McKinney Health is a specialist agency providing a wide range of marketing services to health and wellness brands. Launched in 2022, the agency is a department within the wider McKinney group, which has five offices across the US. McKinney Health is an all-star assembly of people who have worked across the health sector and has grown to the size of a mid-sized agency in its own right. McKinney Health offers a wide range of marketing services, from email marketing to print brochures, online ads, video content, website design and more. Its client base is chiefly made up of companies within the health and wellness sector.
McKinney Health started using Hive in June 2023 and now has 46+ staff across the company using Hive. The agency can also add clients and development partners as external users in Hive to enable and enhance collaboration and streamline the proofing and approvals process.
We caught up with the team at McKinney Health to discuss how the company uses Hive to manage complex workflows and streamline its proofing and approvals processes.
Life before Hive
Before McKinney Health began using Hive, the team used another project management tool as its proofing and approvals tool. However, as the agency’s client list grew and the workload expanded, the team began looking for a dedicated project management solution that could offer the team a wider range of functionality.
“As we started to grow and bring in people who have experience working with larger project management platforms, we quickly realized that the tool would not be enough to manage our workflows,”explains David Gielchinsky, Director of Health Operations at McKinney Health.
Collette Dorbandt, Director, Editorial, had worked with Hive at a previous agency and highlighted its benefits to David and the team. Initially, the agency trialed a few other tools alongside Hive, but Hive stood out due to its functionality and flexibility.
“Hive made the most sense for us,” David says. “It has all the functionalities and integrations we need, and it’s been very successful.” David adds that the company has already saved 810 hours and conducted 48,600 approval rounds in the first 10 months since adopting Hive.
How McKinney Health organizes Projects in Hive
McKinney Health creates a wide range of materials for clients, from printed brochures to complex digital assets such as videos, websites, and interactive visual aids (IVAs) for presentation use on tablet devices.
Using Hive’s Project Navigator, the agency sets up a Hive parent project for each of its clients. Within each of these client projects there are child projects for each specific deliverable.
Actions are then “routed” to the relevant stakeholders, for example, for proofing, fact-checking, or legal input. More recently, the team has also started using subactions as a checklist to manage quality control (QC) to ensure requirements are met and to keep the team accountable., etc. and child projects of specific deliverables: videos, IVA’s, websites with subactions.
“Using Hive to handle our QC ensures we are crossing off all the little details that go into every project. We really love that feature,” says Kat Zic, Project Supervisor.
Using Hive to streamline a robust proofing and approvals process
Proofing and approvals are key for every agency, but in health project management there can be added complexity. Deliverables must go through several people before being published, which means there can be multiple rounds of proofing and approvals before an asset is signed off.
“The number of approval rounds depends on the complexity of the deliverable,” says Gerald Flannory, Director, Experience Design. “There’s a big difference between a print piece versus a 40-page website. As well as having more content, larger assets – such as IVAs and websites – go through extensive user experience (UX) testing.”
Kat adds, “A typical project could take anywhere from four months to a year. We could have 20-30 rounds just going back and forth until the piece is clean and approved by everyone. We have so many milestones in our projects – sharing with clients, making revisions, medical and legal reviews, so the process is extensive.”
Each review round could have hundreds of comments and annotations within the proofing window, so efficiency and accuracy are critical. The ability to add external users in Hive enables the agency to include outside vendors in its proofing and approval routes, so that clients and their teams can mark up materials with comments within the Hive environment.
Conclusion: The main benefits McKinney Health finds with Hive
Hive has enabled the agency to streamline and organize complex projects and conduct rounds of collaboration, feedback, and approvals efficiently and accurately. With Hive as its project management solution, the McKinney Health team has been able to scale up activity and handle a rapidly expanding client list with maximum efficiency.
The agency also appreciates the ability to implement Hive Apps and integrations, such as sprints, automations, and Slack integrations. McKinney Health also enjoys the support it receives from Hive to get the most out of the tool’s functionality.
“Hive has been a real success story for us and we’ve been so excited about what we have achieved so far and what we can do in the future. Our data ties into just how much adherence we’ve had with Hive and how much success we’ve seen,” David concludes. “We plan to explore more of Hive’s functionalities, moving into dashboards, Slack integrations, and other app integrations. We see that there’s a lot of value there.”
