How to Manage Creative Feedback for Faster Approvals

When it comes to creative workflows, you’ve worked with a range of creative collaboration softwares, project management tools, and probably a digital asset manager or at least a shared centralized file-sharing system. All these pieces were designed to deliver better creative work, on schedule and within budget, and be able to access that creative.

Yet, creative projects always seem to be falling off the rails, with the primary reasons falling under budgets, scope, and schedules.

When any of these pieces break down, not only is creative work held up, but quality and morale suffer.

There is one underprioritized factor that has the ability to transform and unify your approach to creative projects, amplifying the effectiveness of your existing tools, and resulting in stronger creative.

How do you manage and gather creative feedback and approvals?

It’s Not Collaboration If It’s a Siloed Mess

Before you can solve the problem of inefficient feedback, it’s important to understand where and why these delays happen.

Your team is likely gathering feedback across various platforms and channels, all for the same project, or even the same file. Feedback is coming at you in the form of comments in a project management tool, markups on a collaborative doc, maybe some Figma or Canva comments, and more comments on PDFs, emails, Slack or other chats, voice notes, or even physical printouts. Not to mention meetings and other offline conversations.

The same issue of siloed communication is happening on creative signoffs.

Things continue to get even messier when multiple versions of the file or creative project are involved. With feedback all over the place, nobody knows if they’re working on the most recent – or approved – version.

It can become a nightmare to consolidate creative feedback, much less keep multiple stakeholders on the same page. And forget about assigning feedback as tasks to specific team members.

All of these problems associated with poor feedback cycles are what get projects held up and lead to frustration.

What Bottlenecks Look Like in Creative Review Cycles

It’s easy to understand how siloed feedback and approvals can destroy productivity.

There are a few clear symptoms of a broken creative process:

Missed, conflicting, or irrelevant feedback

A lack of accountability, whether for jobs to be done or approval deadlines

Endless scope creep and budget overruns

Suffering creative quality (the “I give up and never want to look at this project again”)

Unhappy teams and clients

Sound familiar? Hopefully not. But for creative workflows without a thought out, centralized and consolidate review and approval process, it can be a all too common reality.

How to Approach Creative Review and Approvals

Here’s the thing about creative feedback. You are already gathering it. And it is likely effective feedback. If not, that’s a different problem to solve.

The challenge is how to build a systematic approach to the feedback you are receiving that is not only collaborative, but scalable – without the need to disrupt your core creative or marketing operations.

To build an efficient creative feedback process there are a few key considerations to enable a powerful and resilient solution.

Keep Feedback Centralized

This is the most obvious and solves many of the issues. Most tools do have collaborative feedback elements. PM tools have a proofing functionality. You can mark up a Figma board. You can leave comments on a PDF in a variety of tools. Leaving comments in an email with timestamps can work in a pinch.

But, having all files that require feedback in one place is essential to reducing miscommunication, versioning issues, transparency and so much more.

With images, video, websites, PDFs, and more all in one location, you can see an entire project history in context and reduce the confusion of siloed platforms and channels.

Feedback Deserves Precision

How do you mark up an image file differently than a PDF? A video vs a website? Leaving precise feedback is essential to escaping the miscommunication cycle. Whether the pixel or frame, letter or image selections, precision feedback should indicate exactly what needs to be amended or changed, and always in context.

Take Action

Leaving precise feedback is only one piece of the puzzle. “Great feedback, now what?” Who’s going to do what? With a feedback-to-task disconnect (ie not in the same place) you open the door to a game of broken telephone.

There is a second bottleneck that a connected feedback-to-action system alleviates. That is the “why”. When an approver or a creative understands why they are approving or working on a file, less time is spent on the back-and-forth.

Combine Real Time and Async

While leaving timely feedback and seeing completed tasks in real-time is often vital, so is having a way for contributors to work async if they need to. With teams that are spread out across countries and time zones, establishing an async workflow is an important part of the process. Or the busy creative director who has a team of ten designers waiting on feedback – it might be a while to get ten meetings set up. Having both sync and async feedback is essential to a creative process.

Connecting Feedback to Deadlines

Project management tends to follow a cascade effect. It starts with the project deadline. That is broken into a Gantt or other project schedule format. Creative tasks are often micro-tasks which are only represented by “Get video approved” or “Gather client feedback on layout”. Having deadlines connected directly to the deepest level of feedback helps keep the micro-level tasks on track.

Versioning is (Almost) Everything

If you’ve ever worked on creative of any kind you know the frustration of working on the wrong file, or having a client or manager give you feedback on an old version. This happens with silos. A good versioning system includes the ability to review any version of any file with the ability to easily identify what was changed, when, and of course, why.

Having a consolidated history of all file feedback, with all file versions, with a history of the feedback, that is threaded, gives context for every decision and revision.

Integrate with YOUR System

An important point here to stress is a good tool or process should be additive. You don’t want to change how you work; you want to augment it. If you are gathering feedback anyway, can it be done by simply changing where the feedback is stored?

The Benefits of a Review and Approval System

With a system in place to address feedback and approvals, there are 6 major wins you should see in your creative project workflows:

Faster version turnaround with way less back-and-forth.

Accelerated project completion when deadlines are clear and fewer delays waiting on tasks or approvals.

Lower costs – from reduced meetings and unnecessary versions.

Improved Accountability and transparency (#receipts).

Happier clients, with deadlines, budgets and quality improved.

Happier creative teams…well, because all of the above.

Gathering and managing feedback to get faster approvals is made much simpler with online proofing tools like ReviewStudio. It makes it easier to have everyone involved reviewing project files in context and in a centralized place, keeping creative projects on track.

It’s possible to see a 30% reduction in versions required to get to approvals. Or cut down 50% of review meetings. Or save 100s of hours a week in the review and approvals process.

An Easy Win: Good Feedback and Faster Approvals

When you’re getting and giving good feedback, the transformation to faster turnarounds and quicker approvals is inevitable.

Better feedback is all about being concise, consolidating, setting clear responsibilities, and harnessing the right tools to automate workflows and keep things flowing smoothly.

The result will be a huge amount of time saved on reviewing, discussing, and chasing – and of course, deliver higher quality content. Not to mention happier clients, stakeholders, and creatives!