5 steps to get started for admins
In this article:
- Create a workspace for your agency
- Collaborate with your team
- Manage content or social posts for your workspace
- Send content for approval and receive change requests
- Learn how clients approve or request changes
Getting started with Gain is simple. We’ve helped thousands of marketing teams around the world to simplify their workflows! We want to help your team evaluate Gain and make this transition as easy as possible. Follow these five steps to get your team on its way to a seamless workflow in no time.
If you’d like to get a personalized tour of Gain schedule a demo with our Success team.
Step 1. Create a workspace for your agency
In Gain, you can manage multiple workspaces under a single account. Create a workspace for your agency to get your team set up first. Workspaces will contain file folders and social channels; all your files and social posts show up in a gallery, calendar, or list view.
- You can invite people to join your account and assign them permissions, such as administrator or approver, to the workspace(s) they’ll manage or approve content for.
- To add a new workspace, click + Add a Workspace in the Workspaces Dashboard. Then, follow the steps to give your workspace a name, upload a logo, invite people to join the workspace, and connect social profiles.
After you’ve created a new workspace, you’ll have access to admin settings to configure the workspace under Workspace Settings.
- People: Invite new users or manage user workspace permissions
- Approval Workflows: Create a new approval process or configure existing ones
- File Folders: Create new file folders or modify default folders
- Social Channels: Add, reconnect, or remove social profiles
Step 2. Collaborate with your team
After creating a new workspace, invite and assign people role-specific permissions to your account’s workspace(s). The best way to test how Gain brings content producers and clients together is by inviting your colleagues to help you work through the approval and collaboration workflows.
- Team members: By default, team members join the workspace as Publishers. Publishers can create, edit, and export content. Additionally, they can send content for approval to other users, receive content to approve and review, and schedule and publish social posts. Click here to learn more about additional permissions.
- Team members will receive an invitation to join your account and set up their user settings.
- Approvers: An approver is anyone who will be logging in to review the calendar and approve or request changes on files or social posts and will not participate in creating or editing. By default, approvers do not need a password to log in; instead, they can automatically log in via approval notifications or reminders.
- The approver doesn’t have to receive any notifications until they have real content to approve (unless you choose to send them an invite during the setup process.)
- A user is everyone who has to log in to Gain to get work done, whether they’re account owners, administrators, contributors, publishers, or approvers.
A few things to try with your team:
- Assign a task or mention a team member
- Send a draft for approval and ask your colleague to request changes or approve
- Use tags, filters, and calendar labels to organize content
- Send content to yourself for approval and head to the Pending Approvals page to see what your client will experience when it’s their turn to approve
After you’ve invited people to join your account, you can make changes in permissions or head to Billing to select your plan or download receipts.
- People in Account: Invite new users or manage account permissions
- Billing: Confirm how much you’ll be paying each month according to the number of people in your account
Step 3. Manage content or social posts for your workspace
All your content is displayed in the calendar or as columns in the list view, making it easy for everyone on your team to manage content and be on the same page.
- +New Content: Connect new social profiles, create social posts, or upload files to a file folder.
- Action bar: Draft, schedule, repost, duplicate, or publish posts from any connected profiles.
- Filters: Show content by status, tags, date, formats, and folders or channels. Filters will remain on as you toggle between views or even if you log out of Gain and come back, so make sure to Reset to Default once you’re through using filters.
- Status: After an approval process begins, Gain will place content in a status color for each stage your content is in at any given time (Pending Approval, Revisions, Scheduled, etc.)
Step 4. Send content for approval and receive change requests
When you’re ready to send content for review, just click To Approval from the action bar. You can only send content for approval that has been saved as a draft or is under revision.
In the Approval section, below each approver's name, you can see any changes they've requested. You’ll see the user’s name under each round, accompanied by a color that indicates the status:
- Orange if the person requested changes
- Yellow when content is pending their approval
- Green after they’ve approved
Once you've edited your content, you can renotify them so they can review and approve. You can also override a colleague’s approval when needed. Here’s how:
- Renotify Approvers: Click Renotify Approvers after making the changes requested by an approver. Gain will send the latest version of a file or social post for their approval again.
- Mark Approved: Click on Mark Approved to override a user’s approval. You’ll have to add a note explaining why you’re overriding this person’s approval.
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.
In the Notification Center (🔔), you can check if an approver has requested a revision for the content you’ve created. Click on the Content ID # to access the editor and see the edits.
Note: You’ll receive email notifications whenever there are revisions too. See other notifications Gain sends you under Notification Preferences (⚙️).
What’s an automated approval workflow?
An approval workflow allows you to add people into one or more rounds of approval and automates 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. Save time by saving your approval process as a template.
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: Be sure to invite anyone who will be approving content to your account before creating an approval workflow.
Step 5. Learn how clients approve or request changes
Before you invite clients to join your account as approvers, you’ll want to understand what the approval process looks like for them.
- An excellent way to test what your clients will experience is giving a team member temporary Approver only permissions and send a few pieces of content for their approval.
- Remember, approvers, do not receive an invitation to join your account right away. They’ll only be notified via email when you send content for approval to them. They will be able to auto-login to approve content with this email notification too.
All social post-mock-ups and file previews sent for review will show up on the Pending Approvals page.
- Approve or Request Changes: Alongside a preview of the file or social posts, approvers will have these two options to take action.
- Workspace dropdown: Clients will have access to see the calendar for their workspace(s). They’ll be able to see previews of scheduled, approved, and already published content but will not be able to access any files or social posts in Draft status or read any Activity (including conversations between your team).
- Personal Settings: In this section, clients can modify their notifications and account profile.
What’s next?
There’s a lot to discover as you move along your first 30 days with Gain. To automate your approval process, you can create custom Approval Workflows for each workspace. Productivity tools like tasks, content duplication, and recycling can help your team move fast.
To explore more ways to use Gain, check out our help center or reach out to our customer success team to ask questions, schedule an onboarding for your team, or just say hi. 👋🏽