Set up Approval Workflows

Automated approval workflows are essential in a dynamic and fast-paced marketing environment. Automation leads to faster response times and smoother processes. By implementing an automated workflow, you replace the manual task of chasing down approvals, significantly improving your turnaround times.

Some key advantages of setting up workflows:

Minimize human error by enforcing standardized workflows and validation rules.
Real-time visibility into the status of approvals and the progress of content.
Enforce compliance with regulatory requirements, internal policies, and industry standards.
Scalability. Whether handling a few approvals or thousands, automation ensures consistency and efficiency across the board.

In this article, we'll guide you through setting up approval workflows to ensure a seamless and well-organized content review process for your team and clients.

Creating a new approval workflow

An approval workflow is essentially a template you can save and reuse each time you send content for approval. You can customize the workflow by setting up special rules to auto-schedule a social media post after approval or move it automatically from one person to the next for revisions or approvals. Here's how to get started:

1. Head to your Workspace Settings "⚙️" and select Approval workflows

2. Next, click on the +New Approval Workflow button. Write a workflow name that helps you and your team identify different approval processes quickly. No one but you and your content team can see the workflow name.

3. Click on Add people to this round and select the team members or stakeholders who need to be part of the approval process.

Note: Only people with access to a workspace in your account will appear in the dropdown list. You can assign roles such as Publisher or Approver to people in your account.

4. Rounds are the steps your content needs to go through for approval. Click on Add Another Round to add more steps. You can tailor rounds to include departments such as Legal and Social Media or sequential steps such as one round for internal stakeholders and another for external clients.

Note: You can drag and drop people from one round to another or remove them by clicking "X."

Round Preferences

Everyone must approve / Any single person can approve this round

When the approval setting is set to "Everyone must approve," every individual in the approval round must give their approval for the process to proceed. This option is best suited for critical content where consensus among all stakeholders is necessary before moving forward.

On the other hand, when the setting is switched to "Any single person can approve," only one approver needs to give the green light for the round to be marked as approved.

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 to the next round as soon as the current round is approved. This setting is key to streamlining workflows and ensuring swift progression through the approval process without manual intervention.

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. This allows your team time before moving to the next stage when necessary.

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 stakeholders in a round or approval workflow have approved. This feature streamlines the publishing process, ensuring approved content is promptly scheduled to go live without manual intervention.

Alternatively, when auto-scheduling is off, you must manually schedule content after approval. This option works well for content requiring 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.

Edit existing approval workflows

You can delete, duplicate, and edit existing approval workflows from the Approval Workflows page under Workspace Settings. Find your approval workflow and click the three dots to see the options.

Important: Once you've saved the changes to the approval workflow, remember to update any content currently going through this process. If you've added new people or taken someone out, you'll need to send the content for approval again using the updated workflow. The previous workflow version won't be updated by itself on the content where it was applied.

Just send the content where you would like the content to be updated back to drafts and for approval again.

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 stakeholders are informed of content pending their approval or when change requests are needed.
Track where each content piece is in the approval process to manage deadlines effectively and identify potential delays.
Keep in mind that Gain sends notifications to the people in the first round and will only notify the next round after the people in the previous round have approved.