Ticketing from Email to Asana

[Kayla_Cunningham]

My team gets dozens of quick-turnaround photo requests via email that we have not yet set up in Asana and are still keeping track through an excel sheet.

What have you seen is the best process for getting a heavy amount of tasks into Asana? Wondering if a ticketing system connected to our email would be most beneficial but would love to hear anyones take on this!

[Jan-Rienk]

Hi @Kayla_Cunningham ,

Welcome to the forum!

It’s hard to advise without getting more context.

A couple of questions:

• Are the requests from inside or from outside of the organisation?
• What do you mean when you say photo request?
• What exactly do you mean with “connected to email”?
• Could you paint the picture of what your desired state looks like?

Also, let me know if I can move your topic to Tips and Tricks , as a lot more people will be able to see your request here. (This part of the forum is only visible to Ambassadors)

[Kayla_Cunningham]

Thanks for the speedy response! First of all yes totally fine with moving this to tips & tricks!
To answer your questions:

1. The requests are internal
2. photo requests of product for e-commerce, we call them brand standards, typical generic photos of product for shopping on our website
3. When I say connected to email i know that some people use Asana joined with their email - getting emails to automatically become tasks in Asana - this is a grey area for me as we just joined Enterprise and have the “ok” from IT to connect outside softwares/apps to our Asana
4. ideally we would get an email for a photo request, that request would populate into a task into asana and would start a list of to-do’s for our team to keep track of, rather than them manually adding it into an excel sheet. Hoping this will keep things more organized and will speedy up the process

Hopefully that helps!

[Jan-Rienk]

Great!

@Kayla_Cunningham

The requests are internal

Can we assume everyone doing requests has an Asana account?

@Kayla_Cunningham

photo requests of product for e-commerce, we call them brand standards, typical generic photos of product for shopping on our website

So a colleague needs a photo to put on the website, and they ask your team to provide it.

@Kayla_Cunningham

When I say connected to email i know that some people use Asana joined with their email - getting emails to automatically become tasks in Asana - this is a grey area for me as we just joined Enterprise and have the “ok” from IT to connect outside softwares/apps to our Asana

There are a couple of ways to go about getting email into Asana. One question I’d ask is would you want the request to be an email in the first place? If you use an Asana form you could also set up some required questions to make sure you get all the information you need to start work straight away. This also opens up possibilities to automatically assing people based on the answers given in the form, and automatically adding the submitter as a collaborator so you can talk about the task in Asana as opposed to email. For that last bit to work all submitters need to have an Asana account though.

@Kayla_Cunningham

ideally we would get an email for a photo request, that request would populate into a task into asana and would start a list of to-do’s for our team to keep track of, rather than them manually adding it into an excel sheet. Hoping this will keep things more organized and will speedy up the process

You’ll find what you need to accomplish this here: Email tasks to Asana

Still, from an adoption perspective I’d be curious why you’d want the work to start as an email.

[Kayla_Cunningham]

• Most internal requestors do not have an Asana account - this is relatively new for our company and adopted mainly by my team
• Essentially yes, either going on our website or our database to work with sales (all similar requests though)
• Ideally we’d love to have this be a ‘form to Asana’ process but we are a bit trepidatious of the learning curve since these request are almost always ASAP requests - I think I’ll offer both as options to my team and I’ll check out that link.

[Jan-Rienk]

A couple of flavours that come to mind:

• Offer Asana form for internal users (and auto-add them as collaborators)
• Offer Asana form for external users (default form option) and communicate through email but keep track in Asana
• Auto forward the email to Asana project (Maybe set this up with IT and do some testing to confirm it works, I seem to have some trouble with this at the moment. Not sure if this works if the sender is not in Asana)
• Auto reply that you only take requests through Asana and link both forms.

Mix and match.

Good luck!