Basecamp: Collaborate, Manage, Track, Report
As the virtual office becomes more commonplace, and more and more of your staff or team members telecommute to work ever day, your business needs a tool to keep the wheels on the bus. And that tool is Basecamp. Basecamp is pretty straightforward as tools go. It’s succinctly called a project management tool because that’s exactly what it does…
So, what does it do exactly?
Basecamp allows you to create virtual workspaces for each of your “projects”. Projects can be well…virtually anything that you would require collaboration and management for. Basecamp is great for marketing companies, web development companies, construction companies, design studios, video production companies, companies with large sales teams or large R and D teams…whatever.
Once you create a Project, say “Q1 Email Blast Campaigns”, you can add both “team members” or “clients” via email invites. You simply input the email and they are sent an invitation straight to their inbox. The creator of the project (or Super Admin) can give specific user role permissions to each person invited to the project. And in the project, you have the ability to block certain users from seeing certain content within that project. So, things you can add and create within the project include discussion (specifical elements of your project for example….using our example from above that may be “email design”, “email copy/messaging”, “list management”, and “analytics/data capture”. Within the project itself or within the individual Discussions, you can add files (documents, photos, videos, etc).
You can also create easy To Do Lists and assign specific tasks to specific team members. You can give each assignment a due date and that user is repeatedly emailed “alerts” as that deadline approaches (or is missed!).
After the Project is completed you can Archive it so it doesn’t count against your Active Project limit (more on that in a bit).
Other things you can do with Basecamp (via a wide range of integrations that are both free and paid) is tracking time sheets, invoicing, accounting tasks, reports and graphs creation, data backup, and even customer service support tickets. Visit the Basecamp Extras page for more information on all existing integrations.
Is it FREE?
Well, no. Basecamp is not free, though it offers a great 60 day free trail period with no obligation (you don’t have to put in a credit card to start your trial period) to purchase. If you decide not to purchase at the end of the 60 day trial period, it simply deletes your account (and all the projects you may have created). The first pay tier for Basecamp is $20 per month for 10 projects and 3Gigs of storage. You can upgrade storage capacity. And if you need more Active Projects, then you can upgrade to 40 projects (for $50 per month) or 100 Projects (for $100 per month). Visit the Basecamp Subscription Plans page for more information.
Summary
Stop relying on email threads and a sporadic mix of hand written notes and cloud based storage folders to track your projects and keep your team together and in check. Basecamp is easy to use, affordable, has an impressive user community as well as an integration ecosystem. Check it out and get things done.
