7 min read

Guide

With so many incoming requests and outgoing assets, managing a creative workflow can become complicated. To run a smooth and successful operation, it is important to centralize communication and the exchange of information. This creative request workflow guide will help you effectively utilize monday.com to do just that! Let's jump in!

Get started with a template

In this guide, we'll explore the Creative production board located in our pre-made templates! In the Template center, we have a "Creative Processes" template which can be fully customized to your own liking. 

With your template board ready to use and customize, let's dive into the workflow!

Creative production board

The Creative production board acts as a central place to submit, manage, and complete all incoming requests for creatives. Using this board, new requests can seamlessly flow in through a form submission, or through an automation from other boards, and the team will be able to instantly map out each request and oversee its completion!

Show me some key features of this board

The board is split into different groups to sort the creative requests based on whether they're incoming, in progress, or completed. Subitems are used to oversee the steps that need to be completed in order for the creative to be ready such as brainstorming, copy, and design. The columns within the board are used to track various data-points regarding each campaign. The File annotations and versioning features can be used within the asset added to the File Column to seamlessly communicate and collaborate with your teams on files.

Manage creative requests and approvals

One of the main ways that a creative request can seamlessly be submitted is through a monday form! Using this, the columns from your board will instantly turn into customizeable questions on a shareable form. Every form submission will then populate right into the board for your team to track and manage!

Tip: Try using the Form Viewer to view all submitted creative requests in the context of the questions on the form!

Once a campaign request is submitted, an automation will instantly notify relevant people of the new request. By doing this, you can set up a streamlined approval process for the team to easily manage incoming requests!

On this board, you'll also find a saved, filtered view titled "Needs Approval" which allows you to focus on the specific items pending approval.

Connect your creatives with their campaigns

On the far right of your Creative Production board, you'll find a Connect Boards Column which links the Campaign Planning board directly to this one! This way, once a creative is used for a campaign, you can connect it directly to that item, and all of the important aspects of the campaign will be visible and editable right from here.

By having the Connect Boards and Mirror Columns in place, you'll no longer need to switch between boards to be able to see the data that you need from the campaigns where your creatives are used!

Oversee creative timelines

To ensure the timely completion of creatives, we've implemented the Timeline View which allows us to visualize the due dates and durations of each creative in an organized way. Not only does it provide us with an overview of all of our dates, it is also fully interactive, so we can manage any details that we need directly from here. 🙌

Get a bird's-eye view with the Cards View

Looking to see all of your finalized assets in one centralized place? No problem! The Creative Production board comes read-made with the Cards View, which provides you a high-level view of all creative assets in one easy-to-use, gallery display. 

Tip: You can customize which column's are shown in this view through the view settings, to keep only the most relevant ones visible!

Automate your Creative Production workflow

Automations are designed to take the manual work out of your day-to-day, so you can focus on the work that really matters! The Creative Production board comes ready made with a variety of automations that help to instantly keep your board organized, notify team members, start/stop the Time Tracking Column, and more.

Here are just a few examples of the board automations that help to ramp up the creative production workflow:

Note: The automations added here are fully customizeable. Feel free to go in and edit the automations to suite your own needs!

Transfer finalized assets to your DAM board

Once you've implemented the Creative Production board to take incoming requests, the Digital Asset Management (DAM) board can be the go-to place to manage all of the finalized assets in an organized way!

To further optimize the creative process workflow, we've added in an automation that notify relevant people once an asset is ready to be transferred to the DAM board. The creative can then be duplicated and moved over to the DAM board to have it properly stored for future use. 🙌

Gain insights with a Dashboard view

Now that you have the basis of your creative workflow set up, you may want to analyze your data to gain insights. To meet this exact need, we have a fully interactive dashboard view added to the Creative Production board!

Dashboard views are fully customizeable, allowing you to display the data that you need in any way that you wish! Here are a few examples of some of the widgets we used:

• The Battery Widget which shows us the overall status of our creative projects
• The Chart Widget to show a breakdown of the regions in which our creatives are used
• The Workload Widget to provide an overview of how our team's time is being spent across projects
• The Gantt Widget to help us manage our creative deadlines at a high level

We hope that you're now ready to effectively manage your creative workflow with the tips mentioned in this guide! 

If you have any questions, please reach out to our team right here. We’re available 24/7 and happy to help.