We’re slacking off here at our non-profit organization, having discovered Slack, a cloud-based communication application that combines the functions of eMail, chat, a bit of artificial intelligence (called the Slackbot), and the ability to exchange transactions with a growing number of third-party applications including the Trello project manager. Slack solves the problem of team communication for specific topics or projects.

Let’s say you are launching an e-Shop. You have the web developer, the graphic designer, the photographer, the shop manager, the back-end developer and the testers working on the project. You have calendar schedules, product photos, text copy, html and .css files all in half-a-dozen sites and places; Google Drive, Trello, your calendar, the file server, the production web site, and the sandbox web site. All this is glued together using eMails with copies to the team… each person has their own copy of the email (you hope), and relevant attachments or links to files on Google Drive, Dropbox,  your web server, or your file server. Its all a bit diffuse, and if anyone wanted to come up to speed on the whole project, then it would probably be pretty tough, because everything about the project isn’t in one place.

Nine years ago, I was using Basecamp for several projects including grant applications. I have used Basecamp for many years, and sung its praises for writing grants, which is by nature a collaborative process with multiple players. About 2012, Basecamp got a major upgrade which seemed to break my workflow and processes. So, I started looking around at the alternatives, and there are a bunch.

The basic unit of Slack is the team.

Teams can create channels. Channels can be for a single department, or a single project. So, for our team we created a channel for each department:

• creative
• development
• admin
• it
• programs