YMCA Victoria’s marketing team transforms project management with Asana

YMCA Victoria has served the Victorian community for over 160 years. The not-for-profit organisation delivers services at more than 150 locations every day in settings including camps, community recreation and sporting facilities, swimming pools, before and after school care, early learning centres, and youth services. With studies showing Australians are sitting more and moving less, it’s become more important than ever for YMCA Victoria to conduct work in the community. Their workforce has risen to the challenge with over 6,500 staff and volunteers working to provide YMCA services.

The digital needs of this workforce are supported by Josh Russo, Digital Optimisation Manager at YMCA Victoria, and his ambitious team. In order to better support local programs and services, Josh and his team are creating over 70 new YMCA websites that will be managed in-house. This massive project is being completed alongside their regular workload, a situation that caused a bit of chaos until Josh looked for a new work management solution.

Finding a solution to cater to the whole team

Josh knew his team’s challenges well. Tasks weren't easy to manage, accountability was difficult to track, and excessive emails and status reports were wasting time. On top of this, Josh and his team were moved into a newly created centralised marketing department. Made up of different teams and resources that were previously operating in silos across the organisation, this exciting new department needed to learn how to collaborate effectively—quickly. Josh felt the right solution would not only help his team, but it would allow the entire department to operate under one communication and work management system, driving efficiency and collaboration.

A solution that catered to the whole team would:

• Make it easier for everyone to manage their tasks, and assign work to others.

• Strengthen communication—with less email.

• Provide multiple project views like boards, lists, and timelines to suit different work styles.

• Be easy to use with a friendly interface.

The team chose Asana because it met these needs and enabled them to do even more. With the same task in multiple projects, they didn't have to duplicate data entry anymore. Plus the customisation, like adding profile photos and backgrounds, helped make it so Asana belonged to everyone.

The ability to add tasks to multiple projects is really important to us. It allows us to keep tasks tied to certain teams while also being able to collaborate and share information easily without doing extra work.”

Implementing Asana across the department

Josh collaborated with leaders from the broader marketing team to determine how work would be managed on the platform. The team leaders then used resources like email templates and workflow guidelines from the Asana Guide to help introduce the tool to the department.

Next, an Asana Customer Success Manager held a live training session and walked the team through different processes and features. This training allowed the team to ask questions and get answers in real-time, which was especially helpful for those that were new to digital work management tools.

Working faster and smarter with Asana

Asana has had a profound impact on how the marketing team operates. Today, they use Asana to manage several workflows across the team:

• Project management runs smoothly thanks to Timeline and Portfolio. The ability to assign and track tasks, visualise deadlines, and easily communicate with stakeholders has made it easier for the team to manage the development of over 70 YMCA websites.

• Digital requests now follow a standardised process. Requests are submitted through Asana Forms, which are then automatically categorised and assigned using Rules. This saves the team four steps per request for more timely delivery. For example, a branch may put in a request for a website alert which gets assigned and completed within a 72 hour deadline.

• Sprint planning is managed entirely in Asana. Portfolios and Workload provide visualisations of work timelines and allow the team to easily identify risks, plan work, and have more informed conversations.

Overall, the use of the rules feature personally saves Josh one hour of reporting per week and allows his digital team to effectively manage the hundreds of requests they receive per year.

Communication across the entire marketing team is now streamlined, which has led to a drastic reduction in email and double data entry. Everyone has more time for strategic work, which has allowed the team to meet all their KPIs on time.

Asana helps me keep my team’s workload balanced and helps us have informed discussions with stakeholders about timelines and work progress.”

Looking to the future

YMCA Victoria is undertaking a total digital transformation which will help future-proof the organisation and ensure their services are better than ever. This involves continuing to explore the different ways Asana can be used to manage work and bring teams even closer together.