CNAME pointing from fairlicensing.yourdomain.com (replace yourdomain.com with your domain) to settlement.fairlicensing.com.

Once the CNAME ist set up, please contact your Fair Licensing account manager to confirm the setup. 

#3 Prepare an email account and inbound email forwarding

You will likely need to involve your teach team into this step.

In the Pro and Enterprise accounts you may connect an email account to Fair Licensing to send messages right from the case management portal. This is the recommended approach because it makes life a lot easier than copying messages between Fair Licensing and your email client.

We strongly suggest to set up a dedicated account fairlicensing@youdomain.com. This will allow you to set up an automatic forwarding of incoming messages (replies, bounces, etc.) into the Fair Licensing system to have a fully unified email experience in the system. This would not be possible, if you connect your personal email to Fair Licensing.

If you choose to connect an email account to Fair Licensing, please have the username, password, SMTP server name and port ready for the onboarding call.

Please note that for most Gmail accounts it will be necessary to create an "App Password" for Fair Licensing to send emails. Please refer to the Google Documentation to learn how to do this.

For the forwarding of inbound messages into the Fair Licensing account, please follow the steps in this article.

#4 Have your Logo and Favicon ready

You will likely need to involve your design or marketing team into this step.

In the Pro and Enterprise accounts levels you may customize the Settlement Portal by placing your own logo in the portal. You may also choose to upload a so called favicon (that is the small visual shown in the browser tab).

Please have your logo ready as a JPG or PNG with either a white or transparent background.

The logo should have a size of at least 200 x 35 pixels. 

The favicon may have a size of 32 x 32 or 64 x 64 pixels.

Mandatory Preparations that typically do not require the involvement of other departments

The tasks in this section are crucial for the setup process and must be completed before the onboarding meeting. Usually you will be able to work on these independent from other departments' contributions.

#1 Create a Customized Email Sequence for Communicating with Website Owners

As part of the Fair Licensing approach you will be informing website owners about a case by sending them a sequence of emails. For this you create standardized email templates with placeholders. The placeholders will then be replaced with a case's data upon sending the email.

We suggest preparing a template for an initial email and a first, second and third reminder.

A good email

• addresses the image user with his or her name
• mentions the domain/website on which the image was used
• gives information about you/your agency
• clearly states that you own the copyright in the picture in question
• clearly states that using the picture without permission may be a copyright violation
• shows a screenshot of the image use
• presents a settlement offer and a link to the settlement portal
• ends on a call to action to resolve the case
• possibly gives an outlook what may happen, if the case is not resolved
• ends with a valid signature identifying you and your business

Consider increasing the severity of your emails with every reminder you send. Good reminders reiterate every details about the claim and assume that the previous emails may have been lost.

Placeholders you may use in that email are, among others: the domain the case relates to, a screenshot of the webpage using your image, your original image, the name of your original image, the total amount of your offer, the URL of the settlement portal, the case id and the case PIN (the latter two are used by the recipient to log into your settlement portal).

Please note that Fair Licensing only supports "plain text", i.e. no formatting like italics, underlining, bold formatting, headlines, etc. are supported in the email.

Please have at least the intial email's template ready before the onboarding. Once you have prepared the email templates, please send them to your Fair Licensing account manager for a formal review as soon as they are ready. They will provide feedback and ensure that they meet the necessary technical requirements. You can update the templates in the system later if needed. 

#2 Define an "About Us" Text

The Settlement Portal includes an "About Us" section where you have the opportunity to showcase your company. It's important to prepare a concise text that highlights who you are and what you do, as this adds credibility to your case. Keep in mind that this section only supports plain text, which means you won't be able to use formatting like italics, underlining, bold formatting, or headlines. Additionally, you have the option to include a custom picture (JPG) that will be displayed on the right side of the text in the About Us section.

It is important to note that the About Us section must contain text and it is mandatory to provide information in this section.

#3 Define a Case Page Text

The "Case Page Text" is the information displayed to website owners when they log into the settlement portal. It appears above the section that shows the documented uses of the picture and next to the pricing details for your licensing offer. Please keep in mind that this section does not support formatting such as italics, underlining, bold formatting, or headlines.

It is mandatory to provide information in the "Case Page Text" section as it may not remain empty.

Optional Preparations

Completing the tasks in this section is optional and not completing them will not hinder the onboarding meeting in any way. Note that there may be a legal requirement in your country to provide a Data Privacy Statement and/or an Imprint/Provider Marking.

#1 Define FAQs

The Settlement Portal has an optional "FAQ" section in which you may present a list of questions you expect from website owners - and answers you'd like to give to those questions.

You may leave this section open in the beginning and update it with questions you receive after you started working with Fair Licensing.

#2 Have your Data Privacy Statement and Imprint/Provider Marking URLs ready

If you are required by applicable law to proivde an imprint/contact details/provider marking page and/or a data privacy statement on the settlement portal, make sure you have the URLs of those pages on your main website ready so that they links to these pages can be published in the settlement portal.