A marketing request sounds simple until you count how many teams it touches. A single campus open house can mean digital flyers, social posts, paid ads, photography, billboards, student communications, and print, each with its own owner, deadline, and review. When requests arrive through eight different forms and live in spreadsheets, nobody sees the whole picture.
This is how OrangeDot helped a large community college replace that patchwork with one connected monday.com workspace for intake, production, approvals, and reporting.
What We’ll Cover
- About the college and its marketing team
- Challenge 1: Eight intake forms, and requesters had to know which one to use
- Challenge 2: Approvals and turnaround times had no consistent structure
- How OrangeDot built one connected marketing workspace
- The impact: one starting point, clearer ownership, and campaign-level visibility
About the Client
This client is a large community college in the southeastern United States. Its marketing and communications team supports everything from student recruitment campaigns and campus events to website updates, photography, promotional materials, and internal communications, working with departments across campus.
The college relied on eight separate intake forms, each serving a different purpose. Someone requesting photography followed one process, while someone needing a website update, social media support, or marketing materials followed another. Behind the scenes, teams used spreadsheets and separate tracking methods to manage deliverables, deadlines, and approvals. As campaigns grew more complex, it became harder to maintain a complete picture of what was being requested, who was responsible, and when everything was due.
Two Problems Compounding Each Other
The college needed to consolidate request management without losing the flexibility to support different teams and services. The goal wasn’t simply to replace spreadsheets. It was to create a process employees could follow, marketing teams could manage, and leadership could trust.
With eight separate intake forms, requesting marketing support depended on knowing which form to complete. Once a request came in, the marketing operations team had to coordinate the right stakeholders, assign responsibilities, and track the work across creative, digital, communications, and other channels.
Most initiatives involved more than one team. A campus open house, for example, could require digital flyers, social media posts, paid advertising, photography, billboards, student communications, and print collateral. Each deliverable had its own owner, production requirements, review process, and deadline.
The spreadsheet-based approach made it difficult to see how all those pieces connected. Teams needed to track individual deliverables without losing sight of the larger campaign, while leadership needed visibility into upcoming launches, project status, and workloads across departments.
When the front door is eight different forms and the back office is a set of spreadsheets, no one can see how a campaign’s pieces fit together.
Copy and creative assets often required review from channel leads, strategic leads, department leadership, and executive stakeholders. Without a consistent way to document each stage, it wasn’t always clear who had reviewed an asset, whether changes were needed, or who was responsible for moving it forward.
The college also needed more consistent service level agreements (SLAs). A social media post, a brochure, and a promotional item have very different production timelines, so deadlines needed to be realistic for the type of work requested.
Without defined review stages and asset-specific timelines, every approval was a judgment call, and every deadline was a negotiation.
The Solution
OrangeDot partnered with the college to design a centralized marketing operations workspace in monday.com, bringing request intake, project tracking, production workflows, and reporting into one connected system.
Eight forms consolidated into one
OrangeDot consolidated the college’s eight intake forms into one centralized submission experience. Using conditional logic, the form shows relevant questions based on the type of request. Whether someone needs a headshot, a website update, an internal newsletter announcement, or support for a larger campaign, they start in the same place.
Routing that matches the request
Requests land on a centralized intake board where marketing operations reviews the information, assigns a strategic lead when needed, and routes the work to the right team. For recurring request types such as photography, website updates, and internal communications submissions, automations move requests forward without manual routing. Larger project requests still receive marketing operations review.
A shared working board with team-specific views
Instead of separate boards for creative, digital, and communications, OrangeDot worked with college leadership to set up a single shared working board with customized views for each team, reflecting how the college actually operates: most campaigns need several channels working together.
Initiatives as items, deliverables as subitems
Each initiative appears as a main item, with individual deliverables as subitems. Channel leads identify the tactics a campaign needs, assign ownership, attach files, update statuses, and set launch dates. A single open house can contain dozens of deliverables, from digital signage and social media to print and advertising, all connected to the larger initiative. Connected boards and mirrored fields keep intake information accessible in the working environment so project details aren’t entered twice.
Calendars, dashboards, and personalized views
A centralized marketing calendar brings launches, events, and channel deliverables into one view, while individual teams can focus on their own schedules. Personalized views show each person the work assigned to them as a strategic lead, channel owner, or deliverable owner. Dashboards show incoming requests, project progress, department activity, and team workloads.
Custom SLA workflows by asset type
Rather than relying on one standard turnaround time, the workflows account for different deliverables and the steps needed to complete them. Based on the asset type and requested deadline, monday.com populates dates for copywriting, creative development, and review stages.
Notifications built around the approval process
Workflows and notifications clarify when an asset needs attention from a channel lead, strategic lead, or leadership reviewer. As employees used the system, OrangeDot kept refining it, including improving visibility into individual approvals, adjusting reviewer assignments, and accommodating people who hold multiple roles.
Training and Continuous Refinement
Because the implementation introduced a new way of working, OrangeDot supported the college through hands-on testing, internal training sessions, troubleshooting, and guidance on managing requests, updating deliverables, and navigating the workspace. Feedback from team members shaped the final experience: OrangeDot adjusted board structures, improved notification settings, refined request routing, and helped the college evolve its copy and creative approval processes as employees became familiar with the platform.
The Impact
By bringing eight separate intake processes into one connected monday.com workspace, the college established a more consistent way to request, organize, and manage marketing work across the institution.
A Simpler Experience for Requesting Marketing Support
College departments now have one central starting point for marketing and communications requests. Conditional questions collect the information needed for each request type, and automated routing sends routine submissions to the right teams, so requesters no longer have to navigate multiple forms and marketing operations has a more organized view of incoming work.
Greater Visibility Across Complex Campaigns
With campaigns and their deliverables connected in one working board, teams can see how their work contributes to larger initiatives. During the implementation’s evolution, one of the college’s signature open house campaigns was being managed with 44 individual marketing tactics in the workspace, each tracked within the broader initiative. Shared calendars and reporting views help leadership monitor upcoming launches, work in progress, and responsibilities across the department.
Clearer Ownership and More Structured Approvals
By building channel leads, strategic leads, reviewers, and asset-specific deadlines into the workspace, the college established a more transparent framework for managing production. Team members can see which deliverables they own, what stage the work has reached, and which reviews are required before it moves forward. The approval process continues to evolve, but the college now has a centralized foundation for documenting decisions and coordinating handoffs.
A Scalable Foundation for Ongoing Improvement
The college launched its centralized intake process in March and kept refining the workspace based on employee feedback and changing needs. As new request types, reporting requirements, and approval procedures emerged, the team adjusted its monday.com environment rather than returning to separate tracking systems.
Eight intake forms replaced by one conditional form · campaigns and deliverables connected as items and subitems · asset-specific SLA dates and structured approvals · shared calendars, dashboards, and personalized views
FAQs
Can one intake form replace multiple request forms without becoming overwhelming?
Yes. Conditional logic shows only the questions relevant to the request type, so a headshot request and a full campaign request begin in the same place but ask for different information. Requesters no longer need to know which of eight forms to use.
How do you track a campaign and all of its deliverables together?
Make each initiative a main item and each deliverable a subitem. Channel leads can assign owners, attach files, set statuses and launch dates at the deliverable level, while the campaign stays visible as a whole. One open house campaign in this engagement was tracked with 44 individual tactics.
How do you set realistic deadlines for different types of marketing work?
Build SLA workflows around asset type. Based on what is being requested and the requested deadline, monday.com can populate dates for copywriting, creative development, and review stages, so a social post and a brochure don’t share the same turnaround time.
What happens when the approval process changes after launch?
Plan for it. In this engagement OrangeDot kept refining approvals after go-live, improving visibility into individual approvals, adjusting reviewer assignments, and handling people who hold more than one role. A workspace that can be adjusted as the team learns beats one that is locked in on day one.
Final Thoughts
What began as a project to consolidate eight intake forms became a broader change in how the college coordinates its marketing operations. With one starting point for requests, campaigns connected to their deliverables, and approvals and timelines built into the workflow, the institution has a connected foundation it can keep improving rather than a set of spreadsheets it has to keep reconciling.
If your marketing or communications team is juggling multiple request forms and spreadsheets, we can help you build one workspace that connects them. Talk to an OrangeDot expert →