Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU) is a Christian liberal arts university based in San Diego, California, and was founded in 1902. The university serves more than 4,600 students and offers graduate, doctoral, and undergraduate degree completion programs.
The marketing team operates as PLNU’s internal strategy agency, researching and making recommendations on how to achieve outcomes. Team members are responsible for a wide range of deliverables, including brochures, emails, newsletters, social media campaigns, and more. Collaboration, planning and communication are key for team leaders as they have a high volume of projects to manage and track.
We sat down with Dave Gladson, Associate Vice President for Marketing at PLNU, and Erin Togerson, Director of Marketing Operations for the university, to find out how they use Hive to manage daily workflows.
Driving efficiency: Consolidating project management with Hive
Before adopting Hive in November 2019, PLNU’s marketing team worked with several different systems, including Teamwork and Basecamp. At one point, the team had four project management tools in play. Team leaders decided to consolidate and chose Hive to manage a high volume of work and oversee a team of designers, marketers, and seasonal interns.
“As the centralized marketing team for the university, our primary clients are undergrad admissions, graduate admissions, alumni, and fundraising,” explains Dave. “But there are 50 other people around campus who ask for things at various times, too. Work can range from a simple piece of collateral to a more involved project. Hive is what keeps it all straight.”
The team handles 250-500 project requests per quarter, so it builds out monthly and quarterly plans. Summer is the most active period when PLNU is busy preparing and updating materials for the next academic intake. While much of the marketing work can be planned, there are also last-minute projects to fit into the pipeline. The team’s workload is approximately 60% cyclical projects and 40% ad hoc projects.
Let’s look closer at how the university’s marketing team uses Hive to organize day-to-day operations and collaborate on projects.
Building out projects and managing workflows and deadlines in Hive
The team has a very face-to-face approach to taking in projects from departments around the university campus.
“I meet with our partners or clients anywhere from once a week to once a month, depending on how complex they are,” says Erin. “After each meeting, I build out a pipeline of the client’s projects for the forthcoming semester or quarter.”
Currently, around 60% of the marketing team’s work can be planned ahead due to its cyclical nature. Using Hive to build a pipeline of projects enables Erin to manage her team’s workload and accommodate ad hoc projects.
Erin and the team use Hive templates to speed up the process when planning work and setting up new Hive projects. Leveraging Hive templates enables the university to set up new Hive projects quickly, with actions, pre-specified assignees, timelines, and other information added automatically. For example, if Erin sets up a new Hive project for a flyer, she applies the team’s custom template to automatically add the typical timelines, specifications and actions needed. Erin then makes any required adjustments, such as changing assignees or dates, and in just a few clicks, she can get the new flyer project into her team’s schedule.
“All of our templates are time-based, so if I have something that needs to be built out by 1st November, Hive gives me all the workflow dates for the project,” Erin explains. “So, if a project needs six weeks, the work is scheduled automatically, so we can meet the 1st November deadline.”
Using Hive for clear communications and transparent workflows
One of the PLNU team’s favorite Hive features is the ability to easily view past work and access previous assets, as these can inform the planning and specifications of new projects, as well as updates and revisions to cyclical work.
Erin continues, “Our Hive set-up enables us to look at our past work. For example, we can view the previous assets a client or a partner might have requested a year or two years ago and use that to plan our current work. So, Hive absolutely helps us with strategy as far as that’s concerned.”
When PLNU marketing team members communicate about a specific project, they add notes to the relevant Project Action cards. Action cards contain all the necessary information, and external conversations are added as comments to add transparency.
As well as being useful for work in progress, these notes are also a great reference for future team members when accessing archived work at a later date. All of PLNU’s internal communication is done directly in Hive, whether in action cards or group chats and direct messages. “We don’t really use any other tools like Slack or Google Chat within our team. For me, this is a big reason why I love Hive,” says Dave.
Erin highlights how visibility over past projects helps the team deliver continuity. When people move on, any newcomers to the team have access to a wealth of information via all the archived Hive projects. Visibility also helps the team with any unexpected disruptions. For example, during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when everyone was working from home, team members could continue to operate seamlessly, as all the data and information they needed for their work was accessible via Hive.
Using Hive’s Proofing and Approvals app to move marketing elements through to final approval also supports the team’s goals around clear communications and transparent workflows. Hive makes it easy to set up a new proof quickly and route it to the appropriate people for approval. Erin highlights that PLNU’s marketing team has a very transparent approach, so nothing is siloed. There is a list of subactions in the proofing and approval process assigned by date for stakeholders to check off and tag the next person in the chain to keep it moving forward.
Conclusion
PLNU’s marketing team uses Hive to keep projects organized, create project pipelines in advance, and stay on top of multiple deadlines, which is vital for the busy university.
Consistency is important for the team, so having transparency and visibility across projects and approvals – past and present – is a key benefit of Hive. Communicating within the projects and adding notes to Action cards streamlines conversations and makes it easy for team members to communicate internally and to get the complete picture.
“Hive is essential to our team, it really helps keep work flowing and enables us to build our future strategy,” Erin concludes.
