Hey everyone,
I’m in the process of getting our Marketing team up and running with Asana. Our team is split into a few different groups: Demand Generation (my team), Market Management (vertical market owners) and Execs.
I’m trying to think through the best way to give my team visibility into all the sub-tasks that comprise each campaign, while giving the Market Management a mid-level view for their specific vertical/practice area, and our Exec team a 30,000 ft view of all major milestones for all campaigns (dates when programs are launching, not all the steps leading up to that).
I’m sure a lot of you have worked through this, so I’m hoping you might be able to provide some examples of using tags, privacy settings, etc. to give clean views to each group of stakeholders.
Thanks in advance!
Hey Trask, very excited to hear about your foray into onboarding the department! I feel like I’m still in the middle of my efforts 
Without knowing your specific use cases, I’ll give some generalized answers to your questions:
The department could all be on the same team, and your team (demand generation) has its own projects per campaign/as needed/etc. - within those projects (as a convention) you should begin to add things like ‘Milestone Tasks’.
These are tasks that mark specific points in a campaign or project, and would be maintained by whomever owns them (or the project). Then you can add all project milestones (from all projects) into an ‘Exec’ view project, that executives will have access to - and should check for their ‘30k ft view’.
This is a really round about way of doing check-ins for executives, a more common and elegant solution perhaps would just be - instead of adding the milestone tasks to the exec-project - to use status updates. You can add executives that care about the project to the project itself, and have it so they only receive status updates in their inbox (as opposed to conversations or task creation).
Then you can just suggest that they add the project to their dashboard in Asana. Then the project owner is responsible for updating the status every Friday, and executives get dashboard summary emails Monday morning (this is a fixed schedule in Asana and cannot be changed). Read about dashboards.
For ‘mid-level’:
I’m not sure what the use case is like for this one. Do you mean like vertical management so like the Music vertical owner can see music-related campaigns, etc.? That’s just a case of making sure that they’re shared on the relevant campaign projects. If it’s an over-arching campaign that encompasses multiple verticals, I would just endeavor to try to have the projects be organized with either a section per vertical, a tag per vertical (to create searches for the vertical owners), or custom fields (to sort by them in the project itself).
That’s just scratching the surface, so let me know what you think and any other questions - happy to help!
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Caisha, thanks so much for the reply! For the questions on the mid-level/Market Manager function, I like the idea of tags, but I haven’t used them enough to know the use case. So for example, I add a tag for a specific vertical or practice area, how can that be used as a filtered view for the appropriate stakeholders? Ideally I’d like to present them with the calendar view, but I don’t believe you can show filtered views (unless maybe it’s a project calendar for, say, all campaigns in a given quarter and vertical).
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You can’t do filtered views the way you’re thinking, however you can start to utilize advanced searches. This would be where the tags come in.
For instance, X project, with Y vertical tags somewhere in there.
For the Y vertical people, you would run a search for “Tasks in X project with Y tag” - save it, rename it to something like “Project - Vertical” or whatever, then you can send it/share it with everyone who needs it (they would then have to share it too probably).
All searches also come with a calendar view, if that’s preferable. So it takes a bit of wrangling, but you can make it so they can see just their tasks - however, they’d still have to be able to see all of the project (or be following the task) or else the tasks in the search won’t show up.
If you have premium, I would maybe suggest custom fields over tags, just have an org-wide custom field that you add to almost every project (or whatever) and have it be a drop down for the vertical.
If you don’t like the idea of creating a new search for every project (and then sharing it with the right people, every time), you could do the search as “all tasks in X team(s) with X custom field or tag” - that will encompass every project they can see with that custom field or tag.
However it’s important to note that there won’t be much in the way of organization view (it’s a straight list, some sort options but no sections) - but if they want mostly calendar view that would work.
You could also maybe play around with having home base projects for tasks of a particular vert, etc. (like we do with design, all design tasks from everywhere are multi-homed into a design pipeline project). This might make it a bit easier to onboard people with, but up to you.
https://asana.com/guide/resources/videos/multi-home