Trello for Church Teams – Organise your comms using Trello

Trello for Church Teams – Organise your comms using Trello

Last week I got an email from the lovely Mark. Mark works for one of the churches that has recently enjoyed a ChurchTrain training session. He had a question about using Trello for Church Teams.

Mark wrote the following:

Hi Joe

We met as a communications team last night and decided to start using Trello to coordinate our work/tasks. Have you got any top tips for using this as a church team??

Mark

I, of course, informed Mark that there’s lots of great stuff written online about Trello. In fact, just last week the company even released a blog post about How teams at Trello use Trello – talk about from the horse’s mouth!

Still, I promised I’d get back to him with a few tips of my own.

The following 950 words make up these ‘few’ tips…

How to use Trello for Church Teams.

Ok Mark, here goes, some off the cuff thoughts about Trello for church teams!

First tip – add all of your creatives to the board, to make sure everyone has access to all of the information, however, make sure you explain to your team members how notifications work. If they have been added (assigned) to a card, they’ll be notified of all activity on that card.

Additionally, users can choose to subscribe to individual cards to receive updates, or they can, if they wish, subscribe to the whole board! I’d suggest that whoever is tasked with overseeing/managing this process subscribes to the board, and is therefore kept up to date with any goings on!

On top of this, it’s possible to ‘@ mention’ other users, by using the @ symbol followed by their username. This is a helpful way of asking questions about a task, as it ensures the intended user will receive a notification. Another use for this is when you want to notify someone that files have been uploaded, as this isn’t notified by default.

Notifications come via the phone/tablet apps if installed, and/or via email.

 

I’ll say at this point, that I wouldn’t add ministry leaders, or other staff members/volunteers who don’t have a specific role within your communications. This often proves overkill, with too many opinions in one place! It could also mean the creative team you have are less forthcoming with their ideas and feedback; you want your Trello to be a place of trust, a place to work together without fear of criticism.

For Trello to work for church teams, every comms mini-project needs to go on there. If this doesn’t happen, it won’t be the ‘go to’ place for all of your tasks.

If everything’s on Trello, you’ll come to rely on it.

Having everything there also means that you can see all of your current and past publicity at a glance, which helps to maintain consistency – in both style and quality!

 

Get the tasks up in to Trello as early as possible in an ‘upcoming’ type list, and then flesh them out as more details become available. Give each task a hard deadline, of when the publicity needs to be produced or published (i.e. printed or posted online!), and then set the ‘due date’ of the card for about two weeks earlier to give yourselves a buffer.

Once you’ve got enough details about the task to start work, move it in to a new list, where it can be assigned to the team member(s) who will be working on it. I’m often quite hands on at this stage, making sure all of the specifics are brought together in to a detailed yet concise brief, to make the designers job easier.

You’ll want to have a list for each stage of the process. My current preferred list setup is:

  • Upcoming (Heads up, limited info)
  • Ready for assigning
  • Design/Rework (with designer attached)
  • In Review
  • Done (ready for production)

Make sure that your communication about each task takes place on the card to which it relates. This stops email inboxes becoming cluttered, but also means that any questions or queries from earlier discussions can be traced back without searching around. This also goes for any files – whether thats images for a suggested theme, assets to be used in the design or drafts of the design itself.

 

The ‘In Review’ list is important – we have an internal review, where I give feedback to the designer (usually visuals and some content), then once it’s passed our internal stage, it gets sent to the ministry leader who requested the publicity. Make sure the key stakeholder’s details are on every card! If there are any design or content changes (and there usually are!), the card gets moved back to the ‘Design/Rework’ list for amendments.

 

I like to keep a copy of all relevant files in Trello – this includes the latest editable version of the design, any assets used (fonts, images etc.) and the latest export. Uploading a jpg export for review is really helpful, as it’ll become the ‘card cover’ meaning you can see the image without opening the card.

 

There are loads of really useful integrations and add-ons for Trello – however you can only use one of these ‘Power Ups’ per board with a free account, and having to pay per team user can get quite expensive. I would suggest that you try the ‘Key Info’ power up. This will let you assign a few fields that can be filled out for every card, and displayed on the board just underneath the card’s cover image.

Of course, you can also use IFTTT to integrate with other services, for free. I have an IFTTT recipe that takes any card that is moved to the ‘Done’ list, and creates a linked copy of it on another Trello board. This board is then used to organise the sharing of our publicity online – and the team can access all of the lovely files we’ve created over on the ‘design’ board.

Edit: You can find this recipe here.

If you wanted to integrate the online publication, or indeed the printing of publicity, in to the same board, to keep it all in the same place, you could just create a ‘Currently Promoting’ list on your Trello board. I find for my own sanity it helps to keep these two things separate!

 

That turned in to quite a long email!!

 

It won’t always work to plan, but hopefully starting with a strategy in place will mean any last minute panics happen less and less!

 

I’m really interested to hear how you get on, so please keep me updated!

Joe

 

Phew!

There you have it. Did you learn anything new? Perhaps you have processes that you’d like to share? Comment below or send me a message – and get in touch if you have any questions about how you can use Trello for church team and task management.

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