How to Complete a Document Approval in Slack

Make it easier to approve marketing campaigns, job descriptions, legal documents, and more

Getting a document approved should be simpler than it is.

Whether it’s content for a new marketing campaign, a job description, a legal agreement, or something else, you know how easy it is for that process to get delayed. Maybe the draft was changed, but not everyone was informed of the update. Some people never saw your message about the project. Another person waited until the 11th hour to suggest several changes, guaranteeing you won’t get the document approved by your deadline.

With more people working from home, teams need to find a better way of getting their co-workers to approve documents. One study found it took as long as 10 weeks to approve a contract. In those weeks, those companies could have landed a huge new client or hired a fantastic new candidate. Approval delays kept them from doing so.

We built Wrangle to simplify complicated processes and allow teams to complete them entirely on Slack. In this article, we want to explain how Wrangle can make your document approval process much simpler and keep your projects on track.

The Marketing Campaign That Never Was

It was supposed to be a good day.

For weeks, you’d been working with your marketing department on a new campaign to target potential candidates for jobs. They researched keywords and bidding strategies, and you agreed together what areas you’d target and how much you’d want to spend in the process.

When the day came to pull the trigger, though, your boss asked you to loop in another department head. You sent them an email, and they didn’t respond. You followed up by phone, and they finally answered—and suggested the ad content you sent them on Google Docs needed to be revised. Just like that, you encountered the problem that 92 percent of marketers surveyed said was responsible for missing deadlines: a delay in approval.

There are several reasons why this campaign was delayed. The other department head should have been included at the beginning of the project, not in its final stage. That other supervisor, though, didn’t respond in a timely fashion, and they delayed the campaign by asking for new edits.

This is common life for a lot of companies. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be.

How Wrangle Can Help You Approve Documents Faster

Wrangle is a workflow system operating entirely within Slack. We can help you avoid situations like this one where you don't have everyone involved early in the process. We’d like to share how Wrangle could have helped that team avoid the complications it faced at the final stage of its project. Plus, Wrangle can automatically remind reviewers that they need to take action if they’re late — right in Slack.

Using Wrangle to Start a Marketing Campaign

Building the Approval Process

Wrangle allows you to create workflows as templates, saving you the trouble of starting from scratch each time you need to do a recurring approval, like launching a marketing campaign approval or a legal contract review.

In this instance, you would open Wrangle, click “Start Approval,” and then give your process a name: “Start a Marketing Campaign”. Wrangle will give you the option of selecting the users whose approval is needed, the Slack channel that will display the approval, and how many people need to approve the item before the workflow is considered finished (either a majority of people, all of them, or just one of them).

You don’t have to use the workflow description to share a link to your document, but it’s an ideal place to give people access to the Google Doc or Office 365 file they need to review. That way, you know they’re always responding to the latest version. And just like that, you’ve looped into this process every member of your team whom you require approval from.

Even better, you can trigger follow-up tasks once the approval has occurred, so you can make sure the marketing campaign gets launched on time, or your contract gets signed and returned to the customer. 

Running the Approval Process

Now that your workflow has started, everyone involved in the process will get a notification in the designated Slack channel. They’ll each have the option of approving or rejecting the document you sent, and you’ll get notified every time they choose an option.

If someone has changes they want made, they can do it in the Slack thread with the approval. That way, the full context is available to all reviewers, as well as the person requesting approval. Once the changes are made, the person who recommended changes can return to the approval process and sign-off on the final version of the marketing campaign. With Wrangle, every reviewer gets explicit approval buttons in Slack, so you always know exactly where they stand.

Measuring Your Process

As you do more and more approvals in your approval workflow, Wrangle builds up data on how that process is working. You can export the data and do analytics on how fast you’re approving your documents. You can see who is fast and who is often late, or who is requesting the most approvals.

With this information in hand, you can figure out how to address the bottlenecks within your company that caused you to almost miss your deadline for the project. You can then discuss your findings with the team and adjust the Wrangle workflow once you have a plan to speed up the bottlenecks.

Make Your Document Approval Process Easier

Wrangle makes it simpler for you to review legal documents, job descriptions, marketing campaigns, and much more. All you need to do is install the app in your Slack and build a workflow. We know you’ll be impressed with how much easier it is to complete simple tasks.