Better Visibility, Less Paper

When Senior Marketing Project Manager Stacy Russell began her first day at WorldVentures two years ago, she found a creative team driven by chaos and messy procedures. She was charged with overseeing a team of 35, split into six divisions and covering eight brands, and streamlining their creative and approval processes.

“It was a little overwhelming at first,” she says. “I had people looking to me to make it better. It was so cumbersome for the team to move; it was like moving an elephant on each project.”

WorldVentures, a Plano, Texas-based direct seller of travel club memberships, was producing creative marketing collateral at an astounding rate, churning out up to 850 pieces of video, print, signage and digital collateral a quarter.

One of the first things she noticed in her department was a constant stream of paper. She had never seen anything like it—her team members were creating digital assets, printing them out and walking them over to the appropriate managers for sign-off. They used Excel to track the status of every project, and made up their own job numbers. It made it impossible for her to track any kind of progress.

“It wasn’t very helpful, as they were gaining more and more projects going through,” she explains. “It was a little bit old school.”

The company was already using inMotion, but the creative team was only using a sliver of the software’s capabilities, and manually recording, reporting, and assigning most projects. Russell knew the department couldn’t keep going this way.

She wanted to use inMotion to improve the team’s disorganized proofing process, including the offline revision practices, and add more sophisticated reporting.

She worked with her dedicated Customer Success Manager at inMotion to develop a uniform job ticket, time tracking practices, and customized reports catered to her teams’ needs. Russell now uses inMotion to automate job numbers, proof creative and optimize project scheduling.

inMotion’s Review & Approval allowed her teams to streamline the creative proofing process by routing the proof through a workflow to the right reviewers in the right order. Team members could also easily track the status of any proof for additional feedback and required sign-offs.

“I use that reporting module like you wouldn’t believe,” she says. “It’s been our life blood here as far as the marketing team goes.”

Russell used inMotion to build a custom “Hot Sheet” report that provides better visibility into current projects and the workloads of each team member, allowing Russell and the WorldVentures team to better plan and allocate resources to the proper channels and employees. It also helped her pull teams out of their respective silos to get projects done on time and on budget.

“We didn’t have any of that visibility before. We just knew everybody was sort of either working really hard, or not,” she laughs.

After implementation, the marketing teams were working together more and communicating better.

The module was so successful that the marketing teams’ productivity improved by a staggering 90 percent.

“I’ve done a lot of research into many different platforms, and it really is a great tool for your management of your day-to-day workflows,” she says.

Today, WorldVentures produces collateral, from video to signage to copy translations, with efficiency and clarity at every level of the creative process using inMotion’s online proofing and reporting tools. Managers and creatives no longer swim in paper printouts of projects, and Russell can continue to help her team grow and produce top-notch collateral for a multitude of brands.