Notion

How Notion scaled their in-house Influencer
Marketing Program with Lumanu
How Notion scaled their
in-house Influencer
Marketing Program with Lumanu
How Notion scaled their in-house Influencer Marketing Program with Lumanu

Notion saves hundreds of hours by minimizing time spent on: vendor setup, PO requests and approvals, invoice submissions, W9 collection and verification, and end of year tax filings.

Use cases

Vendor Onboarding

Finance Visibility & Controls

Finance Visibility
& Controls

CRM Integration

Tax Compliance

Company size

1000+

no of vendors

400+

Industry

Software

location

San Francisco, CA

Before

  • Manual onboarding process requiring extensive time and resources

  • Lack of visibility into spend and budget

  • Inefficient approval process causing bottlenecks and slowing down operations

  • Inefficient approval process
    causing bottlenecks and slowing down operations

  • Vendor hand-holding due to frequent payment delays and invoice errors

after

  • Automated onboarding, vendor verification,
    and tax document collection

  • Real-time tracking of budget allocations and expenditures for all team members

  • Bulk payment creation and seamless approval process

  • Bulk payment creation and seamless approval process

  • Bulk payment creation and seamless approval process

  • Transferred vendor support to Lumanu's dedicated team, reducing invoice errors by implementing an invitation-only payout process.

Lumanu has been a game changer for us. We are a small team running 50 to 80 partnerships a month. Lumanu saves us and our Finance team hours and hours of valuable time that can be spent elsewhere.

Lumanu has been a game changer for us. We are a small team running 50 to 80 partnerships a month. Lumanu saves us and our Finance team hours and hours of valuable time that can be spent elsewhere.

Lumanu has been a game changer for us. We are a small team running 50 to 80 partnerships a month. Lumanu saves us and our Finance team hours and hours of valuable time that can be spent elsewhere.

Lumanu has been a game changer for us. We are a small team running 50 to 80 partnerships a month. Lumanu saves us and our Finance team hours and hours of valuable time that can be spent elsewhere.

Danielle Ito

Influencer Marketing Manager

Overview

We sat down with Danielle Ito, Influencer Marketing Manager at Notion, to discuss how Notion built their influencer marketing program and what’s coming next. Danielle shares why they chose their tech stack, including Creator IQ, Copper, and Lumanu, to help her manage 50+ creator partnerships per month.

Can you give us a brief introduction to Notion and your role?

Notion can be so many different things, but Notion is essentially an all in one connected workspace. It can house your docs, wikis for teams, you can collaborate on projects, you can plan everything in your life, organize everything. It's an all in one productivity tool. We're lucky Notion garnered a lot of hype on social media, which is how our influencer program was born.

Users were posting about us organically on TikTok and we thought, you know, we can actually pay people to do this and keep the momentum going.

We work with creators of all types, which I think is the most fun part of this job. I've worked with creators who are chefs in the Hamptons, gaming YouTubers or moms who share their day in the life with their kids.

Can you walk me through the software tools you use, and why, for managing the influencer program at Notion?
Can you walk me through the software tools you use,
and why, for managing the influencer program at Notion?

We use 3 tools: CreatorIQ, Copper and of course Lumanu.

We use 3 tools: CreatorIQ, Copper and of course Lumanu.

We use 3 tools: CreatorIQ, Copper and of course Lumanu.

We use 3 tools: CreatorIQ, Copper and of course Lumanu.

We use 3 tools: CreatorIQ, Copper and of course Lumanu.

CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ is mostly for reporting. CreatorIQ has been helpful in terms of the monthly, weekly and or daily reporting that we have to do on influencer 

impressions. The team and leadership values those awareness metrics a lot.

Copper

Copper

Copper

Copper

Copper

Copper is what holds everything together as our creator relationship management (CRM) platforms. We really like it because it's easy to use. It connects directly to your Gmail to track all conversations. In Copper we house every influencer we've ever worked with, our pipeline of influencers that we want to work with, their contact information, their agent, their managers, contact information, etc.




Copper is great because we can customize everything. We can track all the important things for each campaign, all the actual content for each partnership, contracts, what platforms the content ran, the total cost, we can upload the contract, and anything else we need.




We're a small team, basically a team of two with contractors here and there. So it's really nice to have Copper. We don't have to ask each other for updates. The status of all of our partnerships, for every campaign is right there in front of us in our deal pipeline. And, if someone goes out of town or someone leaves, we can see all the history of their emails in each partnership, which is really nice.

Copper is what holds everything together as our creator relationship management (CRM) platforms. We really like it because it's easy to use. It connects directly to your Gmail to track all conversations. In Copper we house every influencer we've ever worked with, our pipeline of influencers that we want to work with, their contact information, their agent, their managers, contact information, etc.



Copper is great because we can customize everything. We can track all the important things for each campaign, all the actual content for each partnership, contracts, what platforms the content ran, the total cost, we can upload the contract, and anything else we need.



We're a small team, basically a team of two with contractors here and there. So it's really nice to have Copper. We don't have to ask each other for updates. The status of all of our partnerships, for every campaign is right there in front of us in our deal pipeline. And, if someone goes out of town or someone leaves, we can see all the history of their emails in each partnership, which is really nice.

Lumanu

Lumanu

Lumanu

Lumanu

Lumanu

Lumanu is our vendor onboarding and payment platform and we always say the biggest saving grace since we started using it last year. I'm sure a lot of other marketers go through this, but we were previously going through our internal procurement system to pay out influencers. It was a headache in terms of the amount of time it took to actually put a request through the portal to onboard creators. It was difficult with smaller creators who just weren't used to dealing with that level of a finance system. To be honest, it was a headache for our finance team as well.




We implemented Lumanu last year, and it's been such a game changer for us. I think if I were to quantify it, we probably save at least five minutes per deal. And we're running 50 to 80 partnerships a month, so that time really adds up. Since we're a small team, it really does save valuable time that we can spend elsewhere. And that's just speaking to the time saved for our influencer team. Our finance team also saves hours and hours every month.




With Lumanu, Finance doesn’t have to approve every single influencer for every project that goes out. So Lumanu, yeah, I can't say enough good things about it. It's a great experience for us and I know it's also a great experience on the creators end as well.

Lumanu is our vendor onboarding and payment platform and we always say the biggest saving grace since we started using it last year. I'm sure a lot of other marketers go through this, but we were previously going through our internal procurement system to pay out influencers. It was a headache in terms of the amount of time it took to actually put a request through the portal to onboard creators. It was difficult with smaller creators who just weren't used to dealing with that level of a finance system. To be honest, it was a headache for our finance team as well.



We implemented Lumanu last year, and it's been such a game changer for us. I think if I were to quantify it, we probably save at least five minutes per deal. And we're running 50 to 80 partnerships a month, so that time really adds up. Since we're a small team, it really does save valuable time that we can spend elsewhere. And that's just speaking to the time saved for our influencer team. Our finance team also saves hours and hours every month.



With Lumanu, Finance doesn’t have to approve every single influencer for every project that goes out. So Lumanu, yeah, I can't say enough good things about it. It's a great experience for us and I know it's also a great experience on the creators end as well.

Lumanu is our biggest saving grace since we started using it last year. We previously used our procurement system to pay creators. It was a headache and took too much time to put a request in, onboard and pay creators.

Lumanu is our biggest saving grace since we started using it last year. We previously used our procurement system to pay creators. It was a headache and took too much time to put a request in, onboard and pay creators.

Lumanu is our biggest saving grace since we started using it last year. We previously used our procurement system to pay creators. It was a headache and took too much time to put a request in, onboard and pay creators.

Danielle Ito

Influencer Marketing Manager

Prior to Lumanu, can you describe Notion's onboarding, PO and payment process for creators?

We were using our internal procurement platform ZIP. We would put an individual request in for every single influencer contract that came through, which included all of their information, where they live and how much the deal was and of what not. We would then send the influencer a link to a portal where they upload all their information and it was never like an easy process.

A lot of creators had a lot of hiccups uploading their paperwork. It was just always kind of a headache. 


After getting set up, creators sent their invoices to our AP team. AP would have to approve the invoice. We would then have to approve it. Often the PO number wasn’t included so we would have to manually add that and resubmit. There were just a lot of different hoops that we had to go through.




There were often delays in payment because there were all these like different steps that people had to go through on our end and their end to get a payment approved. With our internal procurement system there was no way for creators to get updates in real time on when their payments were going to be paid out.

With Lumanu, all of these issues have been eliminated.

We were using our internal procurement platform ZIP. We would put an individual request in for every single influencer contract that came through, which included all of their information, where they live and how much the deal was and of what not. We would then send the influencer a link to a portal where they upload all their information and it was never like an easy process.

A lot of creators had a lot of hiccups uploading their paperwork. It was just always kind of a headache. 

After getting set up, creators sent their invoices to our AP team. AP would have to approve the invoice. We would then have to approve it. Often the PO number wasn’t included so we would have to manually add that and resubmit. There were just a lot of different hoops that we had to go through.



There were often delays in payment because there were all these like different steps that people had to go through on our end and their end to get a payment approved. With our internal procurement system there was no way for creators to get updates in real time on when their payments were going to be paid out.

With Lumanu, all of these issues have been eliminated.

We implemented Lumanu last year, and it's been such a game changer for us. I think if I were to quantify it, we probably save at least five minutes per deal. And we're running 50 to 80 partnerships a month, so that time really adds up.

We implemented Lumanu last year, and it's been such a game changer for us. I think if I were to quantify it, we probably save at least five minutes per deal. And we're running 50 to 80 partnerships a month, so that time really adds up.

We implemented Lumanu last year, and it's been such a game changer for us. I think if I were to quantify it, we probably save at least five minutes per deal. And we're running 50 to 80 partnerships a month, so that time really adds up.

We implemented Lumanu last year, and it's been such a game changer for us. I think if I were to quantify it, we probably save at least five minutes per deal. And we're running 50 to 80 partnerships a month, so that time really adds up.

Danielle Ito

Influencer Marketing Manager

Can you speak to the Copper CRM and Lumanu integration and your workflow for managing payments?

Yes, actually I was talking to my friend who also does influencer marketing yesterday and I was telling her about Copper. She is considering Copper but was concerned there would be manual steps to go from campaign tracking in Copper to paying influencers in Lumanu.




And I was like, no, you actually don't have to do that. It's the best thing ever.


We have an integration setup between Copper and Lumanu so when a project or a deal moves from draft stage to content live a payout is automatically created in Lumanu. This automation saves us so much time. It's just a one click approval and it's very easy. 

Yes, actually I was talking to my friend who also does influencer marketing yesterday and I was telling her about Copper. She is considering Copper but was concerned there would be manual steps to go from campaign tracking in Copper to paying influencers in Lumanu.



And I was like, no, you actually don't have to do that. It's the best thing ever.


We have an integration setup between Copper and Lumanu so when a project or a deal moves from draft stage to content live a payout is automatically created in Lumanu.

This automation saves us so much time. It's just a one click approval and it's very easy. 

What made Lumanu stand out as Notion's choice for managing influencer vendor onboarding and payments?

We were working on so many partnerships in a month. It was very tedious to get all our vendors setup and payouts approved and made. And honestly, after the first Lumanu pitch, we were like, we have to do this.




It was a very easy sell. So many brands and also just creators themselves use Lumanu. It's a trusted platform that we had already heard positive things about and after seeing it in action and knowing that we could set up automation with Copper it was a no brainer.




Lumanu also helps with visibility into spend and budget which is a huge help and I don't think I've touched on that yet. We didn't have an easy way to monitor real time spend vs budget in our procurement system. With Lumanu, we can see all of our spend and remaining budget in real time as we manage payouts. We have real time visibility into how much money we've spent and how much money we have left for any campaign or project.

The ease and simplicity of using the Lumanu made it no brainer for us. 

We were working on so many partnerships in a month. It was very tedious to get all our vendors setup and payouts approved and made. And honestly, after the first Lumanu pitch, we were like, we have to do this.




It was a very easy sell. So many brands and also just creators themselves use Lumanu. It's a trusted platform that we had already heard positive things about and after seeing it in action and knowing that we could set up automation with Copper it was a no brainer.




Lumanu also helps with visibility into spend and budget which is a huge help and I don't think I've touched on that yet. We didn't have an easy way to monitor real time spend vs budget in our procurement system. With Lumanu, we can see all of our spend and remaining budget in real time as we manage payouts. We have real time visibility into how much money we've spent and how much money we have left for any campaign or project.

The ease and simplicity of using the Lumanu made it no brainer for us. 

We were working on so many partnerships in a month. It was very tedious to get all our vendors setup and payouts approved and made. And honestly, after the first Lumanu pitch, we were like, we have to do this.



It was a very easy sell. So many brands and also just creators themselves use Lumanu. It's a trusted platform that we had already heard positive things about and after seeing it in action and knowing that we could set up automation with Copper it was a no brainer.



Lumanu also helps with visibility into spend and budget which is a huge help and I don't think I've touched on that yet. We didn't have an easy way to monitor real time spend vs budget in our procurement system. With Lumanu, we can see all of our spend and remaining budget in real time as we manage payouts. We have real time visibility into how much money we've spent and how much money we have left for any campaign or project.

The ease and simplicity of using the Lumanu made it no brainer for us. 

We were working on so many partnerships in a month. It was very tedious to get all our vendors setup and payouts approved and made. And honestly, after the first Lumanu pitch, we were like, we have to do this.




It was a very easy sell. So many brands and also just creators themselves use Lumanu. It's a trusted platform that we had already heard positive things about and after seeing it in action and knowing that we could set up automation with Copper it was a no brainer.




Lumanu also helps with visibility into spend and budget which is a huge help and I don't think I've touched on that yet. We didn't have an easy way to monitor real time spend vs budget in our procurement system. With Lumanu, we can see all of our spend and remaining budget in real time as we manage payouts. We have real time visibility into how much money we've spent and how much money we have left for any campaign or project.

The ease and simplicity of using the Lumanu made it no brainer for us. 

We were working on so many partnerships in a month. It was very tedious to get all our vendors setup and payouts approved and made. And honestly, after the first Lumanu pitch, we were like, we have to do this.




It was a very easy sell. So many brands and also just creators themselves use Lumanu. It's a trusted platform that we had already heard positive things about and after seeing it in action and knowing that we could set up automation with Copper it was a no brainer.




Lumanu also helps with visibility into spend and budget which is a huge help and I don't think I've touched on that yet. We didn't have an easy way to monitor real time spend vs budget in our procurement system. With Lumanu, we can see all of our spend and remaining budget in real time as we manage payouts. We have real time visibility into how much money we've spent and how much money we have left for any campaign or project.

The ease and simplicity of using the Lumanu made it no brainer for us. 

The ease and simplicity of using the Lumanu made it no brainer for us.

The ease and simplicity of using the Lumanu made it no brainer for us.

The ease and simplicity of using the Lumanu made it no brainer for us.

The ease and simplicity of using the Lumanu made it no brainer for us.

Danielle Ito

Influencer Marketing Manager

How do you see your influencer marketing strategy changing and growing in the future?

There are so many ways to use Notion and we want to get as many use cases out on the internet as possible. Someone will see an influencer video and think oh my gosh, like, yes, I want to use Notion for this specific thing. I'm really trying to lean into specific use cases on how Notion integrates into your life. Notion Sites, for example, was a big campaign that we just ran. And that was really fun because it is a great product for creators. And we were working with a lot of creators who were replacing their LinkedIn bio or their link trees with notion sites. Or they were sharing their recipe folders or even their recent travel itinerary. 




We leaned into the use cases and actual real life examples on how creators are using Notion. And the end users could see this content and think, oh my gosh, I've never thought of that before. I'm going to download it and try to use Notion for that part of my life.




Something I really value is meeting with creators and forming connections and relationships. We're focused on building a stronger community with our creators. We just launched a newsletter. We have a creator program that we're hoping to roll out in the next month or so to  offer discounts to creators so they can use Notion for their brand partnerships to help with everything from project management to serving as their Rolodex.

Our number one goal as a team is to make Notion the go-to organizational tool of the creator economy.

There are so many ways to use Notion and we want to get as many use cases out on the internet as possible. Someone will see an influencer video and think oh my gosh, like, yes, I want to use Notion for this specific thing. I'm really trying to lean into specific use cases on how Notion integrates into your life. Notion Sites, for example, was a big campaign that we just ran. And that was really fun because it is a great product for creators. And we were working with a lot of creators who were replacing their LinkedIn bio or their link trees with notion sites. Or they were sharing their recipe folders or even their recent travel itinerary. 



We leaned into the use cases and actual real life examples on how creators are using Notion. And the end users could see this content and think, oh my gosh, I've never thought of that before. I'm going to download it and try to use Notion for that part of my life.



Something I really value is meeting with creators and forming connections and relationships. We're focused on building a stronger community with our creators. We just launched a newsletter. We have a creator program that we're hoping to roll out in the next month or so to  offer discounts to creators so they can use Notion for their brand partnerships to help with everything from project management to serving as their Rolodex.

Our number one goal as a team is to make Notion the go-to organizational tool of the creator economy.

Save Time. Improve Margins. Increase Cash.

See why companies like Warner Music and Airbnb use Lumanu to simplify how they buy creative & media.

Save Time. Improve Margins. Increase Cash.

See why companies like Warner Music and Airbnb use Lumanu to simplify how they buy creative & media.

Save Time. Improve Margins. Increase Cash.

See why companies like Warner Music and Airbnb use Lumanu to simplify how they buy creative & media.

Save Time. Improve Margins. Increase Cash.

See why companies like Warner Music and Airbnb use Lumanu to simplify how they buy creative & media.

Save Time. Improve Margins. Increase Cash.

See why companies like Warner Music and Airbnb use Lumanu to simplify how they buy creative & media.

© 2024 Lumanu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lumanu, Inc. is a financial technology company and not a bank. Lumanu accounts are provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC.

© 2024 Lumanu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lumanu, Inc. is a financial technology company and not a bank. Lumanu accounts are provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC.

© 2024 Lumanu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lumanu, Inc. is a financial technology company and not a bank. Lumanu accounts are provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC.

© 2024 Lumanu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lumanu, Inc. is a financial technology company and not a bank. Lumanu accounts are provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC.

© 2024 Lumanu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lumanu, Inc. is a financial technology company and not a bank. Lumanu accounts are provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC.