Plan each client campaign
on one board the client can see.

Agency campaigns mostly slip on dependencies that belong to the client rather than the agency. Feedback arrives late, from three people who disagree, or after it can be absorbed without redoing work. What the client owes, such as assets, product, data, legal review, or access, is left off plans that track only the agency's own work. And adaptations agreed casually take longer than the original. All three are solved by putting the client's side on the same board as yours.

Agree who consolidates the notes, attach feedback to the specific piece, and make the point of no return visible in the plan. Contradictory notes from three stakeholders are the most expensive feedback there is, so settle who consolidates before the first review. Notes pinned to a deliverable never need reconstructing. And a visible cut-off for changes works better than asking for faster feedback, because a change at concept costs a conversation and the same change in production costs a week.

Yes, in read-only form. A client who can see the state of the work stops asking for status and reacts to work in progress rather than only to finished deliverables, which removes the change request that arrives at the worst moment. Keep them out of your working tools: a view-only link opens the campaign board in a browser with no account, they sign in to comment on a specific piece, and they cannot move anything.

An agency campaign plan should include six things: the brief, the creative routes, the deliverables, the dependencies, the timeline, and what the client owes. Write the brief plainly enough to settle an argument later. Group deliverables by channel and count every adaptation. Mark the shared asset four deliverables wait on and the approval that gates the next phase. And put dates on the client's side, the half agencies most often leave off and the half that most often causes delay.

Keep one board per campaign and add one overview board that answers a different question. Each campaign board shows how that campaign is going. The overview shows where two campaigns are about to need the same designer in the same week, which no single plan can show. Keep it coarse: each campaign with its phase, its next approval, and who is on it. A plan detailed enough to run one campaign is too detailed to see across six.

Not yet. Storyflow is paid-only during early access, with plans from $7.99 a month billed annually ($9.99 monthly). A free plan launches before the end of 2026, and anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free. Clients reading a view-only link never need an account, which matters for an agency whose collaborators are mostly outside the company. Until the free plan launches, a shared document per campaign with the brief, deliverables, and approval dates is a workable stopgap.

Yes, it drafts the conventional plan well, and under deadline pressure the conventional items are exactly what gets skipped. Describe the client, objective, channels, and timeframe, and Storyflow's AI lays out the standard deliverables per channel with the usual dependencies and approval points. The value is completeness, since the forgotten items are ordinary ones like the cutdown or the second approval round. Whether the creative is right, or the fee supports the plan, stays with the agency.

A campaign board shows the work, while project management software tracks who owes what by when. Agency suites add timesheets and invoicing, which a canvas does not. What trackers show poorly is the work itself: a campaign becomes a list of tasks whose content sits in attachments. Most agencies want both: a tracker for hours and resourcing, and a board per campaign where the brief, the work, the dependencies, and the client's decisions sit where the client can look.

Make the brief visible and the volume countable. Scope creep is rarely one large request; it is a series of small ones that each sound reasonable and together add a fortnight, and it thrives when nothing shows the total. Deliverables grouped by channel, including every size and adaptation, turn one more asset into a visible change in the count. And a request that does not trace to the objective is easier to discuss when the brief tops the shared board.

Yes, and per-campaign boards make that safe. Invite a freelancer onto the one board they are working on and they contribute directly while seeing nothing else the agency runs. Anyone a paid member invites joins free, so bringing in a designer for two weeks is not a licensing decision. Someone who only needs to read can use a view-only link with no account. Either way, the brief, routes, and deadlines are readable in a couple of minutes.

The brief is what the work is trying to do; the plan is how and when it gets made. The brief covers the objective, audience, insight, message, mandatories, and constraints, and it settles arguments about whether the work is right. The plan covers deliverables, dependencies, owners, and dates. Merging them weakens both, because the timeline is easier to write than the thinking and ends up standing in for it. Keep the brief at the top of the campaign board instead.