Creating content for ‘citizens of change’.

Clamoring for quality creative

Creative content plays a vital role in how a university attracts and retains the best students and staff. In fact, many universities now have creative services teams responsible for delivering on the various requests for content in support of student recruitment, events such as open days, publications, alumni relations, fundraising, and community partnerships.

A magnet for what it calls ‘citizens of change,’ the University of Leicester has flourished over the past century, becoming a leading research-intensive university in the UK. Founded as a living memorial to those who made sacrifices in World War I and known for the discovery of genetic fingerprinting in 1984, today some 20,000 students and 4,000 staff advance the frontiers of knowledge and tackle contemporary issues.

To ensure the university continues to be competitive and thrive, Leicester’s marketing and external relations department works to continually enhance the university’s reputation, research, and recruitment. When Cole Dixon joined the small, in-house creative services team as Marketing and Content Traffic Officer in 2022, the organisation faced a challenge that’s familiar to marketers everywhere: how to support increasing demand for top quality creative and marketing collateral whilst using time and resources efficiently.

Empowering creative productivity

Early on, Cole observed the team — which provides its services free of charge — struggling to handle a growing flood of content and project requests coming in via multiple channels. Emails, instant messages, phone calls, and corridor conversations added to the complexity.

As Head of Creative for the university, Adam King drove a business case and requisition process for a new project management solution. After assessing various options against specific criteria, he selected Adobe Workfront as a cost-effective application to efficiently handle the growing number of content requests, eliminate duplication, and increase the creative team’s productivity.

“Adobe is very in tune with higher education. We explored many alternatives and found Workfront best suited our needs. It’s intuitive and easily tailored to how we want to work,” says Adam. “In the future it will also integrate cleanly with our Adobe Creative Cloud software, so our creatives save time by sending send proofs directly from creative applications.”

These factors helped Adam build a strong business case for procurement. “Adobe’s well-established track record reassured us that the ROI and faster time-to-value would be there. University budgets are being increasingly scrutinised, and we see cost savings for the university by improving how we use time and resources to accelerate our content supply chain,” Adam said. “We’re pleased to serve rising creative demand, from researchers in clinical medicine or archaeology to managers in student experience and community wellbeing, philanthropy, or student recruitment.”

With Workfront, Cole saw an opportunity to improve collaboration and efficiency amongst the team, which includes graphic designers, copywriters, website specialists, and video producers. She set out to put best practices in place and scale creative services by seeing through the university’s implementation. During Cole’s first 18 months, she helped the team better serve marketing asset requests from more than 300 staff members across 22 university departments.

“We wanted to avoid wasted time digging through and cross-referencing emails. We needed to do away with miscommunication, excessive admin, and duplicated work,” says Cole. “Workfront allows us to get everything in one place to manage projects more efficiently with limited resources.”

Focusing on what matters, managing expectations

Cole used the new project management solution to set up a new process that kicks off with a single enquiry form. To submit a request, initiators answer a series of questions that become increasingly customised depending on key project parameters, such as whether it involves general creative development, a web page, or video production.

“In the past, every request required follow-up to confirm details. Using our new briefing form, 75% of requests come in with all the specifications and content files that we need to get started, so we can deliver creative content faster,” Cole says.

A single event at the university can require up to one hundred digital, print, and large format assets. When the University of Leicester's student recrutiment team requests creative assets to welcome prospective students to campus for Open Days, for example, a project manager uses Workfront to easily view team member availability to effectively balance workloads. Everyone involved gains transparency on project timelines and milestone updates.

The creative team also supports annual events like The Citizens’ Awards, which celebrates the contributions of Leicester’s staff members across departments for excellence in teaching, research, student experience, operations, and leadership in inspiring positive change on campus and beyond. The 2023 awards recognised 13 staff members for contributions such as mentoring astronomy postgraduate researchers and promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion at the university’s School of Business.

The event marks the culmination of months of work by the creative team in coordination with dozens of stakeholders across the university community who now easily collaborate on the ceremony video and materials showcasing each of the winners. The creative team no longer emails layout proofs for review. Instead, asset approvers log into Workfront via single sign-on, making it simple for them to review and comment on proofs. The centralised communications allow Leicester’s creative team to collect feedback more quickly.

Scaling up and amplifying value

Now that the team has over a year’s worth of work in Workfront, the university can better align resources for the future. “With data on past projects, hours, investments, and areas supported, we plan more strategically and proactively for cyclical work such as admissions and graduation events,” Dixon says. “We’re focusing on the university’s priorities and adding more value.”

In 2023, the team handled 503 requests, up 46% from 2022. “We knew we were busy, but now we have the hard numbers to convey the growing volume of work we manage, and the time it takes. This is the first time we’ve had the insight to demonstrate our small team’s efficiency and value,” Cole says.

The collaboration capabilities and workflow automations help creative staff manage their time effectively. In the past year, the team used the system to send out 1,300 proofs for review, consolidating 7,896 comments for streamlined creative development. “Our team members have clear priorities, as work only comes to them through Workfront,” says Cole. “They spend more time creating and being productive instead of having to focus on more routine project and client management.”

An easy-to-tailor implementation

Bluprintx, an Adobe Silver Partner, led the deployment. Hosted on AWS, the cloud environment means Leicester’s design team never needs to worry about running out of storage for large working files.

Cole worked with Bluprintx consultants to set up the implementation to meet Leicester’s needs with the software’s out-of-the-box features. The consultants coordinated with Cole to build out the request intake form templates. They also enabled Cole as a super user and admin so she can assist with training and support needs among university staff following system launch.

Cole ran a requester feedback survey that made clear the high levels of satisfaction. Requesters rated the overall experience of using Workfront to request marketing support with an average score of 3.8 out of a maximum of 4.0. “For my colleagues in marketing who use the system, and for myself, we’re providing a superior end-to-end service to people needing creative content across the university,” Cole says.