Note: This case study is a condensed version of a presentation given at Converge: RoboHead’s User Conference.
For marketing & communications leaders in the healthcare industry, striking a balance between scale and efficiency is no small feat. This case study, a summary of a presentation from RoboHead’s Converge 2023, examines how Lehigh Valley Health Network, with the guidance of Lisa Unruh, Operations Director, effectively used RoboHead, a project management tool, to transform and scale its marketing operations, offering a roadmap for growth and efficiency.
Introduction to Lehigh Valley Health Network
LVHN’s Internal Marketing and Communications team fulfills requests across 13 hospitals and 20,000+ employees: a tall order. To successfully execute all of their tasks, the organization relies on a diverse group of 84 creatives and a 14-year partnership with RoboHead, their trusted tool for organizing and navigating a sea of projects.
The Challenge: Scaling Operations in a Complex Environment
As the needs of the organization grew, the team needed to scale up the operations system that supported them. Luckily, one of RoboHead’s greatest strengths is flexibility and the ability to scale and grow with your team. Along the way, five key aspects of RoboHead help the team at LVHN stay on track. Lisa Unruh, Director of Operations for the marketing and public affairs group at LVHN puts it best when she shared, “Once we made pretty significant changes to how we use RoboHead, it really changed our ability to manage a really high volume of projects…we’re gonna come up on probably 4,000 projects by the end of the year.”
5 Essential Elements
When Lisa Unruh sought to help her team rework their system, there were five key aspects that she focused on: Project Requests, Project Templates, Staged Project Reviews, Collaborative Project Views and the Advanced Library. Together, these areas in RoboHead would not only help save her organization time and money, but also put out higher quality projects free of any mistakes.
Smart Request System
The team receives hundreds of requests each month—some simple and others complex. Because all 20,000 LVHN employees have access to submit requests, the form needs to be simple and easy to understand for clients, but powerful enough to ensure the project can be effectively managed and delivered. How does it work?
- Conditional fields: depending on the client submitting the request or the type of project being requested, the request form will populate just the right questions, taking the guesswork out of the requirements for clients.
- Integrated routing: Because the requests are submitted directly within RoboHead, all Lisa and her operations team need to worry about is assigning the work to the right creative.
The outcome: Requests flow smoothly, helping the team scale up capacity, but along the way customer service for clients improves, as the team is now equipped with better project information.
Streamlining with Customized Templates:
“We have 55 templates…it’s really based on a workflow…whether it’s a poster or a flyer or a table tent, those really have the same workflow ultimately.” – Lisa Unruh
When your team is responsible for 4,000 projects each year, you need to find efficiencies to stay on time and on budget. For LVHN and many other RoboHead customers, this means creating templates for different project types to ensure you don’t reinvent the wheel 4,000 times throughout the year. For LVHN, this means:
- Shortcuts for common projects: LVHN works on 55 different types of projects. By building templates that allow all the steps to be broken down, they don’t have to spend time thinking before starting a new project.
- Easy assignments based on role: The templates are structured so that each part of the process includes whether a copywriter, designer, or videographer, or photographer needs to be assigned, making it easy to choose from a list—and even see who can take on the project.
The Outcome: Standardized processes led to improved efficiency and consistency, crucial for maintaining brand integrity and serving their many stakeholders.
Quality Control through Staged Reviews
“Once we implemented the stage reviews, now we know that the right people are reviewing it at the right time…nothing leaves our department until all of those reviews are complete.”
Collecting feedback on projects is critical in maintaining quality and accuracy. But the wrong system can make this process take as long or longer than the rest of the creative process combined. The team was able to move away from a chaotic system by building staged reviews, which allow them to:
- Route projects to reviewers one at a time
- Collect feedback quickly and easily
- Take action immediate action on edits
- Ensure department leaders get the “final look” before final publication
The Outcome: Enhanced quality of output, reduced rework and maintaining a high standard for all marketing materials.
More Actionable Edits Through Collaborative Project Reviews
While staged reviews are useful for certain work, for other types of projects, LVHN has taken advantage of bringing reviewers in concurrently to collaborate on feedback. For example, designers would send a PowerPoint deck out for review, only to receive dozens of edits from each person who reviewed it. Then, the edits would all need to be individually checked and edited. By creating more collaborative reviews for certain projects, they were able to:
- Reduce redundancy by allowing reviewers to see comments left by other reviewers
- Make edits faster by consolidating all the comments into one place
- Increase accountability by ensuring that every edit was attended to
The Outcome: Designers with LVHN have a more straightforward and less stressful path to creating presentations and responding to feedback. Gifting them with more time to focus on the quality of their work.
An Organized Library
“Within our photography library, you’ll see we have 30,000 images…we don’t put them in subfolders in that Library, the tags help to categorize them and be able to make them easily searchable.”
Because of the large breadth of work that the team tackles, they rely on RoboHead to help them organize, store, and share files across their organization. This includes communication plans, CRM campaign assets, marketing campaign assets, logos, medical staff headshots, photography, presentations and guides. This helps reduce stress by:
- Making it easy to share assets with a secure link
- Creating a historical record for past campaign materials
- Building a searchable database for any file the team may need
- Organizing over 30,000 photos to use in creative projects and media releases
The Outcome: LVHN never loses track of a file. They are better stewards of their resources and can reference past work within a few clicks.
The Outcome: A New Chapter in Efficiency and Growth:
This transformation at LVHN wasn’t just about managing more projects faster. It was about writing a new story of operational excellence, responsive to market and internal needs, all while maintaining quality in a high-volume, complex environment.
