Avado is one of the UK's leading online professional education providers, specialising in CIPD qualifications for HR and Learning & Development professionals. Based in London, the company has helped over 50,000 learners build the skills and credentials needed to progress in their careers, partnering with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development to deliver industry-recognised qualifications entirely online.
With a growing student community and a lean internal team managing everything from digital marketing to product development, Avado operates at pace — generating leads through paid social, running an active content and SEO programme, and producing a steady stream of sales collateral and product materials across multiple departments.
With two peak selling periods each year and multiple teams creating content simultaneously, Avado's marketing function was stretched thin. The Marketing Manager, Product Director, and CCO were all generating design requests — social media ads to drive lead generation, website and blog banners to support an active SEO programme, and sales PDFs and product information packs for the sales team to use with prospective learners.
The challenge wasn't just volume — it was coordination. With no dedicated in-house designer, requests were scattered across the team with no structured way to prioritise, brief, or track them. The result was bottlenecks building up at precisely the moments Avado needed to move fastest.
The team faced several compounding challenges:
Urgency without infrastructure — peak selling periods created a surge in asset requirements across ads, web creative, and sales materials, but there was no reliable resource in place to handle the increased output. Without a structured delivery process, deadlines were difficult to plan around and easy to miss.
Multiple stakeholders, no single design source — with requests coming from marketing, product, and commercial teams, there was no central point for design work. Briefs were informal, priorities were unclear, and the team had no visibility over what was being worked on or when it would be ready.
Quality concerns at scale — Avado had tight brand guidelines with specific rules around typography, colour, and visual elements. Without a dedicated designer who understood those standards, maintaining consistency across a high volume of assets was a genuine risk — particularly as they prepared to ramp up content production.
Avado now works with a dedicated Design Cloud designer who handles the full breadth of their creative requirements — from digital ad creative and website banners to multi-page sales PDFs and product information packs.
From day one, the focus was on getting the designer up to speed with Avado's brand. The Marketing Manager shared a comprehensive brand book covering logo usage, typography, colour palette, and visual guidelines — supplemented by a screen recording walkthrough so the designer could fully understand the rules before picking up the first brief. That investment at the start means requests now move faster, with fewer questions and fewer revisions.
The structured delivery process gives Avado the planning certainty they needed. Simple assets like ad creative and blog banners are turned around within a business day, while more complex multi-page documents are delivered progressively with daily updates. The team knows exactly when to expect work back, which makes managing internal deadlines and stakeholder expectations far more straightforward.
All briefs, communication, and files flow through a single centralised platform. With multiple team members submitting requests — including the Marketing Manager, Product Director, and CCO — the dashboard keeps everything organised and visible, replacing the informal, scattered approach that had made prioritisation so difficult before.
When peak selling periods arrive and demand spikes, Avado can temporarily bring in additional design capacity for a single month to work through the increased volume, then scale back down once the period passes. There are no lengthy commitments involved — just flexible resource that moves with the business.
Most importantly, working with the same designer consistently means the quality compounds over time. The designer is building genuine familiarity with Avado's brand standards and commercial context, which means briefs require less back-and-forth and the output gets sharper with every project.
