For our very first Fireside Chat webinar, we are joined by Chris Smith, Marketing & Content Manager at Theatre Projects.

In this session, Chris and CJ from our Customer Success team chat through:

Check out the full video here:

🔑 Key takeaways:

1. Theatre Projects puts out a lot of proposals. It's difficult and time consuming for Chris to review every one to ensure the best content is being used.

Since implementing OpenAsset, the team is now clearly able to see the firm's best content, helping them put their best foot forward on their proposals. This also saves the Marketing team valuable time from having to answer questions and provide images to other team members.

Chris notes this is particularly helpful in a remote environment, where the team members can’t just walk over to his desk and ask a question.

2. Theatre Projects leverages Albums in OpenAsset to quickly access their best content that they reference most frequently. This allows them to collaborate more effectively on content to use for proposals.

Additionally, they use the InDesign templates & InDesign <> OpenAsset integration to streamline their proposal creation workflows.

3. Theatre Projects leverages Access Levels in OpenAsset to make it easy to see what’s been approved for external use, and what’s just for research or internal uses.

They also prioritized setting up a clean, easy keyword structure to ensure to make the system intuitive to use and quickly find the best content for proposals.

This is particularly important because there are team members working on proposals who are new to a software application where they can access content, so making this as easy as possible was a high priority.

Having a proper keyword structure in place helps get buy in from the team, and ensures that the hard work of capturing incredible content doesn’t go to waste - it helps to ensure that content is useful, and not something that’s just “fills the room.”

4. The industry that Theatre Projects is in has a lot of unique verbiage.

It’s important that new hires come in and can quickly learn how the firm talks about projects and understand elements of proposals.

OpenAsset has empowered new hires to quickly learn the lingo, see the work they’ve done in a visually immersive interface, and understand who they are as designers and how they think big about their work.

5. Deltek Vantagepoint is Theatre Projects’ single source of truth for project information. Their OpenAsset system is synced with Vantagepoint, and OpenAsset is where their team goes to look for project information.

Put another way, Vantagepoint is the "back of house" and OpenAsset is the "front of house."

This integration also reduces time spent entering data in multiple tools, and ensures project data is consistent and accurate across their tech stack.

6. Theatre Projects has a formal proposal review process that helps to ensure they’re putting their best foot forward. The team is typically comprised of:

7. Getting project information from project and technical teams is a common challenge for AEC marketers. Chris shares how particularly in a remote environment, much of the communication with team members revolves around asking for things - which is largely a new phenomenon since more companies started working remotely.

To address this, Chris and the firm has a few tips: