The Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) is the most dominant women’s golf tour, with tournaments all over the world, including in Korea, Canada, Mexico, France, England, Australia, China, and Japan. The Lpga and all the brands and tournaments within it are supported by a single in-house Creative team with 12 distributed members. Brad Boyd, Art Director and Senior Technical Director at the LPGA described the team’s work, “We have offices around the globe in Europe and Asia, and we support the marketing and promotional efforts of all those brands, as well as event graphics and promotion. We do print, web, and video production. You name it, we can do it.” In order to keep pace with demand, the creative team at the LPGA prioritizes a streamlined, end-to-end creative workflow to help them manage complex processes and deliver creative content that is aligned with organizational goals.

Process keeps the creative team on par

Because the team handles a large volume of work for a wide range of stakeholders, the creative team at the LPGA has always understood the importance of having a robust process for managing their work, as Brad explained, “For about a decade now we’ve been focused on establishing a project management system, because creative departments, by their very nature, can be quite chaotic and messy. If we can bring some structure and provide protocol, then our team can focus on the work.”

Over time, the creative team at the LPGA began to feel that their old system wasn’t providing the support and structure their team needed to be able to keep up. They decided it was time to start looking for a better option, as Brad pointed out, “As a creative endeavor, everything we do is about communicating the message our requesters bring to us, in whatever platform is required. Our old system just wasn’t really built for creative teams. It was more focused on task management. So we went out into the wide world to see what we could find.”

As Brad and his team began the search for their next platform, they identified the top challenges they wanted their new system to solve:

1. Non-collaborative request intake that made it difficult for the creative team to gather all the data they needed to get started on projects
2. Tedious project creation that took a long time and lacked standardization
3. Chaotic creative reviews that lacked clarity about the feedback or approval status of proofs

inMotion ignite is a hole in one

When Brad and his team discovered inMotion Ignite, they were excited to find a platform specifically built for managing creative work. “inMotion ignite is the Ferrari of creative workflow, and boy did we want the Ferrari.”

Brad described the ignite features that have had the biggest impact on the LPGA’s day to day work:

• Comprehensive request intake forms and collaborative request dashboard. “With the dynamic forms, our requesters can select the kind of project they need, and the form keeps asking them questions depending on the answer they give. Additionally, having required fields is a game changer for us. The forms in ignite really allow us to get the information we need right at the start of the project. Requesters must give us a description, put in a due date, and they have to tell us if that due date has any flexibility. We can really fine-tune the forms and get really granular, and that is a big help.”
• Project and route templates for quick project creation. “We have over 100 project templates in the system right now. Some of them are very specific, so when a request comes in, all I have to do is select the project template, and boom! It’s done. All the necessary tasks are assigned to all the right people, and I don’t have to touch it again. It’s three clicks and I’m done.”
• Intuitive online proofing environment. “ignite has completely changed how we handle proofs. Now we can send out a 200-page proof, or a video project, and reviewers can just leave their feedback right there on the proof. That is a big, big deal. We also love the way the proofing system has tiers and groups. That allows to get really specific and have dynamic workflows and protocols. It has also created a lot more accountability for our reviewers. Before, when we would just send them a link, they would say something ‘looked good,’ and then we’d take it to print, only for them to come back with changes. Now we have clear statuses on the proofs and we know if something is approved or not.”
• Collaborative reporting keeps everyone in the loop. “I love shared reports in ignite. We didn’t have that in our old system. I have shared several reports with some of our department heads, and they love the increased visibility. Since the reports are updated in real time, they can access live data whenever they want and see what is going on.”

A tee-rific creative partnership

In addition to the features they loved in ignite, the LPGA creative team was impressed by the partnership approach they felt with inMotionNow. Brad explained, “When we started working with ignite we always felt that we were building a partnership. We weren’t just a customer. Everyone we have worked with makes us feel like a partner who they are invested in having a long-term relationship with. From the very beginning we always felt like we were being listened to.”

As the LPGA continues to grow as an organization, the creative team will be able to keep their mantra of “you name it, we can do it” to contribute towards organizational objectives with the support of inMotion ignite, as Brad described. “When I started with the LPGA 16 years ago it was me and one other person. Now there are 12 of us, and the organization is continuing to grow under the leadership of Mike Whan. As an organization we’re doing many new things, and this creative team is excited to support that growth.”

Elise Hauser is a product and content marketer with a passion for telling brand stories. She has produced inMotionNow’s annual Creative Management Report for 4 years, webinars, content sessions for major industry events reaching audiences of 11,000+, and of course, countless blog posts. When Elise isn’t writing about the marketing and creative industry at inMotionNow she is teaching economics and hanging out with her cat, Tucker, at her home in Raleigh, NC.