How to Improve Workflow Management for Your Broadcast

Streamline your broadcast workflow for greater efficiency and quality. Tips for mission-driven organizations on optimizing and automating broadcast production.

Broadcasting is an activity that many mission-driven organizations use to market themselves and engage with their audiences. While it may be an accessible option, though, creating a broadcasting setup can be a complex and, at times, overwhelming activity. 

We’ve published tips on perfecting your broadcast quality elsewhere with a focus on the content itself and things like storytelling, planning, creativity, and marketing. In this resource, we’re going to cover another critical angle for mission-driven churches, non-profits, and other organizations in the broadcasting game: how to optimize your workflow. 

A good broadcast has many steps, stages, and elements to consider. This can lead to nuanced and, at times, convoluted workflows. If you and your team feel dragged down by the process of operating your broadcast, here are several tips to help you improve end-to-end workflow management.

Assess Your Current Workflow

Optimization and automation always require a thorough understanding of what your current workflow looks like. What are you doing right now with your existing broadcast setup? Consider every aspect of your process here, including:

• Pre-production
• Broadcast content creation
• Editing/post-production
• Media asset management (MAM)
• Distribution
• Archiving and storage
  

As you review your system, note what is working and what isn’t. Ask people who are intimately familiar with the workflow for their input. Keep an eye out for the metrics that matter most for workflow management, too, such as content quality, turnaround time, error resolution time, and playback reliability. 

Enhance Communication and Collaboration

Once you have a good idea of your current setup, you can begin the optimization process by analyzing the human interactions across your workflow. 

What parts of your workflow are operated by a single individual? Are they tasked with reasonable workloads, or do they need help?

Where are multiple people involved? Is their work simultaneous, or do they need to pass things off to one another at a specific point in the broadcasting timeline?

As you learn more here, you can begin to optimize by:

• Finding workflow bottlenecks and distributing responsibilities more evenly.
• Investing in training to fill skill gaps and improve efficiencies.
• Improving communication between team members with shared knowledge and ongoing updates.
• Bolstering teams where needed or removing collaborative complexities where they introduce the opportunity for lag or error.
  

Optimization of human activity takes time. Be patient and stay open to new ideas.

Automate Wherever It Makes Sense

When it comes to optimizing tools and processes, there are many areas where you can automate and streamline. 

The Sardius Platform is rich with automation that uses AI to save time. For instance, we use artificial intelligence to instantly repurpose broadcast data into audio, visual, and text-based supplemental content for other channels and platforms. 

We also use our platform as a single tool where you can use one stream for centralized distribution that goes out to multiple channels. (More on that in a minute.)

Keep in mind that automation is powerful, but it isn’t a universal answer. Over-automation can undermine trust and dilute quality. Use it strategically when it makes sense.

Optimize Distribution

Once you’ve efficiently captured your broadcast, you can manage the later stages of your workflow to improve and optimize distribution.

One example of distribution optimization with the Sardius Platform is our content delivery network or CDN. This uses an interconnected network of servers to speed up load time by delivering data from the server closest to each user.

Once again, multi-platform distribution from a single workflow is a factor, as well. Combining your raw feed into a single tool that can broadcast wherever needed saves time and effort. It also gives you a single point to work from as you distribute your broadcast to local, regional, or global audiences.

Improving Your Broadcaster Workflow

Workflow management is a critical part of getting the most out of your broadcast. In most cases, a broadcast is one element of your larger mission, which means it cannot take up too much time or too many resources.

Workflow management ensures your broadcast remains a positive and valuable part of your church or nonprofit. Optimizing your workflow keeps it efficient and effective. Automating it can free up previously invested resources for better uses elsewhere.

If you’re struggling to optimize your workflow, our team can help. Our industry experience and knowledge, coupled with the power and capabilities of the Sardius Media platform, can turn a clunky or confusing broadcast into a sleek, efficient, and hyper-effective asset for your mission-driven organization.

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