How I use Trello to automate workflows
I work as a community manager at Norrsken House, a 2400+ sqm creative cluster for over 300 entrepreneurs solving some of the biggest issues of our time. Norrsken House is part of Norrsken Foundation, a non-religious, non-partisan, non-profit Foundation with a strong belief in Effective Altruism. We support and invest in both for-profit businesses and non-profit organizations, whichever we believe is most likely to have a positive impact on society. Although we are based in Stockholm, Sweden, we see ourselves as world citizens.
A tiny smartphone is powerful enough to guide 120 million Apollo 11 rockets to the moon. The tools to change the world are in the hands of millions. Yet we Google cats. To us, life hacks aren’t just about finding clever ways to make living easy, but about finding better ways to be humans. We investigate, ideate and invest with the ambition to create as much good as possible using what we know best: product and business development, creativity and technology. We work and scale as a business. We are always data-driven with clear metrics and a strong demand for profit. But for us, profit is measured not in money, but in lives.
Norrsken Foundation is an ambitious and bold attempt to create a model for how to create scaleable tech solutions that solve societal problems. The ambition is to create a global network of co-working spaces focusing on social impact and tech. By supporting, coaching and investing in entrepreneurs who are working on solving some of the biggest issues of our time, we believe that we can create new types of role models in the tech scene. The goal being to support the making of an impact unicorn, a company that has saved or affected a billion lives, rather than earned a billion dollars. We’re constantly scanning the global impact tech scene for teams/companies with promising solutions to the world’s most crucial social and civic issues, if you are solving some of the most pressing issues of today, please reach out to us.
In my work as Community Manager of Norrsken House, I always try to come up with smart ways of automating my daily tasks with the use of digital tools. This allows us to be a very small but effective team. In everything we do we, try to make processes scaleable and replicable so that we can continue to grow and be very efficient with our resources.
Two of my favourite tools that I use daily are Zapier and Trello. Both of them have completely changed how I work. They’ve allowed me to be much more efficient and enabled our team to work smarter. In this short text I’m going to share two automated workflows that we use to solve daily tasks. I hope that you might be able to reuse or draw inspiration from the examples below.
Crowdsourcing ideas from our community
Our community has a lot of great ideas, and they might notice things that we don’t that would improve our co-working space. In order to harness the ideas and suggestions from our community, I’ve created a public Trello board that is displayed on a Wordpress site that is accessible to our members.
1 We ask our members to fill in a Formidable form embedded in the Wordpress site. Formidable forms are smart and allow you to ask conditional questions, upload files, drop downs, repeatable fields and much more. By using the form, we make sure that all the requests are formatted the same way in Trello later on.
2 The information gathered in the form on the website is then sent to Zapier, which creates a card on the public Trello board for everyone to see. The public Trello board has the voting Power-Up enabled which allows our members to vote on different ideas or improvements that they would like us to prioritise.
3 The board is displayed for everyone to see on the website. This allows us to work transparently and crowdsource ideas from our community using Trello, Formidable and Zapier.
Automating event requests
We get a lot of event requests from both externals and members. In order to handle all of the event requests and in order to offer the right quote on event hosting, we use the same setup as in the previous example. We use Formidable, Zapier and Trello to help us sort through and manage all of the event requests.
1 The event host is taken through a series of questions in order to define which form to display. The host then sends their information through a Formidable form embedded as a pop-up on the Wordpress site.
2 The information is sent to Zapier which then creates a Trello card on our board for events in the incoming requests list. The information we gather in the event request can also help us determine amount of workload, price, number of event hosts needed etc.
3 Once the Trello card is created in a list for incoming requests, the event host receives an e-mail sent through Zapier, and based on their answers in the event request we follow-up with different questions or determine the price for the event. Once the card is moved to a list for confirmed events, we can trigger a new e-mail send out to the host letting them know that everything is ready.
Thanks for reading!
This text is also available in Swedish
If you want to learn more digital tools, tips and tricks check out my side project, Technischool, where you can take micro courses in digital tools.
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