Creating Approval Workflows

What are approval workflows?

Approval workflows are essentially templates that you create with a predetermined amount to review rounds and specific Clients or stakeholders. By creating approval workflows, Gain takes care of sending your content to your stakeholders in the exact order you determine and gathering all their feedback and approvals.

Advantages of approval workflows:

• By automating the feedback gathering process, you minimize human error and prevent content from being published without all the necessary approvals. This is especially useful for teams managing content for highly regulated industries like banking or pharmaceuticals.
• You have real-time visibility into the status of approvals and the progress of content.
• You have a time-stamped log with all comments, change requests and approvals.
• Your team doesn't have to chase down clients for feedback and approvals anymore. Super time-saver!
• You can create approval workflows for every client or type of content, with as many rounds and stakeholders as you need.

Jump ahead

• Creating a new approval workflow
• Edit existing approval workflows
• Implementing your workflow

Creating a new approval workflow 

Creating an approval workflow is quite simple.

1. Head to your Workspace Settings (⚙️) and select Approval Workflows

2. Click +New approval workflow. Name your workflow and its first round. Team Members can see the workflow name and the people in it, but don't worry, Clients won't see this.

3. Click Add a person and select the people who need to review and approve the content. 

4. Click + Add another round to add rounds as needed, depending on the layers or steps of approval in your workflow. This is especially helpful for teams who have multiple stakeholders, who can be internal people (for example, Directors and Account Managers) and/or external people (such as Clients and their Legal teams).

Round Preferences

There are several things you can customize when creating your approval workflow.

For each round, you can select:

Everyone must approve / Any single person can approve this round

• "Everyone must approve," means every individual in the approval round must give their approval for the approval process to keep moving along. This option is best suited for critical content where consensus among all stakeholders is necessary before moving forward.
• On the other hand, if you choose "Any single person can approve," only one approver needs to give the green light for the round to be marked as approved and the content to move to the next round.

Auto-advances to next round after approved / Manually advance to next round after approved

• When the auto-advance option is on, Gain will automatically move the content to the next round as soon as the current round is approved.
• On the other hand, when the auto-advance option is off, the content will remain in Next status after approval. In this case, it's up to your team to manually advance the content to the next round of approval. This allows your team time before the content moves to the next stage.

Auto-schedules after approved / Must manually schedule after approved

• When auto-schedule is on, Gain automatically schedules content for publishing (provided a future publishing date is set) once all the Clients or stakeholders in the approval workflow have approved.
• When auto-scheduling is off, you must manually schedule the content after approval. This option works well for content that requires manual publishing, such as Instagram Stories featuring interactive elements like polls or stickers, which can only be incorporated directly within the social platform's interface.

Editing an existing approval workflow

You can delete, duplicate, and edit existing approval workflows from the Approval Workflows page under Workspace Settings (⚙️). Find the approval workflow you want and click the More dots (...) to see the options.

Implementing your workflow

Testing your approval workflow before going live is a great practice. Create a mock content piece and run it through the workflow to identify any issues. 

A few other things to keep in mind: 

• Set up how you would like to get notified and when. Gain's notification system ensures that Clients are notified of content pending their approval and Team Members are notified when changes are requested. 
• Track where each content piece is in the approval process to manage deadlines effectively and identify potential delays. 
• First, Gain will notify the people in the first round. Once those stakeholders have approved, Gain will notify the people in the next round, and so forth.