Probably the greatest hurdle for any team is choosing the right collaboration tool. Planning Center Online, of course is a staple but it doesn’t handle groups conversations and development.
Outside the face to face creative team meeting, we needed to use a tool that could support both staff and volunteers and be free to use. There are certainly better and more robust tools if you wanted to pay for them, but here are the tools we settled on.
Slack provides messaging, pictures, links etc to be placed in designated channels. We have a Creative Team general channel for discussions as well as a channel for new worship songs and video. I love how easy it is to invite volunteers into the discussion. Also, this alleviates text strings and emails that get lost in the shuffle. Finally, Slack has numerous 3rd party app integrations such as Asana.
Asana is a project management system that allows you to assign tasks to teams. Our project revolve around worship, video, Easter/Christmas and technology infrastructure improvements. Communication can also be handled entirely by email if Slack doesn’t fit your culture. As a leader you can have a birds eye view of what each of your team members are working on. Also, for smaller teams of 15 it’s free. If I where to pay for a tool I might consider something like Basecamp, but like I said, this is free and it’s fantastic.
Evernote is just one of many idea capturing/not taking apps. Our team just a Evernote to store ideas for future use as well as capture ideas from our creative meeting. Evernote makes sense for us because we can easily capture post it notes from our meeting boards using their Scannable app and then store the ideas in a notebook.
