Hi, We are trying out Asana (and several other softwares) for Project Management at our small digital marketing agency. We have @ 60 clients. On a monthly basis we need to keep track of writing blogs, QA blogs, post blogs, create video, post video, create and post social etc. What I can’t quite figure out is how to structure things within Asana - should each client be a project (but then how do you get an overview of your progress across all clients) or should each month of content creation be a project - trying to wrap my head around what the most efficient way to set things up is. Any suggestions about what other folks are doing with situations where you have the same tasks every month and need to keep track of both what’s being done on a monthly basis as well as each client would be much appreciated!
Sarah, I also work for a digital marketing agency, and we organize our client content like this:
-Monthly editorial calendars in board form (Ex- November 2017 has columns titled “Draft Edited” “Ready for Review” “Sent to Client,” etc etc. Each task in these is a blog article that gets moved from column to column as it makes its way to eventual publishing)
-Monthly social calendars in board form (one column for each client, each task is a social post)
-Client Requests in list form (each client is a section, and any tasks under that section are associated with that client)
All of these projects you can create one time, and then make into a template! So, we have an editorial calendar template that has all of our columns, and we can just copy it each month and add all of the blogs (aka tasks) that are new for that month. Same goes for social. We keep our client requests project ongoing, as it is constantly changing and tasks are being completed and added all the time.
We also have projects for video production/distribution, specific campaigns for clients, and website launches. Asana is a life-saver!
We are a very small PR and social media agency and have recently switched to Asana. We work a rather old fashioned “job bag” system.
Firstly we create a team for each client, which contains all our personnel (all 4 of them) using a three letter identifier (making it simpler to send emails to the client conversation).
Then we have a spreadsheet that contains a long list of consecutively numbered projects prefixed by their 3 letter identifier (INS, FNS, EOE etc) We do this because we needed to be able to reference previous projects from our former project management system.
As we add new jobs/projects for clients, we update the master project list. Our project templates have a task to do this so it always happens.
This helps us organise our projects by client.
For each project we have, at the top of the task list, a “marker” task with a custom field called “Project status”. This lets us label projects (in the absence of being able to tag or otherwise identify projects) with statuses like “in briefing”, “drafting”, “internal review”.
We then use saved advanced searches to, for example, return a list of projects “in briefing”, or all the projects for a given client (team).
Each project is then progressed with tasks as per normal. We post Conversation topics using a naming convention to simplfy search. For example, if a press shot arrives for a project, we will create a new conversation thread entitled #EOE 2017 IMAGES and post the image there.
Similarly we create conversation titles using other keywords - so for emails from our clients approving a press release, we will forward the email to project+8763827368763@mail.asana.com with the subjectline #EOE 2017 APPROVAL
Other keywords we have used are DRAFT, BRIEF, CONTACT, and so on.
This helps us find the information we need, by simply typing into the search box #EOE 2017 and seeing what pops up in the typeahead bar.
I’m not convinced that using “marker” tasks to denote project status is anything more than an inelegant kludge, and I am looking through the forums at the moment for alternative workarounds.
Update - those Marker Tasks turned out to be very useful. Reading community use cases, I discovered the utility of multi-homed tasks.
Each new press release project template now contains a bunch of Admin tasks, to which we have added “Add project marker task to Master Project Organiser”.
Master project organiser is a project to which all active project marker tasks are added to - when we view this project we can see all our projects and what level of progress they are at:
The list view in the master project organiser means we can easily jump to the project in question. The only gotcha is if a project isn’t added to the master project organiser via a multi-homed marker task, then we don’t see it … which is probably going to cause a major #fail at some point - so further research through asana communities required - and suggestions welcome.
The master project organiser:
