Send content for approval

Send all your content for approval.

After you’ve selected content, you can pick an approval workflow, or choose from anyone in your account from the People tab, to start the approval process.

An approval workflow allows you to add people into one or more rounds of approval and automate your approval process. All approval workflows are like templates with special rules that you can save and reuse each time you need to send content for approval.

With approval workflows, you can:

Add as many people and rounds as you need
Decide who approves what and in what order.
Content moves automatically to the next person for review, revisions, or approval.

Important: Only account owners and administrators can create approval workflows. As a Publisher, you’re able to send content for approval using an existing workflow.

Taking content from pending approval to approved

Once you’ve sent content for approval, you will see the content status change as it moves through the approval process – from Draft to Pending Approval, Revision, Ready for the Next Round, or Approved.

The status shows up next to every piece of content, so you can quickly identify it in the calendar or list view or use filters to check on any item’s status.

A column labeled Status shows you who is next in the approval process in the list view, and the last time approvers received an email notification.

Pending Approval

After content is to someone (or many people) for approval, it will have the yellow-colored dot indicating the pending approval status. Members of the internal team (publishers, contributors, and administrators) can see and update content with this status.

Additionally, anyone with the publisher or admin access can send any content with the pending approval status back to drafts if they wish to cancel the approval process altogether.

Approvers can only see content with the pending approval status if it is pending their approval. An approver has two options for what they can do with this content:

1. Approve. This action will mark the content as Approved (if this person was the only approver), or it will send the content to the next person in the approval workflow if there are multiple rounds set up.

2. Request Changes. This action will mark the content as Revision, and Gain will alert the internal team to make the requested changes.

Ready for Next Round

Whenever you add one or more approvers into an approval workflow, each round has options that affect how content moves through the approval process.

Manually advance to the next round is one of these options.

When this option is off, Gain will automatically move content to the next round in the approval workflow once everyone in the current round approves it. Gain will automatically notify everyone in the next round that they have content pending their review.

When this option is on, the content is marked Ready for Next Round. It is up to your internal team to manually send the content to the next round in the approval workflow by clicking the Continue Process button or pressing the Continue Approval button from the action bar.

Revision

In the Approval section, below each approver's name, you can see any changes they've requested.

Another thing you can do during the revision process is to ask approvers for clarifications or follow-up questions. When you ask a question, Gain will send the content back for the person’s approval again and change the content status to Pending Approval.

To ask a question, head to the Approval tab, and type your question in the box right below their name and then click Ask Question.

Your client or colleague can see your question next time they log in to approve content.

You can see who requested the revision in the Status column and who’s up next in the process from the List view. All revision requests go to the person who created the content and any person who follows the workspace or content.

Approved

Any content that isn’t set to Auto-schedule after approved will remain with the approved status. This means Gain will not automatically schedule the content, and someone will need to schedule or publish the content manually.

How are Approvers notified?

We know how much everyone, including us, hates receiving a ton of follow up emails. Approvers will receive automatic reminders from Gain every 6 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, and 72 hours after the first notification.

When you send content for approval for the first time, the approver will receive a notification via email. Even if you send ten pieces of content, the approver will only receive one message. If you or another team member send more content to approve later, they will receive another notification.

When all content is approved, the automatic reminders will stop. When you send more content for approval, Gain will send a new notification, and the process will start over.

Renotify approvers

After you’ve made revisions to the content, you renotify approvers. There are two ways to re-notify approvers:

Inside the content editor, click on Resend to Approval.

2. In the calendar or list view, select all the items you need and then click To Approval.

Override Approvers

To override an approver who is on leave or has already given you approval in another way, you can manually mark the content as approved.

Head to the content editor’s approval tab, click the three dots next to the person’s name, and Mark Approved. Leave a comment explaining why you’re overriding the approval, and click Send.

Edit an Approval Round

You can edit rounds inside each piece of content to remove someone or to customize the approval round further. You can only edit the gray rounds. A gray round indicates Gain hasn’t sent an email to anyone in it yet. If a round is already yellow or orange, you will not be able to edit it.

Note: These steps only modify an approval round for this item. If you need to change an approval workflow permanently, go to Approval Workflows under Workspace Settings. After you edit a workflow, be sure to resend content for approval using the updated template.

Here’s how to edit a round:

Click the three dots in the round, and then click Edit.

2. Now, you can remove the person, add more people to the round, or modify the approval options for that round. Click Save.

What’s next?

Next, learn how easy it is to review an approver’s feedback and revise content.