How Teamwork helps colleges manage cross-departmental projects

Moravian College is a private liberal arts college in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania with a marketing department that needed a more effective process for planning and managing marketing projects for other departments.

In this case study, we talked to Mike Corr, Director of Marketing and Communications at Moravian College, to find out how introducing Teamwork has transformed cross-departmental collaboration and improved team performance.

The black hole of email

The Marketing and Communications department at Moravian College is responsible for shaping the college brand and optimizing its reputation through public relations, media, and marketing activities. An additional responsibility of the department is providing marketing collateral to other departments across campus.

When Mike Corr joined Moravian College in November 2016 as Director of Marketing and Communications, one of his first goals was to find a system to keep track of the dozens of responsibilities and project requests that the department received each week. At the time, the marketing team was entirely dependent on email, which made searching for project requests, documents, and other information a time sink.

Collaborating with departments who needed assistance with marketing activities was also causing issues for Mike and his team. With feedback and revision requests happening via phone calls, email, and personal conversations, it was difficult to track all of these exchanges, make accurate changes and keep stakeholders from different departments updated on project progress.

Optimized workflows

One of the first changes Mike made within the department was implementing project management software to help his team collaborate, optimize their workflow, and keep track of deadlines. Teamwork was the obvious choice for Mike as he had used the software extensively during his years with private firms. While he had never used the software in an academic setting, he felt confident that it would offer his department the same benefits that he experienced in the corporate world.

As the Marketing Department at Moravian College works on projects for other departments, they add each department as users to Teamwork. This has improved transparency by giving everyone immediate, real-time updates on project progress. Privacy and permission features within Teamwork ensures that users from each department only have permission to access certain aspects of their projects, without giving them permission to view projects in progress for other departments.

Cross-department collaboration

Whether the marketing department at Moravian College is working on mockups for a new page on the college website or planning a campaign from scratch with the enrollment department, Teamwork has simplified the feedback loop for revisions. Using comments and the built-in document editor, the marketing team and stakeholders in other departments can comment directly on the material they’re producing without sending updated files back and forth.

For Mike, another benefit of the software is that it gives his team the ability to directly measure their output and prove their value to those reviewing budgets at the administration and department levels.

“Using the reporting tools in Teamwork, we can accurately convey the value that our team delivers. It’s always hard to measure ROI in marketing, but Teamwork allows us to quantify our impact.”

While marketing tools and strategies that work well in the corporate world don’t always work as effectively for marketing teams in higher education, Mike found Teamwork to perform exceptionally well in both environments.