Boutique publishing company manages workflows and interdepartmental communication with Redbooth

Please describe the problem or business challenge your company was trying to solve with Redbooth.
Our company produces niche, regional magazines and books so we’re constantly having to keep track of workflows for each publication between admin, advertising sales, graphic design and customer service. When we launched with just 2 employees, a white board in the office worked just fine, but as we grew and added more and more people to the team (many who worked remotely), keeping track of all the working parts of our company became a huge pain point while trying to stay on schedule. A cloud based system where everyone could login to track productivity was our only hope to keep so many people who don’t work in the office, working together.

Tell us about your search for a solution.
Ease of use and having a big picture view of all our projects was the most important feature to me. I had used Basecamp before as a customer through our web developer and I just didn’t like the layout. I’m a graphic designer, so how things look is really important to me. Before we found Redbooth, we tried nearly everything and constantly switched hoping the next program would suit our needs better. One of our new employees sent me a link to Redbooth after the discussion of a better PM system came up and that was in 2012. We haven’t switched since and now I require my web developer to communicate through our Redbooth site instead of his own project management site.

How did you make the decision to choose Redbooth?
The two biggest features I like in Redbooth are the task list templates and the ability to have a big picture view of separate task lists within each project. See them side by side and being able to scroll between them from left to right is so helpful, versus scrolling down a long list. I can visually compare them right next to each other. I can’t stress enough how much I like this! Every magazine issue we create has it’s own project and we start each new issue with fresh task list templates so we know we don’t forget a single step every issue. It allows our small team to work like a machine and I get a lot of good sleep at night because of it.

What specific results and benefits were you able to achieve with Redbooth?
My email inbox has less than 15 emails in it right now because of Redbooth. If it’s a task, it gets assigned in Redbooth and that’s where I go to get stuff done. The mental clarity of having all of my to-do’s organized by project in Redbooth is priceless. I communicate with all of our staff through Redbooth as it relates to tasks. This gives me the ability to set deadlines, bring multiple people into the conversations and keep a record of what unfolded. Yes, I could do that in email… but people forget to “reply all” all the time. Redbooth takes human error out of our communication.

Do you have anything else to add?
I don’t know how big magazine companies keep track of their issues between editorial, advertising, graphics and admin departments, but I feel like because of Redbooth we probably do it better. It’s a great feeling to know that you can run a small company, just like or even better than a large national organization, keeping your employees engaged in a less stressful way and deliver your customers an efficient experience.