Making the Value of Creative Visible

ASCD was an international membership organization serving teachers and educational leaders. Educational materials were part of its membership offering, and it also operated as a mid-sized educational publisher and producer of professional learning products. Its work extended across books, Educational Leadership, newsletters, digital learning, conferences, and professional development.

Creative Services completed 1,864 projects in FY14 across publishing, learning, membership, marketing, and organizational operations. That volume required coordinated design, editorial, digital, and production expertise, alongside an understanding of ASCD’s members, products, and brand.

The production responsibility was substantial: ASCD recorded approximately $4.74 million in printing, postage, and mailing expenses during September–May FY15 alone. This nine-month actual expenditure illustrates the scale of production supported by the unit; it is separate from internal labor costs and is not an annual budget.

Source: ASCD Creative Services Strategic Roadmap, 2015, pp. 26–28.

The report’s FY16 forecast shows the breadth of work the team planned to support. These are planning quantities, not a retrospective count of completed projects.

Source: ASCD Creative Services Strategic Roadmap, 2015, FY16 design and editorial forecasts.

When layoffs put the design department under scrutiny, I saw that the team needed a clearer way to demonstrate its value to the organization. The quality of the work mattered, but leadership also needed to understand the people, capacity, knowledge, and investment behind it.

An outside assessment would have cost approximately $40,000, an expense I knew would not be approved. I took on the research and reporting internally.

A Creative Services strategic report and presentation that connected the unit’s mission and goals with its accomplishments, service offerings, workload, project complexity, forecasts, and value proposition. It made the case for evaluating the team through both the work it delivered and the organizational capability it sustained.

The report became an annual practice during my tenure, creating a repeatable way to explain the unit’s contribution and plan for the work ahead.

Research, analysis, report development, and design management.

I researched articles, journals, and in-house creative-services practices to determine how to make the unit’s value visible. I connected team members’ contributions with the work they supported, organized the evidence into a management narrative, and developed the report internally. The work was developed with the Managing Director of Creative, Gary Bloom, drawing on the accomplishments and operational information of the Creative Services team.

The report connected three views of the unit: strategic purpose, operational contribution, and future demand. Vision, mission, and goals established what the team existed to do. Accomplishments, service offerings, project metrics, and complexity made the work visible. Forecasts and planning information explained what the organization would continue to need.

Its value proposition also considered brand and product knowledge, creative quality, turnaround, innovation, service, and cost-conscious delivery. Those dimensions gave leadership a fuller basis for assessing value and return on investment than project volume alone.

The work helped preserve the entire unit during the layoffs. I continued producing the report annually during my tenure, making the team’s value an ongoing leadership responsibility rather than a one-time defense. Estimated annual salary-cost savings of $2.66M compared with outsourcing, before employer taxes, benefits, and overhead.

Creative leaders need to explain how their teams support the organization, including contributions that a finished design cannot show on its own. This work turned research and operating information into a repeatable management practice: make the contribution visible, connect it to organizational needs, and use the evidence to support decisions about people and capability.

Managing Director of Creative, Gary Bloom, and ASCD Creative Services colleagues, whose expertise, accomplishments, and operational work formed the basis of the report. My contribution was researching, developing, and sustaining the reporting approach.