How best to "deliver" information to an external client

Brand new to Asana, but very excited by its capabilities. Please go easy on me if this is a stupid question… :slight_smile:

We are a marketing agency with external clients. I’ve read a ton of Asana and Asana Forum docs about setup suggestions, learned a ton, and am very grateful - thanks.

We used the recommended strategy of creating an internal and external project for each client, which I love and makes perfect sense.

When assigning a client a task (add us to your Facebook Business Manager, for example), that’s simple and straightforward. They do it, or ask questions, and mark it complete when they are done.

My question is when it is OUR team’s task to send the client information (let’s say a short text blurb with a link to download some of our assets), what’s the best way to do that?

I was hoping I could keep that task in the internal project, assigned to us, and simply add them as a collaborator, and they would get an email notification and the job would be done. But unless I did something wrong, they didn’t receive an email notification when I assigned them as a collaborator.

But as I’ve thought about it, that’s probably too loose anyway, and instead of “pushing” some information to them and not truly knowing whether they’ve gotten it, to re-write the task to be “Acknowledge receipt of URL for our assets”. Then I’d put the blurb and URL in the description, and assign it to them so they get notified, and then they can ask questions and/or mark it complete once they get that URL and the assets downloaded successfully?

Hope that makes sense…

Thanks in advance!

Scott

Hi @Scott_Harvey

Glad you are enjoying Asana…

What about adding a SubTask under your internal project task and multi home that in your client project and assign it to your client. Best of both worlds then…

Jason.

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Thanks much. That seems like a smart way to do it - I appreciate it!

Scott

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@Scott_Harvey, I’d also point out that one of the great features (really, THE killer feature of Asana in my opinion) is the ability to assign the same task to multiple projects. You could have a task living on an internal board. When it becomes actionable by the client, you could add the external board to the task and it will live on both the internal and external board. It will keep all of the field settings from the internal board and when added to the external board any additional fields that are on that board will become available.

You may still want to create a sub-task, as suggested, but the same advice would work for that. One fairly strange yet really cool thing is that a sub-task doesn’t exist in a project initially (it belongs to the parent task, which belongs to the project) but you can actually assign the sub-task to another project or the project that the original task belongs to.

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Funny … as soon as I saw the ability to assign the same task to multiple projects, I thought that I had finally found the system I’d been looking for forever. So, I completely agree with you. :slight_smile:

I’m still working through the logic of everything and trying to do it the smart way given this feature, but I think the internal task instructing our people when, if, and how to assign/“deliver” that information to a client works pretty well.

Really appreciate you taking the time to comment!

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Glad we could all help @Scott_Harvey

This is a great forum for ideas and information on how to achieve things inside Asana.

So don’t be a stranger…

Jason.

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Love these questions! Please know that other Asana users love reading and problem solving these types of things. Here’s the best way! Set up your clients at the Team level. Invite your customer to the team. Create your external projects inside as “Public to Team” so that you can all see it. For internal efforts that you do not want to share, create “Private to Project” projects and invite your internal co-workers. You can use the multi-project approach for ease, ensure that there is a wall between internal/external, and use the team conversations for sharing your deliverables. You can @ sign to your heart’s content, format beautifully, and attach documents. This will open up the ability to use the Dashboard capability since your customer will have multiple projects. Have fun!

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That’s great input also, thanks very much - I appreciate it.

Scott

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