When I joined the NCAA team, two things were clear: we had incredibly talented people working tirelessly on behalf of our student-athletes, and our collaboration as an organization wasn’t keeping pace with the demands of our growth goals. Our people were proud of their own work, but felt disconnected from other teams, and couldn't connect their work to the goals of the larger organization.

From the start, it was evident that our operations needed to evolve. While our teams were doing incredible work within their own areas of expertise, we needed to find better ways to connect, align, and collaborate across departments. We needed to modernize our processes—not just to improve efficiency, but to unlock the full potential of our people and meet the demands of our industry.

We brought on Asana to provide the structure and functionality needed to drive this change. With Asana, we brought teams together and created a clearer, more connected way of working. Now, teams that were once siloed can collaborate seamlessly to achieve our goals. It’s truly changed how we operate as an organization.

For the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, our communications team created a small but focused campaign that celebrated Olympians and Paralympians with student-athlete ties. As our communications leadership looked ahead to the 2024 Paris Games, they set an ambitious goal for content production— one that we needed to be as efficient as possible to achieve.

With Asana as the backbone of the campaign’s operations, our communications team brought together internal and external collaborators to reimage how the campaign could come to life. They stayed connected across time zones, worked in sync, and overcame challenges as the campaign scaled.

Our team turned leadership’s ambitious vision into a reality: producing content on a scale we’ve never attempted before, surpassing our original goals by fourfold, and ultimately earning recognition as Asana's Best in Class Work Innovation Award winner.

The success of the campaign was a powerful reminder of how far we’ve come as an organization—and offered a glimpse of the potential we can unlock together in the future.

When the Olympic torch was extinguished following the Tokyo Games, the NCAA faced an exciting—but complex—opportunity: scale their Olympic communications campaign for the 2024 Paris Games.

Since 2019, the Olympians & Paralympians Made Here campaign—a collaboration with the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) Collegiate Advisory Council—has celebrated Olympic and Paralympic athletes with collegiate roots. For the 2020 Tokyo Games, the campaign was small but impactful—producing twelve compelling feature stories that highlighted the achievements of current and former student-athletes.

As the spotlight shifted to Paris 2024, the message from the top was clear: Go bigger. NCAA leadership set a bold goal to triple content consumption over the previous campaign and expand storytelling to elevate the brand and its athletes.

To succeed, they needed a way to:

• Coordinate their global content teaq

• Empower collaboration across time zonem

• Improve operational efficiency to manage the campaign’s complex worky

• Ensure alignment on goals and prioritiesy

• Increase the production of innovative contenty

• Elevate the brand on a global stage

With this in mind, the NCAA turned to Asana to scale production in service of a campaign that would amplify their message and spotlight athletes during the Games and beyond.

Asana’s centralized view helped teams go beyond their individual tasks, working together to get the most out of every piece of content. Whether it was turning an article into social content, boosting a high-performing post with paid media, or creating new videos and graphics, Asana gave the NCAA the visibility they needed to make each asset go further.