The NCAA drives 4x content consumption with Asana

Highlights

Challenges

• Inefficiencies in managing large-scale, complex projects overwhelmed teams, and impacted productivity, deadlines, and work quality.

• Dependency on outdated systems and disconnected tools left information scattered and slowed progress. 

• Insufficient visibility hindered leadership's ability to track progress and allocate resources effectively, which slowed decision-making.

• A siloed operational structure made cross-team collaboration difficult, creating roadblocks to scaling as projects grew more complex.

• Gaps in process documentation made it hard to retain institutional knowledge, creating challenges for business continuity and onboarding.

Solutions

• Centralized work management provides a single, unified platform for cross-functional collaboration across the NCAA.

• Integrating tools like Google Drive, Slack, Teams, and SharePoint creates a seamless workflow, making it easier to share data across platforms.

• Goal-setting and tracking capabilities improve visibility and data-driven decision-making.

• Process standardization and workflow automation streamline work across departments, ensuring consistency and scalability.

• A single source of truth for all documentation simplifies knowledge sharing and onboarding, making hand-offs smoother and helping new hires get up to speed faster.

Outcomes

• Improved efficiency in planning and executing complex, large-scale projects.

• Accelerated delivery of 80+ collegiate championships annually.

• Scaled the 2024 Paris Olympics campaign 4x beyond the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, exceeding performance goals.

• Increased content production by 2,770%, driving a 1,440% boost in audience impressions.

• Provided leadership with real-time insights to align work with broader organizational goals.

• Resolved problems faster and improved decision-making across teams.

• Improved cross-functional collaboration, ensuring smoother project execution.

• Reduced missed deadlines and improved transparency across departments.

• Centralized institutional knowledge to ensure continuity and speed up onboarding.

A game-changing transformation for the NCAA

When new leadership set out to modernize how the NCAA collaborated, the organization knew they needed a solution to connect their teams and simplify complex processes. At the time, departments within the NCAA operated more like separate entities than a cohesive unit, and larger, cross-functional projects faced bottlenecks from disconnected tools and inconsistent processes. 

To support the transition, leaders emphasized how Asana could connect daily tasks to larger organizational goals, integrate seamlessly with existing tools, and standardize processes. The championships team emerged as an early adopter, showcasing Asana’s potential by building templates to manage 84 championships across various tasks and teams. Their early success inspired broader adoption across the NCAA. The team shared their workflows—and success—organization-wide, helping establish Asana as a foundational tool for collaboration.

Now, Asana serves as a central hub for teams across the organization, breaking down silos and enabling seamless management of cross-departmental projects. This transformation set a new standard for cross-functional collaboration and provided a strong foundation for the communications team as they scaled their efforts for their 2024 Olympic campaign.

When I joined the NCAA, cross-functional collaboration was broken, particularly when different departments needed to share expertise. Teams weren’t used to working together, which led to significant coordination gaps. Implementing Asana helped us close those gaps.”

Asana for campaign management

Scaling content creation for the 2024 Paris Olympics

The 2024 Olympians & Paralympians Made Here campaign, organized for the Paris Olympic Games, marked a new level of scale for the NCAA’s communications teams. Leadership set an ambitious goal: triple content production and audience engagement compared to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The Paris campaign required collaboration across departments, locations, and external partners—a challenge complicated by disconnected tools and inconsistent processes.

Asana provided the foundation for bringing these teams together. Acting as the campaign’s central hub, Asana standardized workflows and connected teams across time zones. The platform served as the campaign’s connective tissue—keeping everyone on the same page and helping teams work together to dramatically increase the campaign’s reach and impact. 

The results were remarkable: the NCAA scaled the Paris campaign 4x beyond Tokyo, produced 2,770% more content, and drove a 1,440% increase in audience impressions. This success set a new standard for collaboration and innovation, earning the NCAA Asana’s Best in Class Work Innovation Award.

For the 2024 Paris Olympics campaign, we had to scale our efforts exponentially. Asana was the connective thread that seamlessly integrated teams, workflows, and time zones.”

Standardized workflows scale content production by 2,770%

• Campaign managers monitor thousands of tasks related to content creation in a shared project, giving leaders an overarching view of all work in flight.

• Using intake forms, teams collect content submissions from internal and external stakeholders in one place. All necessary information is captured up front to streamline kick-offs. 

• Task templates standardize the end-to-end workflow for all campaign assets, from social posts to infographics. This repeatable process reduces errors, accelerates production, and ensures consistent delivery.

• Subtasks break down complex production steps among multiple collaborators, so roles, timing, and deliverables are always clear.

• Pre-set rules automate manual steps to help work move seamlessly across global teams. 

For the Tokyo Games, we created 12 feature articles. For the Paris Games, we created 117. We scaled hard—because with Asana, we were ready.”

Centralizing campaign management improves coordination and delivery 

• Asana acts as the single source of truth for all campaign management tasks, reducing confusion and making it easier to spot dependencies and avoid bottlenecks.

• Managers use custom project views to visualize work in progress and surface the most relevant information based on their specific needs.

• Slack and Outlook integrations ensure timely communication and notifications across existing tech, so no one misses a beat. 

• Real-time conversations and follow-up actions are captured in tasks, reducing app-switching and documenting context teams teams need.

With people across time zones and countries, Asana was a game-changer—our team could log in, see exactly where projects stood, and instantly know what needed to happen next.”

Real-time reporting enables smarter, faster decision-making

• Campaign managers use portfolios for at-a-glance visibility across all campaign work, helping them quickly track progress, spot dependencies, and prioritize work.

• With more accurate, real-time views of work data, leadership, makes informed decisions and optimizes resource allocation throughout the campaign.

• Global custom fields standardize the collection of key metrics to ensure consistency and allow easy filtering and reporting across all projects.

Asana gave our leadership team real-time visibility into every facet of the campaign. For the first time, we could see how daily tasks connected to our larger goals and immediately spot where resources were needed most. This clarity empowered us to make faster, data-driven decisions.”

Asana for event planning

Bringing structure and visibility to championship execution

The NCAA’s Championships team manages 84 of the NCAA’s 90 championships, coordinating every detail from site selection and venue contracts to ticketing, marketing, and broadcast logistics. 

Before Asana, the team relied on physical binders and disconnected digital tools to manage championship planning and execution—a process that lacked consistency. Now, Asana acts as a single source of truth, connecting tasks, timelines, and communication in one place, making it easier to coordinate work and maintain business continuity. 

With Asana, we’ve streamlined how we manage championships—centralizing all our work on one platform. This allows us to focus on executing exceptional events while maintaining continuity across years and team members.”

Standardized workflows streamline championship execution 

• Every championship begins with a structured project template, ensuring consistency across all 84 events. These templates are tailored to the four key championship types—team sports, individual sports, indoor sports, and outdoor sports.

• Essential tasks—such as completing site visits, coordinating with the media, and finalizing signage plans—are pre-built into each template, providing a reliable framework while allowing flexibility for each event’s unique needs.

• Each project is connected to the NCAA’s broader organizational goals, making it easy for teams to see how their work contributes to broader objectives and long-term priorities.

• Within each project, tasks are assigned to specific team members, making it clear who’s responsible for what and keeping work on track. 

• Conversations related to each task happen in the task’s comment section, and all relevant files are attached directly to the task, eliminating scattered communication and lost information.  

• Custom fields capture key details like due dates, championship type, and task status—providing structured data that feeds into project-specific dashboards.

• These dashboards give leadership real-time insights into project progress, potential bottlenecks, and resourcing capacity, helping them make adjustments as needed. 

• At the start of a new season, teams duplicate the previous year’s projects, carrying over tasks, workflows, and assignments to maintain continuity while allowing for necessary updates. 

Real-time visibility drives informed decision-making

• Dashboards provide an at-a-glance view of project progress, helping team leaders address challenges, make informed resourcing decisions, and keep projects on track. 

• Plus, team managers can easily visualize the full project scope, like the number of collaborators involved and tasks in progress. This clarity helps them build a strong case for additional staffing or support when needed.

Business continuity ensures long-term operational success

• Asana centralizes institutional knowledge, making it easier for new staff to onboard and seamlessly pick up where previous team members left off.

• With all work housed in one place, handoffs are seamless—ensuring that no matter who joins or transitions off a project, teams can keep work moving forward without disruption.

• Agendas for leadership meetings and business reviews are managed in Asana, keeping all discussion topics, decisions, and follow-ups in one easily accessible location.

Asana for HR and people operations

Creating clarity and collaboration in HR

The NCAA’s HR team plays a key role in supporting employees across the organization, from hiring and onboarding employees to managing their performance and benefits., Historically, the department operated in silos, with each team member owning a specific function. Without shared knowledge or collaboration, work stalled when someone was out of office, and other departments lacked visibility into HR processes or their role in them.

To solve these challenges, the HR team adopted Asana to improve coordination and process consistency. By creating clear, shared workflows, Asana makes it easier for the HR team to work together, helps other teams understand their role in HR processes, and keeps work moving without delays.

Clarity on expectations has been a challenge in the past. It’s frustrating when outcomes don’t meet expectations, often because they weren’t clearly communicated. Asana helps manage the human element of work by removing emotions and making expectations visible and specific. This makes it easier for teams to focus on what’s going well—and celebrate it.”

A single source of truth for HR process provides transparency and accountability  

• HR–related projects are broken down into clear stages and tasks, making it easy to see who’s responsible for what and what work comes next.

• The structure helps teams across the business understand their role in HR processes, providing a shared reference point for expectations.

• With everything in one platform, it’s easier to see what’s going well and where attention is needed, bringing greater clarity and accountability.

Talent acquisition workflows improve hiring visibility

• A recruitment portfolio tracks open positions, showing how many jobs are available and where they are in the hiring process.

• A talent acquisition template outlines every step of the hiring process, ensuring alignment across HR, hiring managers, and other stakeholders.

• With a more transparent process, the broader organization has a clearer understanding of what goes into hiring and how different teams contribute.

Structured onboarding ensures a smooth employee experience

• An onboarding template provides a structured process from the moment a new hire is made through their first 90 days.

• Tasks are broken down by timeline—two weeks before start date, day one, and 30-, 60-, and 90-day milestones—helping managers and new hires stay on track.

• Key onboarding tasks—like providing a laptop, setting up supplies, giving an office tour, and making introductions—are built into the workflow and assigned to HR team members, hiring managers, and the new hire’s team, making responsibilities clear.

Conclusion

Laying the foundation for long-term success

As the NCAA looks toward future campaigns and initiatives—including the 2028 Olympic Games—they’re committed to expanding Asana’s use across departments. Moving forward, the organization plans to broaden the use of automations to enhance workflows, leverage Asana’s reporting features to inform strategy, and explore ways to integrate AI into their large-scale, cross-functional projects.

Asana will continue to play a critical role in ensuring business continuity for the NCAA. By documenting processes and creating templates based on organizational workflows, the NCAA is fostering collaboration and reducing reliance on isolated expertise—ensuring that teams can seamlessly carry work forward.

By positioning Asana as the central hub for work—an “Asana city” where every department and project is connected—the NCAA is building a future-ready organization that’s ready to empower student-athletes and support their journeys both on and off the field.

Asana became our home base during the campaign—everything lived there. Now, we're building it out into what we call our ‘Asana City,’ with neighborhoods and homes for every part of our workflow. It’s where everything connects.”