The Texas Rangers are a professional American Major League Baseball club brought to Arlington, Texas, in 1972. As a dynamic, fast-moving organization with around 300 employees and 15 departments, the Texas Rangers have numerous marketing needs throughout the year as they support team events and creative initiatives. Constantly in-demand, the Texas Rangers’ marketing team provides the necessary assets and campaigns to support various creative initiatives across the entire organization.
The Challenge
With a number of complex projects constantly in the works, the marketing and creative teams at the Texas Rangers handled an ever-increasing volume of inbound tasks and requests. However, most inbounds were managed through ad hoc, in-person meetings or emails. This raised several issues with the Rangers’ work intake process. Review and approval processes were difficult to track and highly convoluted. Maintaining visibility into pipelines through the lifetime of a project was tedious and time-consuming, exacerbating delays and potential risks.
"Life before Wrike was a bit messy as far as communicating project requests," says Kyle Bartlett, Director of Marketing and Advertising for the Texas Rangers. "It was very difficult when something would be requested via email or in the hallways."
The Solution
The Texas Rangers eventually realized the urgent need for a unified, digital work solution that could devise and establish clear workflow processes. It was increasingly difficult to track feedback and decisions through emails — and as a result, internal partners were having trouble collaborating. Furthermore, the lack of established processes led to workflow issues and missing information.
They found the ideal solution in Wrike. First onboarded in 2018, Wrike enabled the Texas Rangers to standardize and organize their workflow intake, simplify time-consuming review and approval processes, and maintain real-time visibility into projects through accessible dashboards and tasks that could be shared across the entire organization.
"Wrike helps us work confidently, having that comfort of knowing I'm not forgetting a project in an email or spreadsheet," says Bartlett. "It assures me that a project isn't slipping through the cracks."
“I’m thankful for Wrike. It’s a fast-paced world, and we’re all trying to keep up. Wrike helps me do just that.”
Consolidating project information in a unified platform
Through Wrike, the marketing team at Texas Rangers was able to gain a unified, holistic source of truth for their ongoing projects — housing everything from print collateral projects to digital media advertising campaigns. With each piece of mission-critical information now available on demand in a single platform, they no longer had to track their work using fragmented processes like emails, spreadsheets, or instant messages. This saved them time, improved process reliability, and reduced overall risk in their projects.
“Whenever I build a project in Wrike, I include all the information that I have. Everyone knows exactly where to find the information they need,” says Bartlett.
Unifying assets and efforts in a single platform was especially helpful for executing projects like Texas Rangers’ ‘Stay Strong’ campaign — a project that featured a collage of content to keep fans entertained and comforted during the height of the pandemic.
“There were so many different components to Stay Strong, and it was great that Wrike served as that one hub where we could do anything from providing feedback on a video to making graphic updates to a page,” says Claire Girman, Manager of Marketing and Advertising at the Texas Rangers. ”We love that we can tailor these projects to certain designers based on their strengths because of Wrike.”
Monitoring and optimizing resources through dashboards
The use of Wrike's dashboards enabled the Texas Rangers' creatives and marketers to efficiently prioritize their complex and shifting workloads. By providing comprehensive and real-time visibility into each individual's workload and bandwidth, dashboards improved work intake management and resource delegation — tasks previously managed less efficiently through emails.
“Dashboards eliminated a lot of the stress and time spent trying to pull summaries of what everyone was working on," says Girman. "We start every week by using our dashboards — it sets the bar for what we have to prioritize."
The improved transparency and visibility enabled the Texas Rangers to execute immense campaigns such as their branding of the Globe Life Field, which involved filling more than 1.2 million square feet of ballpark space with Texas Rangers branding. Wrike enabled them to achieve a holistic, comprehensive view on everything they needed to get done for the complex project, ensuring nothing fell through the cracks.
"One project that I'm thankful that I had Wrike for was the branding of Globe Life Field. When we got the maps of the ballpark and found out we had 1.2 million square feet of space to fill with the Rangers brand, it was a bit intimidating. When we got a project of this size, our team wasn't sure where to start. Wrike really enabled us to grasp everything we needed to get done in one whole view."
"Dashboards eliminated a lot of the stress and time spent trying to pull summaries of what everyone was working on. We start every week by using our dashboards — it sets the bar for what we have to prioritize."
Solidifying expectations through improved communication
With Wrike’s built-in communication and decision tracking tools, the Texas Rangers could better define project progression and deadlines. Teams were able to move away from coordinating through emails and spreadsheets, helping them better clarify individual responsibilities and relevant stakeholders — which cut down on time spent planning and reduced the risk of details being forgotten or left behind.
"Without Wrike, I can't imagine having to track all our projects," says Bartlett. "We don't have to spend time keeping track of what needs to be done. It does it all for you."
The next steps
As the Texas Rangers continued to integrate Wrike further into their systems, they were able to streamline everyday tasks such as brainstorming, creative asset handing, and approval cycles while establishing clear workflow procedures and project structure for each of their tasks. This enabled their teams to leave behind cumbersome emails and manual tracking. By using Wrike, the Rangers saved precious hours, accelerated workflows, communicated collaboratively, and promoted transparency and accountability across a high-speed, creative organization now looking forward to another 50 years of great work and baseball.
"I'm thankful for Wrike," notes Bartlett. "It's a fast-paced world, and we're all trying to keep up. Wrike helps me do just that."
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