Building a real-time, collaborative project tool for marketers

Challenge

Newsletters were the only archive Google had of its work, projects and creative campaigns. There was no single repository which Googlers could visit to view and collaborate across campaigns and newsletters, giving teams across regions limited visibility on past campaigns and results.

Approach

We were briefed to re-design the APAC in Action newsletter and build in functionalities for multiple teams to manage and collaborate across newsletters.

The brief was then scaled up - to build an evergreen project repository that also connected to a newsletter editor, called APAC Atlas. Toaster's Technology Team built and designed this one-stop project repository with two main functionalities:

1. A project library, where Google Project Managers could submit project-specific snippets, summaries, data, thumbnails, key learnings and more, which are then submitted for editorial review and then published.

2. A newsletter editor, which is only accessible to editors, where project-specific snippets can be selected and linked from the Project Library.

The project library and newsletter editor have both been built keeping collaboration and real-time updates in mind, functioning in the same way that Google Docs or Figma does. This improves efficiency and streamlines work flow across Project Managers and teams.

This year, we have added a new integration called the “Calendar”, which gives anyone accessing the the website a view of important, topical moments happening across the year.

Results

Our real-time collaborative platform continues to facilitate the entire process of consolidating articles and content from various Project Managers in an easy-to-use way. This makes information and content gathering, content population and reviews smoother and more efficient. Over 1,000+ campaigns have been published on APAC Atlas since its launch.