#announcements

Assuming the other teams you listed are also using Asana, I find it to be an easy step in the process to add another project “Email Calendar” etc. to tasks that mark when an email is being sent. It all depends on who’s responsibility it is to keep the calendar updated, but I find wherever you can work within an existing process, that’s where you find the most adoption. Vs. asking a team to work outside of their process for the single use case of updating an email calendar.

it’s hard to capture always on or trigger based sends in this view, so something to be aware of. it likely won’t solve both needs.

As far as I know, our marketing team is the only team that truly leverages Asana, so I am skeptical about using it, but it seems to be the best place to hold accountability. However, I agree with your concern about seamlessly integrating with all of our team's processes.

Have you tried to leverage Google Sheets? I know all of our teams are using that for tracking, but I am worried it will get outdated and be more of a hassle than anything else.

I have used Google Sheets in the past, it’s certainly not a bad option either, it just requires more upkeep like you mentioned. You have make sure all teams are updating. It would probably be helpful to have a person per team who’s responsible for updating and then at least while youre getting the process off the ground have regular syncs where you’re reviewing what’s on there

Makes total sense - thank you so much for your insights, Leah!

I have used Asana for the last 2 years as a customer comms calendar, but only within marketing (for edit access) Asana does support a Google calendar integration so that you can give view only visibility to customer facing teams - but I did have some issues with it mainly being that there were up to 24 hour delays with the edits syncing to GCAL. Could be worth a shot just using a regular shared calendar in Google or MSUITE - have thought about that as well but then it creates double work having to add it in both the shared calendar and Asana.. sigh haha haven't found the perfect solution yet. But happy to chat about this more!

if you use Hubspot there is a calendar feature that automatically syncs over marketing emails - and you can also add new tasks so that might be worth exploring too

Hi Julie! Thank you for sharing your experience with Asana. The Asana/Google calendar integration seems to be the direction my team wants to take, so this is extremely valuable for me. We are in the early stages of developing this calendar, and I will likely be in touch with more questions on how this worked out for you and any suggestions you have for efficiency based on what you experienced 🙂

I do this in Asana. I'm going to be honest and say teams will never reference it. It's just not something I've seen most CS & Marketing teams be successful at. What I usually ask people to do is give me a heads up. At my current job, people were very OK with me taking over visibility and scheduling of all communications to make sure we don't collide.

Yea, good point - I have had luck with scheduling a regular call where the calendar is pulled up and updated by all cross functional managers as a group. As for the view access in Google calendar.. my old CSMs would constantly complain they didn't know what comms were going out so that's why I set it up lol, I never really knew who was looking at it /how often it was looked at though

Both are excellent points. No matter what visual/platform we choose, it has to be something we all agree on with a set process. Thank you both for your shared insights

I also have two additional things I do:
• I have a slide deck that talks about recurring communications, when they go out, and who gets them
• Before a comm goes out to customers, I send a test to myself and forward that to the CS team with a heads up "this email is going out to this group of people on this date at this time." As much as possible, I try to send that heads up.

Something I’m planning to do but haven’t executed yet (so no learnings to share) is create a slack channel re: customer comms where people in the org can join (optionally) to get a sense of what’s going out to who/when/why etc.

We also have a revenue enablement team that has several recurring comms to our sales & success teams that I use to share upcoming campaigns or ad hoc sends to the customer audience.

These are awesome suggestions, Leah! Thank you for coming back to this. Hope you had a great weekend 🙂