Once you’ve reviewed the analysis and resolved as many risks as you can, it’s time to circulate your content for review with any fellow Marketing team members, and ultimately, approval from your legal and compliance expert. Your analysis might look like the below, with certain secondary observations resolved, and other priority observations open so your compliance officer can weigh in.
This guide will walk you through the sharing and collaboration features you have at your disposal in the Compliance Portal to get final signoff from the team.
1. Share Project with Users
Click ‘Share’ in the upper righthand corner to define the reviewers and approvers of your project. Only members of the team who have been granted access to the Compliance tool will be listed here, and you can search for anyone needed by name. When you’re done, click ‘Add.’
If anyone is missing, please reach out to the Persado team with their email and a description of their role to have them added.
Note: If your team does not use Portal to review content, you can also circulate an analysis for review offline in PDF format. This PDF summarizes all priority and secondary observations, lists suggestions and alternatives, and links to relevant regulations and guidelines for reference. Click the ‘Download’ icon in the top-right corner of Portal to generate the PDF.
2. Assign Permissions
Next, it’s time to assign permissions. You can assign:
As many reviewers as needed: This may be colleagues in your marketing department, for example, or anyone else you’d like feedback from on the content (marked as ‘Review Only’).
A dedicated reviewer and approver: The approver should be your compliance expert who will give the final say on whether the content is ready to go out the door from a legal perspective (marked as ‘Review & Approve’). The review flow cannot be initiated until at least one approver has been assigned (you can assign more than 1 approver if needed).
Note: Marketers can now be designated as approvers! This may be preferred if you have a small team. You can self-assign this in the user status as you would for any other individual.
Simply click the drop-down next to a user’s status to adjust as needed. If you need to change the approver, you can change their status back to ‘Review Only’ and select a new approver instead.
3. Submit for Review
Now that you’ve assigned permissions, it’s time to formally submit the content for review and initiate the approval process. Click the green ‘Submit for Review’ button to notify your reviewers and approvers via email that the content is ready for them.
They’ll receive an email notification letting them know they’ve been invited with a link to the project.
At this point, the project status will change from “In Progress” to “Pending Review.” You can find projects based on their status any time by toggling between the categories on your Compliance landing page (i.e., “All,” “In Progress,” “Pending Review,” “Revision Required,” and “Approved”).
4. Reviewers and Approvers Provide Feedback and Suggestions
Reviewers and approvers will then be able to review all of the observations and make manual adjustments, incorporate recommended revisions, and resolve risks as usual—see this article for more information. Any time they make a change, they can click “Reanalyze” to view updated Compliance, Performance Prediction, and Brand Alignment scores.
The option to reanalyze will only be enabled once changes have been made, so no need to worry about whether or not this is up to date!
Logging Comments
Reviewers and approvers will also be able to leave comments anywhere on the creative by switching to the 'Comment ' mode (see comment bubble at the top right toolbar), and then pinning a new comment and starting a new conversation with their team or simply logging some thoughts. If needed, they can use the @ symbol to tag a colleague in a comment, as shown below. The tagged individual will be notified via email that a comment is available for their review.
If a reviewer wants to log a general comment to the creative, they can leave this in the comment box they feel is most appropriate, or in any observations that apply to the full message.
A comment icon will then be visible in the file, on the right side of the box, to annotate the presence of the comment thread, so the marketing team can easily browse feedback and make adjustments.
Reviewing Comments
There are a few actions you can take with a comment to stay organized. Click on the three dots within the comment to:
Manually mark comments as Primary or Secondary Observations. This is a helpful way to make sure all feedback is visible, prioritized, and tracked until resolution. All manual observations will be logged in the Analysis pane above Persado’s system observations so you can easily trace the origin of each item.
‘Resolve’ if feedback from a comment has been incorporated so you can focus your attention on open issues. Comments can be ‘Unresolved’ any time if you want to open them back up.
5. Reviewers Request Revisions (if Needed)
Once all comments are in, there are two options for reviewers/approvers:
If a reviewer/approver believes that changes need to be made to the creative by the marketing team before being resubmitted for Compliance approval, they can click ‘Revision Required.’ In this modal, they’ll enter a reason for the revision, which will be stored in the project activity log and displayed as a tooltip on the status change record to support better traceability.
This will change the status of the project and send it back to you as the Marketing owner so you can review the feedback and make updates accordingly. You’ll receive an email message when the revision has been requested.
When you’re done making adjustments, you can submit for review again. The cycle repeats as needed until everyone is satisfied with the content!
If comments from reviewers/approvers are minor, or adjustments have already been made, the user with the "Review & Approve" role can simply ‘Approve.’
6. Final Approval is Logged
If you’d like to give the team one more chance to check the content offline, you can click the download button in the upper righthand corner any time to circulate a PDF file for review. This may be preferred if your team likes to review via email or another internal system.
When the team is ready, click approve in the upper righthand corner to approve the content. If needed, you can note if another revision is required; keep in mind that this will revoke all former approvals and open the project back up for editing and observation management.
Note: If your compliance team prefers not to log into Portal, the owner of the project can always approve the project if needed on their behalf to make sure you’re showing an accurate status (for example, if approval has been obtained offline, via email, etc.).