How CHF implemented Simple to streamline marketing operations

Not-for-profit organisation Children’s Hospital Foundation is the official charity for the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital and the Centre for Children’s Health Research. CHF helps sick children by funding life-saving medical research, investing in new medical equipment and providing comfort, entertainment, support and care for children and their families in Queensland and northern NSW. Thanks to the support of a range of community and corporate partners including Woolworths, Channel Nine (CHF and Channel Nine telethon), Bank of Queensland and many others, CHF continues to help sick kids and their families get better and go home sooner.

CHF’s marketing team consequently liaises with a large number of internal and external stakeholders on relevant marketing activities for both short- and long-term projects. The marketing team supports stakeholder contributions across all facets of creative marketing from project initiation and brainstorming to briefing, managing print and digital artwork production, and delivery.

The small internal marketing department not only deals with an unusually large number of external partners, but also with internal teams including Corporate Partnerships, Research and Grants, Data Analytics, Direct Marketing, Patient and Family Services and Corporate Development.

CHF Production Manager Philippa Bailey determined the charitable foundation needed to implement a Marketing Operations Cloud platform to get the best use out of its marketing resources and help improve internal organisation collaboration.

“We’re a small organisation with a substantial workload,” Bailey says.“Every team’s unique.”

 

Why CHF’s marketing team implemented Simple

CHF implemented Simple’s MRM platform to help it improve planning and the efficient allocation of resources as well as manage marketing requests, manage and improve the briefing process, streamline marketing production workflows and approvals, store approved creative assets, reduce go-to-market times and centralise all projects and communication in one platform.

The marketing team trialled some initial workflows with Simple, but then reassessed these to streamline the briefing process further.

 

How CHF uses Simple’s marketing operations platform

The CHF marketing team uses Projects in Simple, beginning with a brief and incorporating the use of templates to help automate and speed up the workflow and approval process.

“As the production manager, all project requests are directed to me for a discussion or set-up of a project,” Bailey says. “I create the project in Simple, then release the brief form to the internal client. Simple notifies me when the form is ready to be approved. Once approved, I add in the tasks and distribute the work within our creative team.”

 

Customised briefs for CHF

Bailey says the team changed the way Briefs were set up to better suit CHF’s specific process.

“As an organisation, we trialled our original brief forms while we were implementing Simple into the business to gain feedback,” Bailey says. “The feedback we received helped us work with Simple to streamline the briefing process further, improving the functionality and user experience.”

Those changes included:

• Reducing the brief form ‘save’ time to 2-3 seconds, rather than a minute
• Streamlining the look and feel
• Streamlining and condensing sections and questions
• Allowing all text boxes to expand automatically
• Adding and removing multiple print items in the dropdown menu and refining the information required
• Adding and removing multiple EDMs, Every Day Hero page requests, multiple social media posts and social media ad campaigns.

“We consolidated questions,” Bailey says. “As a result of the changes implemented, clients are using Simple on a regular basis and agree the system makes it easier to communicate marketing campaigns.”

 

Benefits of Simple’s Marketing Operations Cloud platform

Since CHF implemented Simple its marketing process has improved in several key areas, generating time and efficiency gains from planning and project management, through briefing, collaboration and approvals:

• Planning
  “Simple helps us plan our annual marketing campaigns, identify possible clashes and support the marketing team’s workflow,” Bailey says. “We can view all projects in the one platform, providing a valuable organisational overview.”
  The other planning benefit is in being able to view the previous year’s work. “Clients can see what’s been done year-on-year,” she says. “Next year we’ll be able to see an overview of campaigns, plan ahead and re-use assets. Clients can copy information from previous briefs, saving time on year-on-year projects.”
• Induction
  New team members can access previous campaign assets saved in Simple’s Library, Bailey adds. “I provide internal training with new starters, giving them ‘How to’ guides and teach them how to navigate videos created by Simple in the ‘Help’ section of the platform.
• Resource allocation
  “Simple helps our marketing/creative team with project management and coordination,” she says. “Receiving all project requests allows me to see an overview of projects and determine which projects could be combined and which need to remain as stand-alone projects. This helps condense the amount of information being sent out to the market and results in less artwork being produced.”
• Workflow
  “By streamlining the briefing process and focusing on the necessary steps, the workflow has improved,” Bailey says.
• Briefing
  “I work with clients to help them write better briefs,” she adds. “The approval process in Simple helps us narrow down the important information so we can spend more time working on projects rather than chasing clients for information. The Reject button in Simple is very helpful. The ability to reject briefs that aren’t up to scratch and explain why within the one platform is beneficial. Clients have a much better understanding of the information they need to provide. Their project won’t be started until we receive all of the necessary information.”
• Work-in-progress management
  Bailey is responsible for managing work-in-progress and uses Simple to do this. “I used to manage a manual WIP sheet in Excel,” she says. “It could take up to 1-2 hours per day. Being able to see a project overview, the status of a project, and what’s overdue has saved me about 5 hours a week on average.”
• Team collaboration
  “Simple is helping to support team collaboration,” Bailey says. “The reduction in emails has been fantastic. Clients are using the Comments and Feedback buttons to mark up their changes in Simple. We’re not having to chase clients as much as we have previously. This allows us to spend more time producing campaigns.
  “We’ve had a reduction in turnaround times for proofs,” she adds. “We used to send them by email and they would get lost in people’s inboxes and sometimes we wouldn’t hear back from clients. Simple reminds people that we’re waiting on an approval before their project can move forward. Simple has helped send pieces of collateral to market quicker and launch campaigns on time, helping to secure their success.”
• Approvals
  CHF is using Simple to help manage marketing approvals. “We can see who’s approving what, when and how quickly, as well as who’s holding projects up,” Bailey says. “We can look at why approvals might be taking longer than expected, where the bottlenecks are, and how we can improve the process.”

In all, CHF has experienced time-savings from using Simple to help manage its marketing operations, improving briefing, training, workflow, team collaboration, approvals and WIP management.

Better planning is also allowing resources to be allocated more effectively, and on work that returns a benefit to the organisation, rather than losing time and hours searching for materials and chasing feedback.

“Simple has helped improve our marketing operations and keeps all artwork, communication and approvals in one platform, benefiting the organisation,” Bailey says.

To find out how Simple’s Marketing Operations Cloud platform can help your marketing team reduce complexity and be more effective, reach out to one of our consultants.