When ten briefs land and you have time for four, the choice should come from a score, not from whoever asked loudest. Rate each brief for impact and for production cost, divide one by the other, and build in that order. It takes about ten minutes a week and ends most priority arguments.
TLDR: Score every brief 1 to 5 on impact and 1 to 5 on cost, rank by impact divided by cost, and cap the active queue at two weeks of capacity. Use AI to draft first-pass scores, and let a person set the weights.
Mydrop pricing check, September 2026: the entry paid plans of the eight tools most often compared with Mydrop run from $6 per channel (Buffer) and $25 a month (Later) to $99 per user (Hootsuite) and $79 per seat (Sprout Social), read on each vendor's pricing page. Mydrop is free to start, then $19 a month flat, not per seat. Full table on Mydrop's compare pages.
What goes wrong when briefs are ranked by who asks loudest
The loudest requester wins, and the cheap, effective work sits unread. Studios end up spending a day on a polished video that only earns the median, while a ten-minute carousel that would have beaten it waits.
A ranking sheet fixes this by putting the trade-off in plain view. Everyone can see why brief 3 beat brief 7.
Score impact on three things, not one
Impact isn't a gut feeling. Rate it from 1 to 5 using three questions, then average them:
- Audience size: how many of your followers will plausibly see it?
- Proof: has this topic or format beaten your median before?
- Commercial pull: does it connect to an offer, a launch or a deadline?
For proof, use your own analytics. In Mydrop's data, the median Instagram post earns about 3.1% engagement, with the middle half between 1.1% and 6.7%, so your own account median is the line a brief has to clear.
Score cost in hours, not money
Cost is easier to compare as design and edit hours. Use a 1 to 5 scale:
| Cost score | Typical production |
|---|---|
| 1 | Caption change or crop of an existing asset, under 1 hour |
| 2 | New copy on an existing template, 1 to 2 hours |
| 3 | New static design or short edit, half a day |
| 4 | New video with motion or multiple formats, a day or more |
| 5 | Shoot, location or external supplier involved |
Rank by the ratio and set a cut line
Divide impact by cost. A brief scoring impact 4 and cost 2 gets 2.0. A brief scoring impact 5 and cost 5 gets 1.0, so it waits.
Draw a cut line at your capacity. If the team can make six pieces in two weeks, the top six ratios are active and the rest are backlog. Re-score the backlog at the next cycle, because impact changes when a launch date moves.
Protect two slots for high-cost, high-impact briefs
The ratio can starve the big ideas. A launch video with cost 5 and impact 5 will never rank first. Reserve one or two slots a quarter for those, and decide them separately, with a named owner and a date.
Use AI for the first draft, not the verdict
AI can read a brief and flag missing fields, suggest a first-pass impact score from your past results, and rewrite a vague brief into a clear one. It can't know that the client dislikes red.
In Mydrop, AI captions and post ideas help turn a short request into a draft, and workspaces and brands keep each client's briefs and approved assets apart. The approved brief and the draft then go through the approval flow without a thread of email attachments.
If you want the briefs themselves to be sharper, the 8-field AI-assisted brief template covers what each brief should contain.
Review the ranking against results every month
After a month, compare the top-ranked briefs with their results. If high-ratio briefs keep underperforming, your impact scoring is off, so adjust the weights. If low-ratio briefs overperform, you're underrating something, perhaps a topic or a format.
A short example of the sheet in use
A team has three briefs. A product carousel scores impact 4 and cost 2, so 2.0. A founder video scores impact 5 and cost 4, so 1.25. A holiday banner scores impact 2 and cost 1, so 2.0.
The carousel and the banner go first. The video gets a protected slot next week, with a named owner. Everyone can see the reason in one line.
Score your current backlog before Friday
List every open brief, score impact and cost, and draw the cut line at your real capacity. Tell the requesters whose briefs fell below it when they'll be re-scored. When the queue is ready, start free with Mydrop to move the winners from brief to draft to approval in one place.
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