Children’s Health℠ gains back 223 days annually with collaborative work management

Highlights

Challenges

• Siloed tools and fragmented communication across multiple platforms led to frequent miscommunications and challenges when collaborating with external vendors. 

• Inefficient work prioritization caused teams to spend too much time on low-impact tasks rather than strategic initiatives.

• Operational inefficiencies and limited marketing resources made it difficult for the team to support broader business objectives and quickly respond to strategic opportunities.

Solution

• Unified collaboration hub: Adopted collaborative work management technology to consolidate siloed tools and fragmented communication into a single platform, reducing miscommunications, fostering seamless collaboration, and providing a single source of truth for all stakeholders.

• Standardized workflows and automations: By leveraging workflows, automations, intake forms, and multi-homing features within the Asana platform, the team standardizes processes and streamlines operations, enabling better prioritization of high-impact work and innovative initiatives.

• Improved resource allocation: With visibility across teams and projects, the team keeps work on track and allocates their limited resources toward strategic priorities.

Outcomes

• 223 workdays saved annually 

• 100% satisfaction in how teams work together

• 2-hour weekly reduction in internal meetings

• 45% faster time-to-market for creative assets

• 95% improvement in cross-functional collaboration for video and photography projects

Revolutionizing marketing operations at Children’s Health

In 2022, Children’s Health launched a marketing operations team to expand its reach and strengthen its reputation through diversified marketing strategies. However, the team faced operational challenges:

• Fragmented workflows: With over nine separate project and ticketing systems, teams were siloed and processes were inconsistent.

• Inefficient collaboration: Disconnected tools led to time-consuming processes and frequent miscommunications, slowing down progress on high-impact initiatives.

To address these challenges, the marketing operations team opted to move to a collaborative work management tool in January 2023. Their goals were to:

• Centralize work: Asana would serve as a single source of truth, improving visibility, reducing the need for department-wide meetings, and streamlining workflows.

• Standardize processes: A consistent project management framework aligned teams across departments and clarified priorities.

• Enable scalability: By saving time and focusing resources, the team can prioritize high-impact initiatives, helping the organization reach more patient families and achieve key goals.

In just sixteen months, Children’s Health successfully rolled out collaborative work management across Marketing and Communications, transforming how the team works and prioritizes their efforts. The team’s innovative use of Asana earned them the Marketing Visionary Work Innovation Award, a testament to their ability to scale efforts while strengthening their impact on families and the community.

At Children’s Health, marketing and communications plays a pivotal role as the connective tissue of our organization. By centralizing our marketing efforts in Asana, we’ve streamlined collaboration and positioned ourselves to deliver meaningful outcomes for the patients and families we serve.”

Simplifying strategic planning for better outcomes 

Before adopting collaborative work management, the marketing department relied on presentations, documents, and spreadsheets to manage strategic planning. By transitioning to Asana, the team centralized their planning process, automated workflows, and created a more cohesive system.

Centralized planning creates alignment

• Strategic plans are built in Asana as dedicated projects, creating a centralized hub for all planning efforts.

• Teams across the marketing department operate within the same strategic plan, improving visibility, keeping teams outside marketing informed, and eliminating the need for separate documents or tools.

• By standardizing the planning processes, the team ensures consistency across workflows and keeps work from falling through the cracks. 

• Using multi-homing, which allows users to include a single task in multiple projects, teams can connect tasks from the strategic plan to the creative queue, allowing them to track all campaign assets in one place.

Improved focus delivers measurable impact

• Real-time dashboards give teams and leaders visibility into workloads and project progress, improving resource allocation and helping identify roadblocks early to keep strategic projects on track.

• By automating planning processes and eliminating inefficiencies, the marketing team gained greater capacity to focus on high-priority initiatives, achieving their 2023 goal of dedicating 80% of their time to strategic work.

Driving results with streamlined campaign management

The Marketing & Communications department plays a critical role in enhancing the organization’s national reputation through initiatives like email marketing campaigns, targeted digital strategies, and multimedia content. 

Previously, managing a high volume of campaigns across siloed tools led to inefficiencies, miscommunication, and delays. By centralizing work in Asana, these challenges were resolved—improving collaboration, maintaining visibility, and accelerating results.

Unified work accelerates campaign timelines

• All marketing activities are tracked in a single platform, centralizing campaign management from start to finish.

• Cross-functional teams and external agency partners work in shared projects, reducing miscommunication and improving coordination.

• Dashboards and portfolio views provide real-time visibility into team workloads, ensuring projects stay on track and deadlines are met.

• Standardized campaign workflows enable faster planning and execution of creative assets, improving speed to market and driving high-quality output.

Collaboration tools improve alignment across teams

• Real-time updates and automations allow the team to focus more time on planning innovative campaigns rather than chasing updates.

• Time to report on campaign outcomes decreased by 80% thanks to Asana’s reporting dashboards, which provide faster insights and streamline the measurement process.

• Portfolio views visualize key project stats, such as total tasks completed, providing insights during postmortem reviews to help the team continuously improve their processes.

Transforming creative production for faster execution and delivery

Before adopting collaborative work management, creative requests for marketing initiatives were managed through email, leading to inefficiencies and inconsistent workflows. With approximately 150 creative assets in the queue at any time, the team needed a solution to streamline the intake and production process, freeing them to focus on creating high-quality work. Asana transformed their creative production process.

Standardized forms and workflows improve efficiency

• Creative requests—including video, photography, email, and print production—are submitted through customized intake forms tailored to each asset type and project need.

• The forms use custom fields to capture essential details upfront, such as timelines, asset type, and priorities, ensuring requests are complete before moving forward.

• Once approved, requests are converted into active projects. Tasks, timelines, and team members are automatically assigned based on project templates, streamlining workflows and ensuring consistency.

• Flexible project templates allow teams to adjust timelines and dependencies for their unique needs, reducing setup time while keeping projects on track.

Improved efficiency and resource management 

• Portfolio views provide real-time insights into designers’ workloads, helping managers balance capacity and assign projects efficiently. This improved workload visibility by 25% and increased designer ability to prioritize urgent projects by 95%.

• Capturing project details through intake forms boosted efficiency by 25%, saving 2.5 hours per request and 115 total hours across Q1 and Q2 of 2024.

• A new video and photography report improved visibility into that team’s work by 98%, enabling better coordination and decision-making.

• Shared projects fostered seamless collaboration across teams and external partners, improving cross-functional collaboration by 95% for video and photography projects and 25% for email marketing workflows.

• Standardized workflows reduced project creation time by 20% for creative assets and 80% for video and photography projects, helping accelerate time-to-market by 45% for creative assets.

Creating a brighter future for children

With the efficiencies and improvements collaborative work management has made to their operations, the team is poised to take their marketing efforts to the next level—streamlining workflows, improving collaboration, and delivering impactful campaigns that support Children’s Health’s mission of making life better for children.