ApproveThis manages your Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social Integration approvals.

When “Just Post It” Meets “Wait, Did We Sign Off On That?”

Let’s get real: employee advocacy programs live in the awkward space between “we need authentic voices” and “we can’t afford another compliance nightmare.” Marketing teams want employees sharing content yesterday. Legal teams want to review every comma. Meanwhile, your sales rep in Denver just wants to know why their draft about your new SaaS product has been stuck in review purgatory for two weeks.

This is where ApproveThis and Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social become your tag team for controlled chaos. We’re not here to sell you magic beans – just a practical way to stop playing approval whack-a-mole across Slack threads and spreadsheet trackers.

Why This Combo Doesn’t Suck

Most approval tools treat your workflow like a checklist. ApproveThis actually understands that getting sign-offs is political warfare between departments. Meanwhile, Sprout’s employee advocacy platform needs real human content to stay… well, human. Together, they solve three actual business problems:

• The “Who Approved This?” Black Hole: Trace every post from initial draft to final approval
• The Compliance Time Sink: Auto-route legal reviews without bottlenecking your entire social calendar

Example: A healthcare tech company uses conditional approval thresholds. Posts under $5k in potential liability get auto-approved by middle management. Anything higher gets kicked to legal – with full audit trails when regulators come knocking.

Real Workflows for People Who Hate Meetings About Meetings

Use Case 1: From “Cool Idea” to Approved Post in Under 48 Hours

Your content team creates a killer LinkedIn post about your latest product update. Instead of manually emailing it to Legal and waiting for a reply that says “See comments in doc” (spoiler: there are 47 comments), here’s how it actually works:

How It Flows: Sprout Social story gets drafted → Zapier triggers an ApproveThis request → Post routes to Legal (needs sign-off) AND Compliance (conditional approval based on financial disclosures) → Once approved, post auto-publishes with scheduled times for employee sharing.

Who Cares: Mid-market SaaS companies scaling from 100 to 500 employees. Your marketing team’s trying to hit 1M impressions/month, but Legal’s still operating like you’re a 10-person startup.

Use Case 2: When Your Sales Team Actually Wants to Post (Yes, Really)

Sales reps create user-generated content that’s gold for authenticity… and potentially terrible for brand guidelines. Instead of locking everything down, use calculated fields to auto-flag posts needing review:

Real Example: A fintech company lets reps post about client wins automatically UNLESS the deal size exceeds $250k (triggers CFO approval) or mentions competitors (triggers Legal). All others go live instantly via Sprout’s platform.

Use Case 3: Killing the “Who’s Out Today?” Excuse

Your Head of HR is on vacation but needs to approve DEI-related posts. Instead of delaying the entire campaign:

How It Works: ApproveThis’ vacation delegation automatically reassigns approvals to the Deputy CHRO. If they reject it, the request escalates to the CEO based on predefined thresholds. All while keeping the original audit trail intact.

Setup That Doesn’t Require a PhD in Zapier

Here’s the brass tacks for your overworked operations team:

1. Connect ApproveThis and Sprout Social via Zapier (15 minutes tops)
2. Choose your trigger: New story drafts, approval thresholds met, or specific content tags
3. Map approval stages to departments (Pro tip: Use conditional logic so Legal only sees posts with “contract” or “pricing” mentions)

Critical note: Approvers don’t need Sprout Social licenses. Huge for agencies managing client content or businesses using external partners. (Yes, your compliance attorney counts as “external” – they’re not about to start posting memes.)

Why Your Teams Will Stop Hating Each Other

For Marketing:

Finally prove that “approved” doesn’t mean “will launch Q3 maybe.” Real-time tracking shows exactly where posts get stuck. Is Legal taking 5 days on average? Now you have data to negotiate SLAs.

For Legal/Compliance:

No more CC’ing the entire company on email threads. Role-based access means junior attorneys handle routine approvals, only escalating high-risk items. Plus, auto-archived records for audits.

For HR:

Employee advocacy participation metrics actually mean something when you can tie posts to approved content buckets. No more rogue employees sharing unvetted industry takes.

The Bottom Line (Because You Skipped to This Part)

This isn’t about making approvals faster – it’s about making them strategic. Every company between 200-2000 employees hits the same wall: processes that worked at 50 people now cause mutinies. By connecting ApproveThis and Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy, you’re not just automating checkboxes. You’re enabling:

Scale Without Chaos: Double your employee-shared content without tripling compliance risks
Actual Accountability: Trace every “Approved by Jim in Legal @ 2:37AM” to its performance metrics
Fewer BS Meetings: Status updates happen in dashboards, not Zoom rooms

Ready to stop being the approval bottleneck? Book a 15-minute demo or start a free trial. (Yes, you can approve your own trial request. We’re not monsters.)