Free web tools that sync between desktop & mobile are a godsend if you’re coordinating a fundraising campaign with a team.

This post looks at 3 online tools that can help teams to coordinate digital fundraising campaigns.

1. Slack – for easy discussions (a.k.a the 21st century MSN Messenger but for the workplace. A personal favourite)
2. Appear.in – for quick group video calls (unlike Skype, no installation or login is required)
3. Trello – for simple project management (drag & drop to-do lists)

Slack

Slack is a booming web tool in the tech startup space. It’s a chat service that allows teams to easily have online conversations & send each other documents. Email isn’t the most effective channel for having real-time group conversations about a project and Slack solves this issue for small group projects.

Easy online discussions for campaign teams

In Slack you can create various chat channels for different members to join. For example, you can have a #general channel with every member of your campaign team for general day-to-day brainstorming and updates.

You could also have a #socialmedia channel to just include members who are planning the marketing of a campaign.

You could have a #stewardship channel for team members discussing how to thank donors.

You can also send direct messages to team members for individual conversations.

This ability for a whole team to speak together online allows for easy coordination when planning a fundraising campaign with lots of elements.

An example of how we use Slack to plan content at Hubbub

Easily share campaign documents

You can easily share campaign documents (e.g a draft of your fundraising campaign page’s core messaging) to your team for people to instantly feedback on & documents can be found using a search feature.

There’s also the option to ‘pin’ documents to a channel to make sure that important docs (e.g campaign images for social media) are quickly accessible.

Appear.in

Appear.in makes it super quick to set up team video/voice calls in seconds which is ideal if your campaign members are regularly on the move.

No login details needed – no need to download a program

Skype is not instant to use. You need to a) download Skype to use it and b) have to login with a username/password, often resulting in resetting login details if you forget them.

Appear.in is a cloud based video chat tool. You type in a unique URL – e.g appear.in/campaign_catchup.As soon as you click that URL, your video conversation starts. If anyone in your team goes to that URL, they’re also in the chat. No logins needed!

Screenshare

You have the ability to screenshare on appear.in. This is ideal for talking through campaign materials or walking through moderating an online campaign on an external platform.

Trello

Trello makes to-do lists simple and allows members to be assigned different tasks.

Different to-do-list boards for different projects

You can create different to-do-list boards (e.g one board could be a ‘campaign launch plan’ another called ‘post-campaign tasks’). Each board can then be filled with tasks just related to that specific campaign project.

Drag & drop tasks into lists

For each board, you can create as many lists as you like. This could be kept very simple (e.g. ‘to-do’, ‘in-progress’ and  ‘done’). You can drag that task into different lists.

One task may start in the to-do list such as ‘agree on a campaign hashtag for Twitter’. You can assign relevant team member(s) to the task & they’re get a notification. Once brainstorming for the hashtag has begun, you can then drag the task into the ‘in progress’ list. Once you have sign off, the task can be dragged into ‘done’ list.