External Communications in Wrike

Jenn O'Connor

Recently my team has expanded its use of Wrike to include tracking external communications, specifically executive communications and crisis management. Prior to this, our work within the platform was focused on collaborative GTM and program support initiated via a request form.

I wanted to check with the larger Wrike community if there are recommendations, any specific templates, or best practices I can leverage. I need to coach and guide my internal SME on incorporating. Long term we're looking to capture effort and capacity vs. purely tracking.

Anna Giacobbe

I don't have a template to share per se, but I do have our own experience to share!

When setting up your work, think about what key elements are important for you to track outside of native fields like assignee and due dates; whatever you need visibility on or elements you need to track, transform those ideas into Custom Fields. Any tool you create works off of these, be it Dashboards or Calendars. This is my best practice.

For our tracking needs, Calendars have been super handy, especially if you need to understand publication dates. Calendars now leverage powerful filtering which is a huge upgrade (this was a very recent update).

An example to share is that last year, I was mandated to create an email tracker with the intent of helping users plan their comms on certain days, ensuring that they are not planning an email send on a day where there are already a few slated. We have an email request form for people to put their submissions with that includes a link to the Calendar I created so that they can select the most appropriate date. The Calendar includes layers like Region and Audience targeting so that we can avoid over-sending, as well as layers for products and email type. Anyone can go in and play with the layers as they see fit!

Dashboards can also be super helpful in your case, especially since you can group/break them down by specific custom fields.

To tie it all up, I'd recommend making your Request Form act like a brief; instead of having folks purely attach something that cannot be scanned, transform your briefing questions into custom field questions on the Request Form so that it acts as a single source of truth (and any changes made there are tracked!).

Good luck!!!