With seven people working from multiple cities and locations, my team doesn’t have an option when it comes to online productivity.
Our job is to be online all day finding the latest and greatest in nonprofit happenings. That means reading blogs, writing articles and (gasp!) being on social media. We’re a bunch of writers, editors and creative-thinkers—which means organization can prevail, but we might need a little help.
Enter Trello. It’s an online productivity tool—and it has completely upped our game.
These are the cool features we love, why it works for us and how your organization can jump on board with an online productivity tool.
Unique Features
Much like Pinterest, you create different boards. The difference? Each board houses different tasks instead of your favorite recipe. Simply assign the appropriate team members and you can all communicate on a project within the board. Make comments, change due dates and even upload documents so that other team members can download them.
Why It Works for Our Organization
In a sea of online content, it doesn’t take much to—squirrel! I mean, er—distract us. It’s a natural human thing. But Trello is an interactive to-do list that can always be up on our screens. That means if we get sidetracked, it pulls us back to the land of productivity.
Some of our part-timers have weird hours. One is in a completely different state. If they can’t attend a meeting, they’ll get a notification right away telling them what we’ve changed on their boards. Plus, they can make comments from a distance.
For our organization, we have personal boards where nobody else can access the content. Besides that, we have an interactive board shared with all team members that has our top priorities. The last board we utilize has all of our unassigned tasks. We simply meet each week to move those tasks to a specific person’s board.
Ways It Could Work for Your Nonprofit
Let’s make a real-world application here. Your volunteers probably have different schedules. Your board members are in different places with busy schedules. And like most NPOs, you probably need to submit a grant.
Simply upload the doc and every member will get an email notification. They can download the document, make changes and reupload it. Voila! You have a new and improved grant-writing system.
How else could your organization utilize Trello (or a similar tool) to up your productivity game?
