The COVID-19 pandemic has had a number of impacts on non-profit organizations, perhaps most notably, forcing organizations to rapidly adapt to a “digital-first” environment. For organizations that have operated primarily in-person for years, this rapid shift has caused a lot of disruption, and for many organizations, the shift is still ongoing. Thankfully, there are many tools that organizations can leverage to help their employees work more effectively remotely.
Here are three tools that can help your team collaborate more effectively remotely. These tools are flexible, affordable, and highly scalable for teams of any size:
Notion describes itself as an all-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. This description is not an exaggeration, as Notion is almost endlessly flexible. For organizations that don’t have the benefit of a cloud-based platform like Office 365, or an intranet, this can become a great tool for sharing resources and managing projects. Coda is another company that provides a very similar solution, and both products have a free version.
Airtable has become one of our most recommended tools for organizations looking for an affordable project management solution. I often describe Airtable as “excel on steroids”. Airtable allows customers to create flexible databases, and is a loaded with features to adjust to your needs and working style. Functionally, this looks like combining a kanban board, calendar, gantt chart, spreadsheet, and image gallery. Notion and Coda offer similar features, and Smartsheet is a fairly robust database tool, but Airtable is truly in a category on its own.
At this stage in the pandemic, email fatigue is a real risk and may be impacting the productivity of teams. Team communication solutions like Slack offer an affordable (free) way for teams to reduce inbox clutter and stay connected. The tool is a messaging service, that allows you to create rooms for teams, message team members individually, collaborate on documents, and search through the history of messages to find what you need. It functions very similarly to Microsoft Teams, but without having to integrate into the full office ecosystem, which may appeal to some organizations.
With any tool, there is going to be an onboarding period and some growing pains. Adoption of a new way of doing things is never easy. However, if organizations position themselves with the most current technology, and learn to take advantage of these advances, they will be better equipped to weather massive disruptions, and transition more smoothly.
