Successful marketing workflows at universities

“As the centralized marketing team for the university, our primary clients are undergrad admissions, graduate admissions, alumni, and fundraising. Work can range from a simple piece of collateral to a more involved project. Hive is what keeps it all straight.”

Team goals

Consolidation of high volume of projects and efficient management of a team of designers, marketers, and seasonal interns. The marketing team operates as PLNU’s internal strategy agency, researching and making recommendations to stakeholders on how to achieve desired outcomes.

Driving efficiency across 1,000+ projects a year

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.

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.

Mastering on-time delivery for cyclical and ad hoc projects

The team uses 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.

“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. So, if a project needs six weeks, the work is scheduled automatically, so we can meet the 1st November deadline.” 

Clearer communication, more transparency

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.

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.