Katrina Oko-Odoi
Sr. Content Marketing Manager
Video production is a complex, multi-layered experience with many people collaborating together to create a single film. From script writing to casting, filming, video editing, animation, post-production and promotion — there are lots of hands in the pot. For a small online video production agency like VMG Cinematic, excelling in the industry requires keeping projects tightly organized and managed at all times.
Agency partner Nick Haffe-Emslie saw customer relationship management as part of the puzzle — which Copper helped him solve for. But much of his team’s other work remained siloed in different software and they struggled to bring all information sources together for unified reporting and project management.
At the same time, Nick’s team was also using Coda for internal documentation. Coda is an all-in-one document app that provides a powerful set of building blocks to create custom and all-in-one team collaboration spaces. Nick had integrated other tools into Coda for reporting and overseeing projects using “Coda Packs,” but a pack for Copper wasn’t available — yet.
And then, Nick’s opportunity presented itself: Coda invited makers to build their own “Coda Packs” to better integrate the tools they were already using — and Nick took on the challenge of building one for Copper. Here’s how it works.
The Backstory: VMG Cinematic and Copper
VMG Cinematic crafts high-quality video projects and branded social media content for clients around the world. Nick’s team manages hundreds of projects a year with a full-time staff of only 15. With this level of volume, Copper has proved critical to help the team put effective systems in place to manage projects with limited data entry. Since VMG staff work predominantly out of Gmail, Copper automatically tracks their internal and external interactions so no detail slips through their fingers.
Getting stuck in silos
A big priority for VMG was ensuring all their tools could work together. For quite a while, the team struggled with siloing between different tools at different stages in the video production process, impacting their project management efficiency and accuracy. Nick wanted to be able to easily pull customer communication data from Copper together with project information from their various systems without having to export to spreadsheets, but CRM integrations didn’t fit the bill for their complex workflows.
Enter Coda. The platform helped reduce the number of SaaS products VMG used to build reports and manage projects by integrating their most important tools, including Copper.
In the beginning, VMG used Zapier to integrate Copper and Coda, allowing them to track the journey of a project by the invoicing number from billing, to production, to delivery. When Coda introduced the ability for users like Nick to build their own integrations, the Copper Pack was born.
The Coda Copper Pack: Endless no-code possibilities
Using Copper and Coda together is super easy once you get the two tools set up:
- Make sure you’re on a Copper Professional or Business plan first, and then sign up for a Coda account.
- From your Copper account settings, generate a Copper API key.
- Install the Copper Coda Pack and enter your Copper API key.
There’s a lot of possibilities here — especially since a new user doesn’t need to know any coding to get the Copper Pack up and running. You can sync records including Opportunities, People and Companies with the Pack, and it can also push data back into Copper.
For Nick and VMG Cinematic, using Coda and Copper has made it incredibly easy to pull in CRM data and data from other systems to help the team better visualize their projects and take action. To see some example docs that Nick uses for his Pack, check out his use-case story in the Copper Community.
To learn more about Coda X Copper, see the full pack details here.
