The OSF HealthCare creative team produces some amazing marketing assets using Adobe’s Creative Cloud® Suite. But with 13 hospitals and medical facilities in Illinois and Michigan, the healthcare corporation’s creative team struggled to manage the increasing volume of work.
Four-hundred creative requests a month. Eleven different marketing teams. Seven designers. One rigid, homegrown system to manage it all.
The team needed a flexible project management solution to centralize requests, assign work, and collect feedback. But this couldn’t be any task manager—the tool also needed to streamline the design, review, and approval process. They selected Wrike and integrated it with their Adobe tools to create and manage an optimized creative delivery process.
Wrike and Adobe recently caught up with two OSF team members, Andrea Bonk, Program Manager of Market Research and Operations, and Heidi Wessler, Graphic Design Coordinator. During our conversation, Andrea and Heidi shared the inner workings of the OSF creative request process, the types of assets they create the most, and how they cut revision and approval time in half.
What are professional services in healthcare? Can you share a little bit about your roles and teams at OSF?
Andrea: I'm Program Manager of Market Research and Operations for OSF Marketing and Communications. As part of my operations role, I was chosen to lead the implementation of Wrike for the marketing and communications division.
We have 11 different specialized marketing teams that serve different parts of our organization, such as neurological, children's hospital, or our cardiovascular service line. Each team has a strategic marketing lead, writer, designer, digital team member, internal communications expert, and media specialist. They can pull in video or photography if they need it.
These teams manage large, full-scale service line projects and campaigns. And then we also have smaller projects that come through our request forms from outside our marketing department. We get probably 15 to 30 requests each day.
Heidi: I run graphic design for our Foundation marketing team. I'm part of the creative services department. There are seven of us designers who are constantly given assignments throughout the day in Wrike. We work with writers, digital web developers, and the marketing people on a regular basis.
Can you walk us through your team's creative process?
Heidi: Sure. It's definitely different project by project. But in general, for the day-to-day assignments, our director of creative services assigns projects like brochures or flyers through Wrike.
When we have larger scale requests, like landing pages or campaigns, we go over them in our weekly meetings. The writer will start off the process and provide content, and then the designer will come up with layout. We predominantly use InDesign and a little bit of Illustrator and Photoshop for supporting graphics. We also use Wrike’s Adobe Creative Cloud® Extension.
If there are any web components, we work with the web specialist for that. And then we will present any of the concepts we have at our next weekly meeting. After that we will just keep working with marketing on any changes and developing it further before sending to production.
Adobe is a world-class creative suite and it's wonderful to be able to work with a project management system that has partnered with Adobe to make the life of a designer easier.
What types of assets do you create the most?
Heidi: It differs for each marketing team. I work on the Foundation team, so I do a lot of invitations because we do a lot of events for fundraising and stuff like that. The Innovation team does a lot of digital work, like digital web banners and graphics for displays throughout the building where the innovation programs are.
Andrea: Within our Wrike request forms we have 38 asset options our internal team can choose from as a result of creating project templates in Wrike. Direct mail is an option, digital campaigns, social media pushes...we pretty much run the whole gamut. We also have internal communications and multimedia teams as well. Our goal is to function much like an in-house creative agency.
What was life like for the OSF marketing teams before Wrike?
Andrea: Three years ago there were multiple, smaller, siloed marketing and communications teams across the company. So we consolidated and centralized these groups into one team, and when we did that, the long-term plan was to move to a true project management system.
We use SharePoint, and before we started looking and found Wrike, it was difficult for us to monitor requests, triage work, and delegate assignments. We couldn’t break projects out into smaller tasks.
Heidi: With such a large volume of work coming through, we realized we need something like Wrike to help maintain our edge and streamline projects to free up our time.
How has your creative request and intake process changed with Wrike?
Andrea: Right now, our OSF colleagues, or Mission Partners as we call them, click on our SharePoint portal and it takes them to a Wrike dynamic request form where they answer a series of questions to tell us what they want, who their audience is, etc.
From there, if it’s something quick and easy, it’s automatically assigned to the right creative team. Operations doesn't even manage it. It just goes straight to the right person. For requests that are a little bit more complex, those land in operations. I will gather feedback and assign it accordingly based on what we need to do with that project. We probably get anywhere from 15 to 30 requests like that we need to review each day.
How has using the Wrike and Adobe Creative Cloud® Extension improved your creative process?
Heidi: I used to work in a different design solution, which was clunky and not ideal. Adobe is a great product and is always innovating. When we were looking for a work management solution, finding something that could really make that seamless transition from the project management system to the creative process was really important. So when I saw the Wrike and Adobe integration, I was really excited we found something that could bridge that gap so well.
I use the extension in InDesign a lot. It’s simple but really powerful. I can just click into Wrike directly from InDesign and review a task description really fast, or copy and paste asset copy and work that way. Adobe is a world-class creative suite and it's wonderful to be able to work with a project management system that has partnered with Adobe to make the life of a designer easier.
I use Wrike’s Adobe Creative Cloud® Extension in InDesign a lot. It's simple but really powerful.
How have Wrike and Adobe improved your creative review and approval process?
Heidi: Creatives work on designs in Adobe, upload them to Wrike, and then tag whoever is responsible for reviewing and approving them. We always assign the director of creative services, the project requester, and then whoever the marketing lead is. They individually mark up any changes they want, or mark it as approved in Wrike.
It’s so nice. From InDesign, I just go into the Wrike extension, see what changes need to be made, and then upload a new proof until we land on a final version.
Andrea: Some of our team members use Wrike’s Proofing and Approvals to get feedback on videos. They really like the ability to pinpoint a particular hour, minute, or second and say, "This is the area where we need more light,” or, “You need to blow in the graphic here."
Heidi: Before, you'd have to search through emails and if people didn't reply all or a separate email got sent on top of another one, you'd have to group all that feedback together. We don't have to spend time doing that anymore. Feedback is all in one place. In fact, it has caused a little bit more back-and-forth because it's so easy and quick, which raises the quality of our assets.
Andrea: I think the time to value within our team has certainly increased. We're collaborating more than we ever have before, but we’ve also cut the time it takes to revise and approve assets by 50%, if not more. Heidi and I noticed right away how much faster it was.
Heidi: Yeah, I no longer have to adjust my PDF settings, export to desktop, start an email, attach the asset, and send it. I literally just click the add button in Wrike directly from within InDesign and it's out there.
We're collaborating more than we ever have before, but we’ve also cut the time it takes to revise and approve assets by 50%, if not more.
What are some other benefits you have experienced with Wrike and Adobe?
Andrea: From an operations standpoint, the transparency is amazing. The visibility. I’m able to very quickly pull reports for my boss, so she can report up to her boss the kind of work that we're doing. The ability to do that quickly is just fabulous.
Heidi: I'm more in the trenches doing production work. It’s really nice to cut out a bazillion emails every day. Instead of everyone on our team sending 10 emails about one topic, we just make comments in Wrike. I don't have to go search through emails for all my pieces and parts—they're all right there in one place.
Andrea: Even yesterday we ended up having to send a one-off, high-priority patient email communication. Because we had Wrike and the Adobe extension, the ability to proof, load, and comment was easily 50% faster than it would have been otherwise.
Want to get projects out the door 50% faster like OSF HealthCare? Is your creative team bogged down with administrative tasks? Does feedback live across emails, notebooks and spreadsheets? Is your intake process a mess?
Together, Wrike and Adobe can help transform your creative process. Sign up for our free webinar on Thursday, April 26th at 9am PDT to learn more about why the world’s most innovative creative teams use Wrike’s Adobe Creative Cloud® Extension.
And to learn more about how OSF HealthCare uses Wrike and Adobe, check out the full case study here.
