Communicating Between Organisers

Having good systems for tracking tasks and coordinating between fellow organisers could drastically improve the efficiency of your group.

Action Trackers and Asana

A lot of EA groups’ activities involve many short, recurring tasks. For example, when planning and running an event, organisers will often go through the same process of booking a venue, writing event descriptions, sending emails, making social media posts, buying refreshments, etc. This means that it’s useful to create an action tracker for running events in order to save time and reduce the risk of tasks being forgotten. Action trackers can be created on Google Sheets.

Alternatively you can use existing task management software like Asana (which is free for up to 15 people). If your team of organisers is larger than 15, or you want to use paid features of Asana you can apply to get paid Asana subscriptions for a very low cost here.

This guide to action trackers from EA Cambridge goes into the details of how to use action trackers and Asana.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is a great tool to keep track of any information organised in spreadsheets, such as contact details of group organisers, event finances, and task delegation. The sheets can be shared with anyone who has a Google account via their email address. Google Sheets also allow multiple people to work collaboratively and simultaneously on the same sheet.

To use all Google workspace tool for your group, consider signing up for a non-profit account for free, which give you more cloud storage and other benefits compared to a standard Google account.

Notion

Notion is a collaborative workspace tool which allows you to create flexible and aesthetically appealing resources to share with other organisers. With Notion, you can create tables, docs, calendars, photo galleries, wikis, dashboards and much more.

Notion is free to use as an individual (where you can share your resources with up to five people) and is available as a paid version for larger teams. If your group is an official student club or non profit organization, you can apply for a 50% discount on the paid version here.

Messaging: Slack and Discord

Slack is a team collaboration tool used for organizing work flows. It consists of different channels where team members can chat and share information, documents, and plans. It is also integrated with Asana (see above). It enables you to categorise projects into “channels” and to respond to messages in “threads” so that you can keep conversations about different topics separate. Here is a guide for setting up a Slack account for your group.

To let your fellow group organisers know how to join and set up their Slack workspace, you can make a copy of this document, edit to add your group’s details, and send to your fellow organisers.

The free version is probably adequate for the vast majority of groups, but it only saves the most recent 10,000 messages.

Discord is also used by some groups. It doesn’t have the same ability to integrate other apps like Slack does, but it is free for an unlimited number of users and messages.