Week of Process

The incredible dream team behind week of process. From Left to right - Logan Burruss, Ellen Graham, Aaron Folsom, Danielle Douglas, Adam Planas, JP Petrucione, Nick Panagopoulos, Rose Robins, Liz Morrison, Kevin Liao.

The Situation

Policy Digital was a global department with a small team and large remit. We only had one producer per market (or covering multiple markets) in charge of creating all the policy content (including social, emails, digital advocacy, and paid media.) We also had to collaborate with many stakeholders across the organization in Policy, Comms, Marketing, and the Business.

Given the nature of the policy landscape, we generally didn’t have control over the timelines for our work. We had to work fast and scrappy, often creating unique workflows for each market.

The incredibly talented team continuously brought creative solutions to the table, but with such a demanding workload they were getting frustrated with our inefficient process and starting to show signs of burnout.

My Role

As the Content and Creative Lead, I assisted the entire global team with content operations and creative resourcing. It was clear we needed to come together to build a universal system for content operations that would streamline and organize our work. We also needed to provide tools for the producers to educate their non-creative counterparts about the realities of the content creation process.

Working with my insanely talented Global Creative Services subteam, I designed the wonkiest (and most productive) offsite dubbed “Week of Process.”

I crafted the agenda and facilitated the offsite using design thinking principles:

• EMPATHIZE: We surveyed the whole team, and had representatives from every region attend

• DEFINE: We listed out all of our channels, audiences, types of content, stakeholders, etc

• IDEATE: We had real talk around what was working, what wasn’t, and brainstormed ways to refine our systems

• PROTOTYPE: Through working sessions, we established some key systems and documents that every project must follow

The Results

We came out of the week with a project tracking system, an organized team folder structure, working document templates, and a universal project plan. We built these first as prototypes using tools available (mostly google docs), then refined them over time.

We built these using The Content Journey, a production flow I developed based on the classic heroes journey. These steps ensured every project had a clear beginning, middle, and end. By breaking down how our projects moved through the Content Journey, we operationalized systems to keep us organized and asking the right questions.

This offsite also boosted team morale, and empowered members to feel like they had more control and authority over their work. The systems we created cut back on tedious busy work, and enabled the broader campaign teams to have more productive planning meetings. The Policy Digital team was ultimately able to lean on these new systems to enable more strategic and creative work, which in turn helped make our campaigns more successful.