The one about our productivity tools
As any productive developer, we as organizers should have useful tools that make our life easier, more organized and as a result, conference will have fewer fuck-ups :)
Trello
Lets start with tasks. In GDG Lviv we are using Scrum methodology with 2 weeks sprints (yeah, 10/10 organizers work in IT). Trello is a collaboration tool that we use to keep track of all our tasks, ideas and some resources. As a result, everyone knows the current state of progress and can help others make tasks faster, better, easier.
Why Trello? Well, it’s free, simple and does most of the things we need. It was as an experiment in early 2014 (the year we moved from Kyiv to Lviv). Now we use it everywhere we can: from local events in our GDG to subgroup tasks: website, speakers, designers, etc.
As you can see in the picture above we have 6 columns to track tasks:
- Ideas — place where we save new ideas from the other conferences, promotions or our team-buildings, calls.
- Backlog — important tasks, but can be done in next sprint(s).
- To Do — the most important column in this sprint, because it contains everything we have to do during current two weeks.
- In Progress — (surprise, surprise) it’s important to know the current state of progress on the task (as you can see, this article has its card on the board :D ). Maybe someone needs more work ;)
- Blocked — sometimes your task depends on others, or you are just waiting for the response from other people.
- Done — the best feeling is to move cards to this list and archive entire column after some time. For sure, you can keep it as is, so that you have a feeling of busy organizer that has completed lots of tasks :D
Each card has responsible people assigned and is marked with tags to simplify filtering.
Tip: it’s recommended to have one assignee per ticket. In another case, you can have situations when no one has started on it.
Google Drive
It’s nice to have a common place where you can store and share files between organizers in your team. In our opinion, Google Drive is the best. Simple to use, but powerful inside.
Tip: don’t remove last years data. Sometimes you need to recall something and analyze it
Make folders’ structure simple and meaningful.
Nothing special to add here. Just keep all the information together to help everyone quickly find anything (that helps during the event when you need to find the answer in seconds).
Slack
Over the years we have tried different messengers. For sure, Skype was our first attempt, and it was okay for 6 organizers in 2014, but we were suffering from horrible experience on mobile devices. Sometimes you were not able to get any notifications until you open the app manually and wait a couple of minutes for the chats to load. The second downside is history. Single Skype chatroom gets bloated over time, and finding any information written few weeks ago becomes just impossible.
Our second try was Facebook Messenger. It worked great on mobile, which is very vital when you’re on the go. It’s a great tool until you need to have several groups where everyone starts asking questions.
In 2016 someone suggested to use Slack for the communication between volunteers. After couple of days, we loved it. Now we keep all our conversations in one place, divided by target groups. Additionally, if you need any ad-hoc chat with someone, you just write directly.
Benefits:
- Create private channels to keep all sensitive information inside the group.
- Create public ones for announcements and open discussions.
- Pin the important information to the channel.
- Integrate with other tools. For instance, we have added Trello integration.
- Create polls to get community opinion.
In addition to this, it just works!
MailChimp
Though social media seem to become one place for everything, never underestimate direct communication with your audience.
That’s the reason we use MailChimp — brilliant tool for both beginners and experienced users.
It combines easy setup, some nice basic templates and friendly interface for those making their first steps, with advanced integrations, analytics, testing and other great features for advanced users.
We use MailChimp for the following purposes:
- Newsletter: major announcements, news & updates.
- Collecting emails. Email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with your most loyal audience — the ones who willingly subscribed to your updates. And it’s relatively cheap (compared to CPC ads or sponsorship).
- Collecting feedback.
- Getting more people to know and attend our events :)
Quick case study. This year we started collecting “super early birds” emails long before tickets announcement itself. This way we defined our the most loyal audience, provided them additional benefit of getting the first tickets and as the result got crazy conversion rate of 15% (sales to visits).
So don’t be afraid to experiment, try new tools and of course care about your customers:) ❤️️
Streak
When you organize a conference you constantly have to keep track of relationships with your speakers and partners. It takes time and extreme discipline to communicate with everyone in a timely fashion.
In 2014 we started organizing our conversations with Gmail labels. As the list of partners grew, we couldn’t keep information and key decisions about all of them in our mind at once. We learned about CRMs, but they were complicated. We figured out, we need some sort of Gmail labels on steroids. That’s where we found out about Streak — a simple spreadsheet-like CRM inside your Gmail, which does it’s magic as a browser plugin.
Key benefits of Streak for us:
- Custom pipeline. You can easily design pipeline, which suits you best. Our pipeline is always a work in progress. We started from simple Lead/Contact/Respond/Accept and now we have stages for things like payments, agreements, etc.
- Custom columns. We keep track of our commitments with partners in the corresponding columns. Columns can keep different sets of data: freeform text, checkboxes, dropdown lists, dates, etc. Everything is very easy to fill-in. So that you actually use this CRM.
- Box view. Streak keeps all email threads with one entity under one “box”. All emails, attachments, custom fields and notes are in one place. This helps us quickly grasp all our activity around specific partnership and communicate effectively.
Tip: When you find yourself answering an email at 2AM, use “Send It Later” or “Remind Me” feature. Don’t bump people with your email at night.
Moreover, Streak has an iPhone app, which is awesome, when you need to remember something or fill in some data without launching browser Gmail.
Other
- Project Hoverboard — open sourced conference website template developed by our team.
- Buffer shares your content at the best possible times throughout the day so that your followers and fans see your updates more often.
- Hangouts for video calls.
Conclusion
The tools we use is just a medium for building reliable effective communication. We are always looking for the ones, which can improve and simplify our workflow.
If you know any tools which made organizational process or your life frictionless in some way, please share in the comments. This list will never be full!
Authors
Oleh Zasadnyy, Alina Yurenko and Ostap Andrusiv from GDG Lviv contributed to various parts of this blog post together.
