I am the director of marketing for a presenting arts organization in Michigan. I use asana daily for my department and am working to get our whole org (less than 20) on board to use it for event communication and logistics. I was wondering if anyone else uses it in a smiliar way? Right now each “show” is a task on a board (by season). This works well but I am wondering how others do it? What automations do you have set up? How do you have things organized so the whole team isnt overwhelmed but different departments have what they need and access to everything else?
What has worked well for me is having a single “channel” project that holds all events, and then creating a primary milestone task for each event as you mentioned you are already doing. You can even use start and end dates to show multi-day events. This makes it easy to share visualizations of a calendar or timeline view across all events.
But I also like using rules or templates to set up all related subtasks (e.g. budget finalization, booth logistics, pre-show email, during-show social, post-show sales plan…whatever pieces you typically use). And each subtask then has its own owner, based on who is responsible for that particular piece or deliverable. In my setups I typically have “channel projects” for each of the core related channels (email, social, collateral, events, digital) so each subtask has more than one related project.
For example, you could have a subtask under an event milestone that is for a pre-show email, and that subtask would also get added to the Email project. This way, whoever is managing emails can look in the Email project’s Calendar view and not miss anything, yet you only had to enter the email task once. Everyone is working from the same shared task, so you know you always have the latest updates. Asana calls this “multi-homing” (Asana Help Center)
Ideally you could use project rules to automatically generate a core set of subtasks for each event, pre-assign the subtasks (if your owners are consistent), and then use the relative date feature to automatically assign due dates that are all based on the show dates. For example, you could have a rule that creates a pre-show email subtask for 7 days before the show milestone due date. But I have had trouble with this via Rules because it fails to distinguish between Tasks and Subtasks, and you end up with extra sub-sub-subtasks. Instead I would recommend using templates. Asana has a ton of great resource information on templates!
As the earlier poster noted, of course this is all based on how YOU already manage (or would like to manage) your events. Working with the team to map out an ideal set of subtasks ahead of time means everyone agrees to the general template, and then you can always modify the subtasks if needed for shows that are a little different from the norm. Have fun!