The Y marketing team shifts to remote work with Asana

YMCA Victoria is a not-for-profit with a mission to empower young people by giving them the skills and confidence to lead positive and independent lives. The organisation manages major recreation and aquatic centres across Australia, runs camps, sporting events, child care centres, leadership programs, and much more. 

YMCA Victoria’s marketing team started using Asana just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic to stay aligned so they could achieve their goals. This also coincided with a department reorganisation that brought together marketing and digital specialists from different business units into a single marketing team of about 40 people. 

Josh Russo, Digital Optimisation Manager at YMCA Victoria, led the implementation of Asana in early 2019. Initially adopted to support his team in digital services, the program was an immediate success. Asana was easy to use, allowed tasks to be added to multiple projects, and had ready-to-go templates that helped the team get started. Using Asana led to:

• Significant reduction in internal emails and double data entry by improving communication workflows.

• Improved trust among the team because of greater transparency into work they were actioning.

• More time for strategic work like website building which led to increased KPI achievement.

Thanks to the success of Asana within Josh’s team, the platform was rolled out across the wider marketing team.

Asana came in at a pivotal stage for us. It helped us work more efficiently which was crucial when we switched to remote work.”

Moving to remote work 

When the pandemic began, the marketing team, like most others around the world, switched to remote working. By this time, the team was adept at using Asana and following a monthly sprint model. Thanks to Asana’s central role in the marketing team’s day-to-day functions, changing to remote work wasn’t too disruptive. In fact, Asana was the core platform the team used to start and recover from multiple lockdowns, including one of the longest lockdown periods in the world. 

It’s really hard to get 40 people to work the same way, especially remotely. Asana made this easy thanks to our ability to create workflows and templates, assign tasks and store them in multiple projects.”

YMCA Victoria operates across multiple industries and all experienced significant changes and restrictions during lockdown periods. It was the marketing team’s responsibility to communicate to over 60,000 customers about the shut downs and re-opens, and to the thousands of staff and volunteers–and Asana was essential to this process. 

Managing lockdowns with Asana 

Here’s how the YMCA Victoria marketing team used Asana to manage the challenges brought on by COVID-19 lockdowns: 

• A restart task template with 600 subtasks exists to help the marketing team close and reopen all YMCA sites quickly. Every small detail, from changing business hours on Google to updating website information, is included in the template. At first, it took the team a week to communicate the close down or reopening of businesses; now it takes less than a day using the template–an 85% decrease in time needed. 

• Request forms were used pre-COVID but became more important during lockdowns. Using Asana Forms, people around the business can make marketing requests from any location without the worry that they’ll get lost or missed. In one month alone, the marketing team completed 316 requests, totaling 4258 tasks. 

• Reporting is now easier because Asana captures the information they need, including the number of requests completed. This makes it easier for Josh and other team leaders to keep up business-as-usual work despite lockdowns and other disruptions caused by COVID-19.

Overall, Asana makes communication and collaboration much easier across the team. The ability to create and share projects, assign tasks, and comment on them has reduced the need for internal emails. The switch to remote work further increased the use of Asana and now, most team members open Asana before any other platform when they start their working day.  

Our latest restart saw an 84% increase in web traffic and 80% increase in sales leads. Managing this wouldn’t have been possible without the processes Asana helped the team create.”

Moving to hybrid work 

YMCA Victoria has now moved to a hybrid working model. The marketing team continues to manage work in Asana. All new marketing team members follow the Asana Basics training course and then move on to a specific YMCA Victoria onboarding project which outlines internal processes, like how to use templates for team projects.

Josh has plans to create a mega project that outlines all the marketing activity planned in the upcoming year so it can be tracked and reported with even greater precision. There are also plans to create an internal Asana ambassadors club so the team can ensure they keep using that platform in the best way possible.