Our Favourite Collaboration Tools For Digital Success
Day in, day out, we need to communicate with our clients. From sharing new designs, to working on marketing campaigns, our digital agency constantly need to collaborate.
So how do we do this effectively? We use a lot of tools on a daily basis, some more often than others. However, when it comes to communicating with both our clients and internally within our team, some of these tools are ideal. Here are a few of our favourite collaboration tools:
Trello
Trello is just great. In a nutshell, it’s a free project management tool that uses boards to organise lists and cards. By creating relevant lists for projects, you can then add cards and drag-and-drop them in the positions that you desire.
As an example, we’re working on several PR campaigns with a certain client and use Trello to share ideas. We have columns for ‘Ideas’, ‘Approved’, ‘In Progress’, ‘Completed’ and ‘Shelved’. The client is able to add comments, attach documents/images, and ‘vote’ for the ideas that they like the best.
Basecamp
Here at Parallax, we use Basecamp as our primary source for communicating with clients. From discussions about particular areas of a website, to creating to-do lists for both our agency and the client, we’ve found it’s incredibly powerful. It removes the frustration of ongoing chain emails that can get lost in your inbox, with the added addition of a useful search feature if a lot of discussions are taking place. We can also easily assign tasks to particular team members working on the project, or even to the client if there is something that we require.
Google Drive
Google Drive is something that we tend to use internally. Drive allows us to create folders for particular clients and add documents (spreadsheets, written documents, presentations, etc.) with ideas, plans and content within them. Other members within the Parallax team, whether they’re in the content team, account management, or designers can add additional content or comments.
InVision
InVision has proved to be the perfect solution for presenting design work to clients. As well as being a presentation tool, InVision allows us to create interactive prototypes giving clients an idea of how they’ll be able to navigate around the website.
More than just a way of showcasing our work to clients, InVision allows real-time collaboration. The app simplifies the whole design feedback communication process as clients can simply click on area and add a comment. Conversations then start from these comments, removing messy email chains and feedback coming from multiple designs.
Collaborating between our internal team and with clients is essential. The above are just a few of the tools that we use to ensure that communication is up to scratch. What have we missed? Got anything you can recommend?