Materials Submission Forms

The Project:

I moved 100% manual labor processes of accepting materials submissions via email which involved collecting, reviewing and inevitable rejecting almost every submission for being out of spec, to asynchronous submissions via forms, where clients can find the forms without our materials reminders, and collecting form entries with rigid rules reducing the number of errors in submissions by magnitudes, while also creating transparency for the client and our staff and enabling the creation of automations, including some form-to-product processes that are nearly fully automated.

Background:

I often overheard coworkers complain that clients submitted materials that weren’t to spec. Usually too long, and often by a lot. Clients would submit 300 words for a 150 word spot, hoping they would get away with it and get more value for their investment in advertising. Each time this happened cost us time, and ended wasting their time too.

Starting less than a year into my job, I wrote a purely database driven form engine where I’d manually create rows in MySQL in order to build forms, starting with products that we sold the most of. This soon saved so much time on email correspondence that manually creating these, keying in every detail like max-length, and errors didn’t allow me to keep up with the requests for new forms. Luckily, we had also started a new WordPress website to post information from our media kit, so I was able to utilize Gravity Forms to reduce the administrative burden and create and modify forms quickly, even when they needed custom code. I developed a series of template forms and best practices to standardize our forms and reduce the time needed to create new ones.

Results:

These forms greatly reduce the number of questions advertisers have, and the amount of time we collectively spend dealing with materials that aren’t to spec. Advertisers get instant confirmation of submitted details and instructions for making corrections.

While some will still make mistakes, the error rate is far lower, and with shared access to the form entries, we no longer have to resort to pestling employees on vacation or breaking into their work email to see if materials have arrived—sadly both of those things happened more than once.

Today, most materials come in via forms and we’re moving to a form-only approach, refusing submissions of complex products over email. Integration into our Digital Stats Dashboards are now tying form submissions to Tickets, which can set the ticket status, change an ticket owner from production manager to graphic designer upon submission, and push details about the submission to the ticket.

A few years back, I handled off the development of most of these forms to our print production team who are now capable enough to handle almost all of the day to day needs. I still handle forms for digital materials and automation on several forms is increasing our margins and allowing us to keep our prices competitive. More automation is coming in the future as these forms drive digital-first strategies.

I don’t know that I can fully estimate the savings over the years, but beyond the time and monetary savings, these have saved many people’s sanity.