At Monotype, part of the company’s mission as a design thought leader & creative services provider was to offer innovative design resources, such as eBooks, articles, webinars and events, that can empower big brands, creative agencies and individual freelancers.
For any given project, stakeholders needed a simple, quick way send in their marketing & event requests to Revenue Marketing. Each request for project assistance, from a hosted event to a segmented customer list, required creative assets and/or logistics with specific workflows and lead time to make it come to life.
The caveat? There was no formal way or system to communicate, document or track a given request. Flurries of emails and manually updating spreadsheets wasn’t cutting it since that process caused confusion or production delays.
The solution? Monotype needed one cohesive way to collect all project inquiries, no exceptions. This would become a project request prompt card system that allowed stakeholders to send over their requests while giving Revenue Marketing all the required information in one take.
How it was done:
The Marketing Operations team already had backend requirement checklists to build, QA and launch each type of project. First, I worked with this team to identify general the pain points that were causing production delays for any and all campaigns. Then, I led working sessions with the MOps team and different stakeholders to map out the labor needed to complete each project request type. From there, we were able to determine what steps could be simplified or eliminated.
All the working session conversations and revised snapshots for “ideal” production processes gave me enough information so I could build & test out a prompt card system and a campaign calendar aimed to support any type of project request.
With rounds of feedback from various colleagues, betaing, revisions and approvals, the final iterations for the prompt card system and calendar were rolled out. A guide outlining the formal project request policy and tool tutorials were also circulated.
Once stakeholders began using the prompt card system and referring to calendar for campaigns, this made it easier for project members to a. communicate with each other, b. set realistic project expectations from the start, and c. track overall project progress using the checklist generated from a stakeholder’s submitted project request.
At the end of the day, 2 productivity tools built with technology we already used helped improve workflows by offering stakeholders a way to send their project request with specs in 1 step. This also gave Revenue Marketing an overall glance of the workload involved per request, which initiated earlier planning and task prioritization.
Monotype went from launching 1 marketing campaign per month to an average of 5-7 campaigns per month. That’s at least 500% more than before!
Want to improve your project workflows and process? Let’s work together!
Kristina Moy 