How I Manage My Agency With Basecamp

0:00:00
One of the most critical aspects of running an agency is project management and staying organized. The last thing you want to do is have tasks and files and messages and things like that slipping through the cracks. You don’t want to be missing deadlines. You don’t want to be communicating in a hectic or chaotic way with your clients. You want everything to be organized for you and at the same time you want the client to feel like everything is super organized and efficient. And what that brings us to is a discussion about project management tools. Basically, we need a tool that can serve as the central hub for running your agency. Because here’s the thing. As your agency or your business grows, you bring on more clients. You start doing more projects at once. So your projects are starting to overlap a bit. The more you bring on team members, the more you work with clients who have multiple people on their team. So now you have multiple people on your team, multiple people on their team. You may even get into situations where you have outside contractors or third parties that are involved in projects and they need to be up to speed on things. You start to really see the need for a centralized hub for managing your agency and all of your projects. And you may even have some internal projects as well as client projects that you need to manage. And it would be nice if you could manage those in the same place. So what we’re going to do in this training is we’re going to talk about project management. But primarily, we’re going to take a look at a tool called the base camp. And this is the tool that I use for managing my entire agency. In fact, all of my brands. So not just our agency clients, but our internal projects as well as automatic CSS. And even the digital ambition inner circle that you are watching this video in is managed inside of my base camp. So we’re going to take a look at all of the features, how base camp works. But before we do that, I want to say this, there are a lot of tools out there that you can use to manage projects. There are very complex and complicated tools. As you may know, I used to use a tool called the click up very, very powerful and customizable. And when you look at it from the outside, you might come to the conclusion that a tool like that is probably the best option because it’ll be able to do almost anything that I wanted to do. I can craft it exactly to my needs.

0:02:24
And you may look at a tool like base camp and say, well, that’s very simplified. It’s a very simplified tool. Is it really going to be powerful enough to do what I needed to do? And here’s what I will say to you. Almost always the best tool for this specific task of project management is the simplest tool because you also have to remember number one, there’s really two things here. Number one, you don’t want to spend your half your time managing the tool. And if you use a tool like click up, that’s what I felt I was doing is I was spending half my time managing the actual tool, getting it set up, getting it customized, making sure that it was being used properly. And that becomes like a second job in itself. And you don’t want that to happen if it all possible. You want to avoid that at all costs. Number two, the tool has to be usable by your clients. And if the tool is too complex or complicated or has too many bells and whistles and features, the client isn’t going to use it. And if the client doesn’t use it, you’re kind of dead in the water because only half of the equation of every project is using the tool. And that’s not good enough. You need your project, your clients to be using this project management tool. And so the reason I’ve used base camp, I switched completely to base camp and the reason I’ve stuck with it is because clients absolutely will use it. They’ll use it consistently. And there’s no excuse for them not to use it. They can’t say that it’s too complicated or they don’t understand it or anything else.

0:03:57
And I’m going to show you we’re going to dive into base camp. You’re going to see exactly how it works. And I’ll kind of show you from the client side and from our side as agency owners and freelancers as well. But that’s really that don’t fall into that trap is what I wanted, you know, preface all of this with because it is going to seem to you like, hey, it’s kind of a simple tool on the agency side of things. Maybe it’s missing a couple core features, even some inefficiencies for us as on the agency side of things. But it more than makes up for it when you factor in the ease of use for clients and the fact that they will actually use it. And I would recommend this. I tell all of my clients we make this very clear up front. We reiterate this over and over and over again. It’s in our contract language. They must use base camp. And we explicitly tell them if you email us and it falls through the cracks, that’s your fault. We have a tool called base camp. That’s the tool that we all use and that we all need to be using consistently. And I would make that rule in your agency as well. Tell clients you must communicate with us through base camp. If you have a task, create the task in base camp. If you want to send us an email, go into base camp and create a discussion thread instead because, and this is very critical, the more people that are involved in a project, the more people that we add to our team that are involved in this project, the more people the client has on their team. There needs to be a single source of truth for all tasks and all communication. If they send me an email, nobody else on my team has access to that. If I send them an email, nobody on their team has access to that. We’re having a private conversation, that nobody else is privy to. And then somebody forgets about that conversation or there’s a task involved in that conversation. And it ends up not getting done. And then the clients have set, but we’re upset because you can avoid all of this and explain this to the client. I walked them through this. I’m like, this is why we have to do it. These are the things that happen in website projects. These are complicated projects with a lot of moving parts. If we don’t use base camp, we can’t hit your timelines. If we don’t use base camp efficiently and consistently, we can’t do our best work. And we want to do our best work for you. And we want to hit the timelines. So use base camp. That is the appeal that we make to our clients. And guess what?

0:06:15
They do it. And this is not just for active projects. This is for maintenance and management projects as well as for marketing projects. It’s for everything. Every thing should run through base camp. Make that your religion. Okay. With that said, I’ve got a list right here to make sure that I don’t forget anything because there is there is even though it’s a simple tool, there is a lot to go over. We’re going to go ahead and dive right into base camp. And this is the base camp dashboard. We are not going to start by clicking on projects and looking into projects, but I will give you a quick overview of what you are seeing here on the home screen. The pinned projects are active development projects, things that I want to stay front and center for me. Everybody on my team though has their own dashboard view where they can pin their own projects. So things that are important to them like the projects they’re assigned to, they can pin those tasks to those projects to the dashboard. And as you can see, you can move around. You know, you can repriortize if I wanted this to be first. You know, you can come up with whatever organization you want. But basically the pinned tasks are things that are active that I want to stay right front and center for myself. It’s very easy to unpin if you just click the pin. It’ll unpin it. Click any pin down here. It’ll pin it to the pin section. Then you have cards down here that are not pinned. And these are just organized by projects that you have opened recently and interacted with recently. So this is always auto shuffling. You can’t really drag anything around here. It’s simply auto shuffling by what did you view last or what did you engage with most recently.

0:08:01
And so this kind of stays auto organized. If you want to manually organize something, I would recommend pinning it. And then you can move it around in your pins. And then this only shows a certain amount of cards. So this is not showing all of them. You can view all in a list at any time. You can also archive projects. So if a client is not active and they’re not on a monthly management plan, for example, you could archive their project. And we have some projects in our archives as well. But this kind of keeps things like if they’re down here, it’s because they’re on a they’re project is still quote unquote, it’s not an active development, but it’s an active project in the sense that we’re doing probably management for them, maybe even marketing for them. But it’s still needs to be easily accessible, right? You’ll also notice that we have teams versus projects, where you see this is a team based camp, the old version used to actually have teams like you get out of team or you could add a project. Now everything is one and the same and you just name it what you want it to be. So we have a digital gravy HQ, which is our headquarters for this is our kind of our team area. So we put global team tasks in there, have global discussions in there. We’re going to get into all the features of a project in just a second, but it is important for you to know that teams and projects are now combined in base camp and you simply name the thing, the card, what you want it to be and all the cards have the exact same tools. And this makes it very easy because it used to be that like teams had kind of certain features that projects didn’t have, but then as base camp grew, they kind of became one and the same. So it was like, well, why are they name different things? And basically, I finally just combine them and they’re like, basically, you get a project card if you wanted to be a team name and a team name, right? Instead of a project name.

0:09:49
So that’s how that works. And the way that we organize everything in base camp is by company or client. So every client has a project card. And then we use different lists inside of that project card for like a client has multiple projects. And they might have a website project. They might have a Google ads project project. So to speak, like we’re doing Google ads for them or Facebook ads. It could be a lot of different things. So you’ll see this more as we go. Where I want to start is just if you are opening base camp for the first time, how does it work just making a new project and inviting people to the project? And you can see that base camp has recognized that those are the two most, you know, used actions probably that need to be front and center in base camp. And so they have a button that just sits right here under your branding called make a new project. And then they have a button that says invite people. You can do this in either order. I’ve pretty much found that it’s best to make a new project first. And then you can go ahead and invite people. You can also invite people from the project area. So we’re just going to take a look at how this workflow works. So I want to make a new project. This is going to be awesome client. So this is our, we’ll say new awesome clients. Okay. So new awesome client. You can add an optional description here. So this could be like you could talk about who the client is or what their company does. A lot of times I’ll put their website address here. So just its front and center. So we can do like awesome client.com. And then you have the option of using a project template or just creating a project. Now what a project template is is for us, we just have the tools that we like to use already set up and kind of ready to go and named how we want them named versus just what base camp gives you out of the box. There isn’t a lot of there isn’t a huge difference. Okay. I’m going to go ahead and hit use a project template and I’m going to select my new project template and I’ll go ahead and create this project.

0:11:51
And I’ll just show you what the differences would be. So we now have a new dashboard for new awesome client. And you can see that we have some key areas as part of this project. We have the project discussion. We have website tasks. We have marketing tasks. These two things would not be here. If I did not choose a template, basically you would have a generic task list. I think it would say like current tasks or something like that. It was something very generic. But we have two different lists. One for website tasks and one for marketing tasks. Even if we’re not doing marketing tasks with this particular client right now, maybe we’re just doing their website, it doesn’t mean that we won’t have marketing tasks in the future. And here’s a subtle thing. When clients are invited to these projects, I want clients to see this that there’s a marketing tasks area ready to go because it gets them thinking, ooh, they can do my marketing too. So even if we don’t have anything to put there, I want clients to see that it exists because again, it gets their mind going and it makes them understand that hey, we do marketing too. Don’t forget we could load this thing up with tasks. Get your marketing going. So we have website tasks. We have marketing tasks. We have docs and files. Critical area. We’re going to go through each of these one by one. I’m just doing a little overview for you. Schedule and dates, email forwards and automatic check-ins. Now the only thing missing that would be there if you had not done the template, I’m going to go ahead and hit change tools. You can see all the tools that are available to you.

0:13:22
The one tool that is not turned on is campfire. And what campfire is, I’m going to go ahead and turn that on real quick. And then we’re going to go back to our project dashboard. And you’re going to see campfire show up right here. And by the way, you can change where these are. So if I wanted campfire to be first, I can simply drag it up here and drop it in. And sometimes it’s okay, it took, sometimes in Firefox, it doesn’t work so great sometimes. I don’t know. Works flawlessly in Chrome, though. So, all right, anyway, now you can see that there’s campfire here. We’ve added a tool. And we can go in and see what campfire is. Campfire is a live chat with your team. Or with the client. Or Android team. Basically, everybody involves, right? So you can go ahead and you just start typing. You hit enter and it’s going to post the message that everybody can see. It’s just literally a live chat. You can also do, you know, bold italics, strike through. You can drop links in here. You can drag images in here. You can use emojis. You can upload files. It’s a very robust live chat experience. We do not turn this on for almost any client or any project because we don’t want live chat is too chaotic in my opinion for project management. So what we want to do is we want to confine everything in message threads so that it’s like email. Every thread has a topic. And then you can see all the replies to that specific topic. And the whole conversation related to that specific topic. If there’s a new topic we want to talk about, we create a new thread. I’ll show you that in just a second. So I’m going to go in and I’m going to go to change tools and I’m simply going to turn off campfire.

0:15:00
And now you’re going to see campfire disappears. Nobody can live chat anymore inside of this project. And that’s exactly how I want it to be. Okay. Before we get into all the project tools, we need to talk about adding people. See, that’s why I made a list. I didn’t want to miss anything. So obviously my client is not on this project. In fact, none of my team is on this project either. So I want to hit add some people. Now you can add people through here or I want to show you because it’s a little bit different when you add them through the main dashboard. Invite people. When you do them through this process, it gives you three options. And this is where I do most of adding my people or really anybody that needs to be in our base camp or on a project. And this is brand new. It’s one of the reasons why I waited to do this video. I needed to wait for this feature to be released. I knew it was coming. And I didn’t want to make the old training automatically, you know, not be up to date. So I waited for some of these features to come out. This is super important and very, very helpful. So you can add someone who works at your agency or your business. So that would be a team member. And it says right here co-workers, right? Can create projects, add people to projects and act as administrators. If you want them to be an administrator, they don’t have to be an administrator. You can also add critical and outside contractor or vendor you’re working with. I work with lots of contractors and vendors that are not on my team, but they need to be privy to what is happening with specific projects. And these are sometimes I do this with partners as well. I have a great partner who owns an analytics agency and he’s constantly bringing me clients. We’re working together on projects. So he is an outside contractor or vendor that I’m working with and I can assign him to any project he needs to be up to date on and be able to see all the files for and all that good stuff. Then there’s a client you’re doing work for. This is obvious that it would be your client.

0:16:57
Okay. So I can choose it’s a client I’m doing work for next. Enter their name. All I have to do is put in their full name, their email address, their job title and then the name of their company. And if their company is already in here because I’m adding multiple people, I just select their company from the drop down and then I hit email invitation now. And after they’re invited, the next step is going to ask me what project I want to add them to. Okay. Now if we go back, you could do the exact same thing for an outside contractor. If you enter all the same details, you can even add multiple people here. All right. You can do that for clients as well. So if you’re wanting to add, if you know, hey, there’s four people that are clients for this project, I need to add them all at once. Okay. There you go. So you’re going to add all four people at once and then email out the invitations and then assign them all to projects like that. It’s very, very, very simple. They’re going to get an email invite. They’re going to go create a password. It’s going to take them right into their project and they’re off to the races. And normally what we have in here, I have a project manager. And right after she creates a new project, she goes into the discussion area. So I have new awesome client right here. She goes into project discussion and she types a welcome to base camp. And she has a pre-written thing that we’ve all, we’ve already written out.

0:18:15
And she basically puts their name in. She tags them. She can tag people, right? She can tag the client. And you can then post the message. And we’ll just say blah, blah, blah. Okay. Very cool that you can, you know, look, look, you can style all this stuff. It’s got like background colors, highlights. You can put block quotes in. You can change things into headings. It’s very robust. You can drop code in here. You can attach files. You can drag images in. Very, very robust discussion area. I hit post the message. You can see my message. And then look, there’s a comment thread on every single message. So you can follow discussions. We welcome them to base camp. We explain how base camp works. And we encourage them to, again, we kind of remind them, hey, everything goes through here. Make tasks for us. If you want to make us task, you can assign the tasks to us, start discussions here, upload your files to the docs and files area. It all kind of outlines exactly how they should be using base camp. And so when they log in for the first time, they see that message. They read it. They know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. And that this is the hub for where all of the action happens. Okay. So that is inviting people to a project. So we’re going to pretend that I’ve got my team has been added. I can also, let’s do it through here with the workflow. Add people. If I was adding my team name, right, I could do, there’s Andrea right there. So I can add him to the project. I can add Suzanne to the project. I can add Wajee the project. I can add all of my team members right there very quickly. I don’t obviously have to put in their information because they’re already in the system as users. Okay. So that is adding people to a project. So now we’ve got a project set up. We’ve got all of our people added. Let’s go ahead and talk about what needs to happen next.

0:20:05
Okay. Project timeline. So after you’ve added a project, you can click the three dots up here. And you can go edit name, description, and dates. Anytime you need to edit the name of the project or the description, like when we set up the project, you can edit that here. But there’s another little feature. And I kind of wish that they would ask you these dates when you’re creating the project. They don’t currently. Maybe they will in the future. But if I add start and end dates, I can pick a start date. Let’s say today is the start of the project. And the end date is going to be, let’s say two months from now. So that was July 8th, September 8th is what our end date is going to be. I’m going to go ahead and hit save changes. And you see it puts this little timeline bar at the top of the project dashboard so that everybody can see. And the green is where we’re at in the project. Right. Now that’s not all that does. There’s another feature that we’re going to get to later. The super helpful that uses these dates right here. But you do get a little bit of a timeline overview at the top of the project card. So we’ve added our project timeline. The next thing we need to talk about is adding and organizing tasks. So these are task lists right here. I’m going to go ahead and open website tasks. And at this point what my project manager would do is she has an SOW in her hand. Right. In fact, I will go ahead and in docs and files. Typically, what she’ll do is she’ll upload it right here. So I’m going to go grab. I think I was just looking at one. Here’s here’s an SOW. Okay. So I’ll just put SOW.PDF. We’ll post that to the project.

0:21:39
And we can see it right there. And if I open that, let’s go ahead and open it. Let’s look at. Oh, there it is. It’s right there. So that’s looking at it earlier. Here’s the statement of work. So you can see that we have some different sections. Right. There’s discovery and SEO deliverables. There’s UX design deliverables. There’s UI design deliverables. These are all part of a project. A website project to be more specific. So I’m going to open up the website task. And this is what she would do. She would have, and I want to make sure that this is doable while we’re screen recording. I’m going to go tile this to the left. And I’m going to tile this to the right. And I want to see if, oh, y’all can’t see both at once. You can only see the one that’s active. All right. Bummer. But anyway, that should be fine. So you can see over here, discovering SEO deliverables. So in the website tasks in base camp, you can have lists. You can have groups. And you can have the individual tasks themselves. You see right here by default, it’s asking to name a list. What I do is I break each of these headings up into individual list. Actually, my project manager does. But this is how I trained her to do it. Right. So she would name the list discovery and SEO deliverables. And then she would add that list. And then she can add tasks immediately to this list. So we see here, the tasks here, like market research, keyword research. So it would be market research. And then there would be keyword research. And then there would be opportunity report. Now, we actually have a template for this that you can copy from another project and paste here. But that’s a little bit more complicated. So I’m going to show you that part and just going to show you what typing this stuff in looks like. I’m just hitting enter on my keyboard.

0:23:28
To and basically when I hit enter, it enters that task. And then it asked me to create another task. I can literally like go down really quick and do this. All right. So if I go back to website tasks, I can now see that there’s a list. And I can see that there are individual tasks. Now you can actually group these tasks as well. And you can create a name for your group. So I’ll just say my group save. So there’s a bunch of different ways that you can organize. Now if I move that group, right, it’s going to move the tasks that are in it or I can drag things into the group, I can have multiple groups. I can do whatever I want to do. So that’s that. I don’t really need a group in here. So I’m going to go delete entire group. And of course it deleted the tasks. So I’m just going to go ahead and put those in. So PPC forecast, visual site map competitor research, market research, opportunity report is one that got deleted and keyword research got deleted as well. So now let’s just take a look at well, let’s let’s make another list. Just you guys can see how this actually works. So then we have UX design. And we’re going to add the list. And then I’m just going to add something and I’m going to add everything because this is, you know, you guys get the point, right? So page service areas. Okay, great. Whatever. Then I go and I do a new list called UI design. And then this one would be page home. And then I would have page single service detail.

0:24:51
And then the UI style guy. Okay, so that goes back. Now I’m not going to do anything else. We’re just going to stick with those three. I can reorder these if I want to in the specific order that they go in. So discovery always comes first. Then we have UX design. Then we have UI design. All right. So next thing I can do is I can look over here and I can say set up the hill chart. Now this is optional. We do this for some projects. We don’t do this for other projects. But if I do set up hill chart, I can track which lists I want to track in the hill chart, save changes. And look, it’s going to put a visual chart here. This is very helpful on active projects for a lot of clients, especially if it’s a larger project with a lot more moving parts. So basically, what you can do is as you complete tasks and make progress on these areas, you can simply drag. We’re going to hit update. You can simply drag these visual indicators. This is all just manually done to the points where they’re at. They’re either getting started or we’re like right in the thick of things or we’re almost done with it. And so a client can log in and they can visually see where every phase of the project is at. Very helpful for a lot of clients. But again, totally optional, you can turn that off. But the thing is, is you need separate task lists in order to set up a hill chart. If all the tasks are part of one list, you’re only going to see one list on here.

0:26:14
Right? And yeah, you can move it, but it’s like, okay, that doesn’t help us as much. If we have separate lists like this, very easy to see where each phase of the project is. Okay? I’m going to go ahead and go to hill chart settings and then we can select none, save changes, and it’ll turn off the hill chart. Next thing is, we created lists, but here’s the thing. The client, and in fact, I’m going to have to add a client so that we can see the other thing. Add client to this project. And do I have a client that’s a dummy? Do I have a dummy client? Test client? No. Man, I don’t… Oh, it’s… Oh, sorry. Which client is this project with? So let’s do take four media as one. And I’ll add people. Okay, we’re going to say… Test, no. Oh, there we go. Amazing client. Okay. So I knew I had one in there. I was like, I have a dummy client in here somewhere. So I’m going to go ahead and add them to the project. And you can now see that amazing client is part of take four media and they are on the project. And what happens when you add a client is it enables new features. Okay. So I’m going to go ahead and click on this. And now you’re going to see this little blue thing that says, this to do list is private to our team. If I go to the discussion and I open this up, look, the discussion now says this message is private to our team. So once a client is in there, you want to change this to allow the client to see this too. You hit save changes and now there’s a yellow flag on that item.

0:27:53
And this yellow flag is critical in base camp to everybody on your team. That yellow flag tells them the client can see what the hell you’re doing. Right. So button it up, buddy. Like, you know, cross your teeth, dot your eyes. Client can see this thing. Don’t screw it up. Don’t say any stupid. All right. You’ve got the yellow bar. That means client is visible on this. Right. If they don’t see if they see the blue bar. So I go to here and I open this up. I see a blue bar. Hey, we can party in here. We can do whatever we want to do. Client can’t see what we’re doing in here. So that’s a really important part of base camp is you get to granularly pick and choose what your client can see. When you go into docs and files, every single file, every single folder, you are able to change and decide whether the client should be able to see that or not see that. Individual list items, right. This list can be visible while and I’ll change this to the client can see this. All right. And so now when I look here, let me go to my website tasks. Look at that. It puts the yellow badge out to the side so that at a glance, I can see, hey, these two lists are private to our team. This list is client visible. That’s a very, very important part of base camp. Okay. So we’ve got lists, groups and hill charts. We covered that. We just covered client view versus team view. Next is the project discussion. So like I said, this is a threaded discussion. What I would say is you have to have and you train your team and you train clients to have discipline in this area. But this is the single source of truth for project discussion. So we’re going to say something like I’m going to make this visible to the client immediately. And we’re going to talk about the about page messaging, right. And this is where I would ask the client, hey, do client. So I would tag them amazing client and it puts their first name by default. It’s kind of casual instead of putting everybody’s first and last name. So hey, amazing. I would just say something like do you already have copy for the about page, your company’s history, bio, et cetera. Or do we need to write that now, obviously some of this will be worked out in the discovery phase. And I’m just showing you an example of a discussion you might want to have with a client. This could be, hey, we’re thinking about this for an offer. What do you think of this offer? The main point here. And then by the way, down here, you can choose who you want to notify. Now anybody that’s tagged is going to get notified because you tagged them. But you can also select other people if we had like five team members on here. And when we look at a sample project, you’re going to see this how this actually works. But you can decide who on your team is should be notified about this discussion, who on the clients team should be notified about this discussion. And then you can say changes or you can just say, hey, I want to notify everybody who can see this project. And then you post this message. And now we go back and you can start to see a organized discussion thread starting to build up here topic by topic, everything is timestamped. And this is very important for you as an agency, not just so things don’t slip through the cracks, but we’ve all been in situations where we talked to a client about something.

0:31:24
And then a month later, the clients like we never talked about that or you said it was going to be like this, right? Single source of truth, threaded discussions completely organized all time stamped, you can go right to the discussion area and say, this is exactly where we talked about it, right? In fact, this is your message right here at 447 PM on June 2nd, where you agreed that this is what we were going to do. And that’s it. It’s the end of the discussion. You don’t have to go hunting in your emails. You don’t have to be like, oh no, we did it on the phone or whatever. Right? And if you are doing a phone call, here’s what you do. You go as soon as you pick up the phone with a client, docs and files, new, make a new folder, client, we’ll do meetings, something like that. And then we’ll do new, start a new doc and I’ll do phone call. And I’m taking notes, I’m logging the minutes, right? So phone call and I’ll do seven, you know, whatever today’s date is, seven, 22. And then I am going to usually I use bullets and I just bullet out every single thing that we talked about and all the pertinent details. And then guess what? I notify everybody who was on the project, if that’s what I want to do, I can, let me go ahead and post this doc. And then I can say, this is going to be change, allow clients to see this too. Okay. So now they can see all of the meeting notes. And let’s just pretend that I just put a bunch of meeting notes in there. So they go to meetings, they open this up, they can see here’s our phone call from seven, seven, 22. Here’s what we talked about all the details. We can have a threaded discussion related to that phone call after the fact, everything is timestamped, everything is logged. It’s amazing, right? This is what you need to be doing to make sure that you are crossing T’s, gotting eyes and there’s none of this. Oh, we never talked about that or here’s what we actually agreed on. Yada, yada, yada, let me get out of the split view. I don’t, I forgot we’re in split view. That’s just ruining our recording at this point. Let’s go and do this and check. Okay. We’re back to full screen. Sorry about that. All right. So that is our, how, how we do that with project discussion, meeting notes, things like that. You could put your meeting notes here, but I find that because you’re doing lots and lots of meetings, it’s better to have them as docs and a folder. It’s completely up to you.

0:33:46
I mean, however you want to do that, but that’s how I manage that. I put all of them as docs in the folder. Okay. So the next thing that we want to do is we want to talk about we did client viewers team view project discussion docs and files. Well, that takes us right into docs and files. So very, very powerful part of base camp. First is the folders, just the ability to like, I can do branding. Then I can make a folder for website content. Then I can make a folder for images. Or we’ll do, we’ll say photos. I can make a folder for videos. And so everything is folder-based organized. Then I, let’s say I wanted to drop some photos into the photos folder. And I’ll say that these are team photos, right? So team folders, photos are inside the photos folder. And let’s just go to unsplash real quick. And let’s just say headshot. Okay. I want to just kind of show you how this works. So we’re going to download this guy. And we’re going to download him. Okay, that’s perfect. We’re going to download her. So we’ll download here, save. And then we will download her as well. Man, she’s ready. She’s chipper. She’s ready for the job. All right. So we are going to come back over here and go to downloads. There’s my three photos right there. I drag them in. And look, I can bulk name them right here. Change their, basically their file path name. I can add any notes that I want to add to the photo. These are full resolution, right? You see how fast they uploaded.

0:35:22
And then I can notify people if I want to. But I’m just going to say post to the project. And there they are right there. Now everybody on my team has access to these photos by default. They don’t have to be like, oh, I don’t have access to that Google Drive folder. Or where is it in Google Drive? I can’t find it. Or what, you know, did it get emailed? Oh, they didn’t attach to the email properly. All of that nonsense goes away. You use base camp. It always works. And everybody has access to everything. If I want the client to have access to the folder, I make sure that the client can have access to the folder. Now the client can do exactly what I just did. They can go in, get everything that’s on their computer for photos. And they can drop them right in here. They can organize them into folders. And it’s all there waiting on us and our team. And it notifies us when they do this. So nothing is lost in translation. Nothing has been emailed back and forth. Very, very powerful. But that’s not all. Check this out. New. Look at everything that you can add. You can add links to Adobe Creative Cloud documents. You can add air table direct links, base camp for other base camps. If like you’re working with another agency and the agency has a base camp, you can interlink the two together. Box, drop box, Figma, amazing, right? I can put direct links to Figma wireframes, Figma UI files. So the clients like, where is that? I don’t remember where the wireframes were. Hey, go into docs and files. Click on the wireframe Figma. It’s going to open it right up for you. You can put your public Figma link in there. So the client doesn’t even need permission. It just they can access it publicly. All your Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Invision Notion is integrated in here. One Drive sketch, Zoho, and then other any link on the internet that you could possibly want to put in here. Maybe you want to share a resource with your client.

0:37:08
You can make a resources folder. You can put all your resources links right inside of that folder using this and it’s all ready to go. I’ll show you exactly what that looks like here. So I’ll just say digital gravy. And we’ll put the digital gravy.co website, our agency website, and then I post it and boom, just like that. So it’s just sitting there as a link to digital gravy, our agency website. They click it, view file, now they’re on our website. It’s so easy, very, very, very easy. They can even have a discussion about any of these individual files. Okay? So docs and files section very, very, very powerful. And guys, this is one of the most important aspects because you know as well as I do, they’re getting content, getting files from clients. How do I do that? How do I share it? I don’t know. Okay, it’s open up base camp. It’s on your desktop. It’s in a folder, somewhere, just drag it into base camp and you’re done. They don’t need to figure out Dropbox. They don’t need to figure out Drive, how to make public links and all this other nonsense. They just open base camp. They drag the files in. It uploads them. It accepts every file type. They hit publish and it’s done and now we have instantly have access to it. And then if a photo, like let’s say this photo is a low resolution. Good type on here. Hey, amazing client. Unfortunately, this photo isn’t high enough resolution. Can you please provide a new file? Just click, replace with a new version. Okay, I hit save. It pings them with this message. And by the way, it emails them this message. You get an email notification that this message just existed. And now they can come in. They can replace with a new version. They can pick it from their computer and it won’t even create a new thing that I have to go find. It’ll replace it right there. All right. So very, very powerful stuff from base camp when it comes to docs and file management. Next thing that we want to talk about is schedule and dates. Okay. So we have this schedule and dates section.

0:39:17
You can always come in here and you can add an event. Right. So you can add an event, allow the client to see this too. Type the name of an event. Maybe we’ll say we have a meeting and it starts on Friday, July 8th. And that meeting is going to be at 1 p.m. And then we don’t repeat this meeting. It’s with Kevin Geary and amazing client. We’re going to put some notes. Here’s what this meeting is about. And then I can post the event. You can always do that there. And then it puts the event on there. The client can see it too. Yada, yada, yada. Right. So and then you can add it to your calendar straight from here. No problem. I’m going to go ahead and put that in the trash. Mainly, I don’t use that. You can do it that way if you want to. That’s not how I use the schedule and dates section. What I do is I come in and we have certain things and we say assign three to do. So I’m going to sign these to me. Okay. We probably should have gone over that. How do you assign tasks to people? And I kind of forgot that part. So when you open a task, you can, obviously it says who added it. You can assign it to one or more people. Now, there’s only two people on this project. So I can only assign it to two people. You can estimate how many hours it’s going to take. I can’t remember if this is part of base camp or if it’s part of ever hour because I use ever hour for time tracking for a team. Ever hour integrates with base camp. I don’t know if ever hour added this feature or if it’s a native base camp feature, but you can estimate the time if you want. This is the one I use all the time. So we’ll do tasks and maybe there, you know, the client requested the task or we just came up with the task. We put it in, but we want the client to be notified when the task is completed. So we don’t have to manually go tell them, hey, dude, the task is completed.

0:41:07
So you can just put amazing client on here. And as soon as this is marked as done, the client gets a notification that that specific task has been completed. Very, very powerful. Then you can have a due date. You can have no due date. You can have it on a specific date. All right. So I can say this is due Friday, July 8th. You can also make it a multi-day task. Right. So this runs from the 8th to the 12th. We’re going to be working on this, for example. I’m just going to do a specific day. And then you can choose whether it repeats every day, every week, every other week, every year, every weekday, every month, every 8th of the month. And it knows that because it’s currently the 8th of the month, right? Or actually the date that you chose. All right. So that’s very, very powerful stuff. And I’ll show you how we do that with regard to like website management. Right. We have an auto task that comes to us every month on every project we’re doing management for. So we don’t have to remember to go in and do it. This is what we use that repeat task feature for. You can put notes on your task. This is the same kind of box like you have in the discussion thread. You can drop files in here, images in here. You can highlight things, bold things, list things, put dividers, put code, anything you want to do. Very helpful for the team. Like there’s a code snippet we need to implement. I can drop it right in there and they can get it without formatting and it’s freaking great. Okay. So I am going to add market research, assign to Geary. Okay. And it’s got a date. Friday, July 8th. Save. Now let’s go look at this. I go into my schedule and dates. Guess what’s automatically on the calendar. So if a client wants to mainly bookmark this calendar date and see where all the tasks are and what the due dates are, it’s automatically building out this schedule and dates calendar from the dates we’re assigning to different tasks. So I find that to be very, very powerful and that’s primarily how we use the schedule and dates sections. All right. The next thing that we want to do is email forwarding.

0:43:10
So I have email forwarding turned on for this project and inevitably no matter how much you coach your clients, they’re going to send you an email. Okay. And you need to get that email into base camp. And so base camp has this cool email forwarding feature. So I’m going to open up my email right here. Hopefully there’s nothing private in here, but I doubt there is. We’re going to hit compose and actually not compose. We’re going to open up a email here. Let’s do. All right. Here’s Andrea. Andrea, that’s part of my team. This guy, amazing. First of all, send me for my birthday, send me Falcons tickets. Well, this is, I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it. Thank you so much Andrea. I absolutely, this stunned me when it came in. It’s just absolutely one of the best team members, best team members that I’ve ever had by far. So this is, I just, I love Andrea to death and thank you so much. But let’s say, let’s say that I needed to get this into base camp. So watch how easy this is. I hit forward to base camp. And it’s called base camp save. They give you an email address. Now you would think that you would have a specific email address for every single project. And I believe that is a possibility. But that’s not how I like to do things because Gally, that is really hard to keep up with, right? But if you just email base camp save with this file, I’m going to go ahead and hit send and I go back and we just kind of wait for a minute.

0:44:43
And Gmail does have a little bit of a, like, I believe it’s a spam. Actually, it’s the sending delay because I have the undo feature enabled. So if you want to be able to like, oh, no, don’t send that, it holds on to it for a minute. But look at that right there. Base camp. Pick a team or project for your forwarded email. This is where should we save that email? So base camp just emailed me about the email I forwarded them. And then this is all automated. There isn’t anybody reviewing or getting access to these emails. And then I hit click here to choose. It opens up this special window in base camp where I can now select any project that I want to do that. I don’t remember what we called our little test. Was it an amazing project or amazing client? I can’t remember what it was. Let’s see. Now I got to read them all. So we’re going to go up up up up new awesome client. There it was. Now I hit save the email there. Okay. And you see it does give you next time skip a step forward email to this address. We’ll save it directly to that client without asking you where to put it. But again, like I said, it’s so hard to manage. Right. I just want one place and one thing to remember. Hey, just email to base camp. Base camp save. Now I click view this email on base camp. And there is the entire email thread inside of base camp in my email forward section. So I have a log in case again, your client or or a third party or whatever is emailing you and you need that log stored in base camp. You simply forward it and it assigns it and it puts it right there. It’s got the stamps on it. Everything is exactly how you would want it for your records. Very cool. Next is automatic check ins. Another really, really awesome feature. So I’m going to go to automatic check ins and I’m going to pretend for a second that and I keep this private to our team. Pretend for a second that five different team members are on this project. We can set up a and it says Friday footnotes update the team on this project status. You can actually program any of these in here that you want. Let me go to automatic check ins. I can do a new question. So this is the default question as part of our project template. Right. That’s another reason why we create the template. So we don’t have to remember to do things like this. But my project manager would come in and assign this check in to every team member that’s active on this project. And basically what this will do. It says asking one person every Friday at 4.30 p.m. So at 4.30 p.m. on Friday, it’s going to ping our team member and say, hey, update the team on this project status. And it’s going to do that for every project that team member is active on. So they might get five pings for this project and that project and this other project and this next project. And their job every Friday at 4.30 p.m. is to go in and tell everybody, here’s what I did this week. Here’s what’s coming next. Here’s my sticking points. Here’s what I need in order to do my job better. They put those notes in. They post their answer. And then our project manager every Monday does what we call a Monday mingle. And before they do the Monday mingle, the Monday mingle is you’re mingling with the clients, right? So you go in, you mingle with the clients every single Monday morning. And basically your job is to tell the clients, here’s what we did last week. Here’s what we’re going to be doing this week. Here’s what we’re still waiting on from you. Here’s what we need to do our job better. Yada, yada, yada. Anything that is pertinent to that project every Monday morning, the project manager goes in, it’s not templated. You write a personal note to that client, updating them on everything, asking them what you need from them, seeing if they need anything. And on and on and on, it’s a very high touch. But the thing is, she can’t create those Monday mingles if she doesn’t know what’s going on with the project.

0:48:35
So these Friday footnotes are how she compiles the information of what has happened with each specific project. She can also go in and review completed tasks, review activity logs, which I’ll show you in just a minute. But this Friday footnotes is an automated ping to every team member active on every project for them to come in and give us an update. And so me as an owner as well, I don’t know what’s going on with some of these projects. I can keep up with the Friday footnotes and be like basically up to date on every project’s status. All right. I can also go read the Monday mingles. So this is a, I would highly recommend you implement this in your agency. It is a very high touch thing. And I will tell you this, the clients that get these Monday mingles, they love it because they’re not having to reach out. They’re not having to say what’s going on with my project. What’s the status? What have you guys done? What are you working on? Yes, they’re getting notified when we complete tasks. Yes, they can see the timeline. Yes, they can see the dates calendar. Yes, they can see a lot of things, but they shouldn’t have to log in and be digging in all these different areas. When we can simply reach out to them every Monday morning and say, hey, hope you’re having a fantastic week. We wish you the best this week. Here’s what we did last week. Here’s what we’re planning on doing next. By the way, we’re still waiting on XYZ from you. We can’t do XYZ until we get XYZ and we’re just explaining the whole thing and we’re staying high touch and communication.

0:50:05
Communication with your clients is absolutely critical, critical for many different reasons. Okay, so that’s what automatic check-ins are. And you can, like I said, customize this, ask different questions, ask your team questions. You can make an auto ping to the client every Monday, Tuesday, Friday, whatever you want to do. If you want to check in with the client automatically, there’s a lot of different ways to skin the cat. But this is how we have it set up. It’s just one thing, Friday Footnotes to our team internally and then we write the Monday Mingle manually. All right, that is automatic check-ins doorways. So there’s another cool feature of this dashboard. If I go into the three dots, change tools, you’re going to see I can click this little link right here. This is open a door to an external service like GitHub, Slack Trello, etc. Look at this, my gosh. All those things that you saw in the files as far as integrations can actually be added directly to the dashboard. So things that we use a lot would be Google Docs. Sometimes we have some things in Google Docs, we want to put a direct link to it. Google Drive is another one. Figma, for sure. You can attach the wireframe or the UI design directly to the dashboard if you want to. You can do Dropbox. The client will often give us a public Dropbox link with files instead of adding them to Docs and files in Basecamp. That’s no problem because we can simply add Dropbox. We can paste in the link that the client gave us and we can say add this door and it will add it directly to, I don’t have a Dropbox link right now, but it’ll directly add it to the dashboard. I will show you exactly how this is set up because we’re using this for automatic CSS as an example. So I click on automatic CSS, I have all the normal things, but I come down here and look at this. Classes and variables cheat sheet.

0:51:58
So when I need to add something to the cheat sheet, I don’t have to go digging in Docs and files, I don’t have to go digging in my drive. I open Basecamp, automatic CSS, Classes and variables, I click it and I’m in and I can start doing whatever I need to do inside of this cheat sheet. Same thing for GitHub, I can go direct to our GitHub, I can go direct to our notion roadmap. If I onboard a new person, they don’t have to be like, what’s your GitHub, where’s your GitHub link? I don’t know, it’s right there on the dashboard, very easy for them to access, right? Open up the roadmap and notion. If I want to manage this roadmap on the back end, here’s what the roadmap looks like in notion. This is not the public view of the roadmap, but this is the back end view of the roadmap and I can edit and do my roadmap right there one click from my Basecamp dashboard. How awesome is that? So even if you’re using these third party tools, you don’t have to leave Basecamp for the management. You can hook the tools right into Basecamp so you can get to them very, very easily and every single project can have its own set of doorways and custom tools and things like that. Okay, next one is public links. So sometimes you want things to be publicly available to people outside of Basecamp. You can do this with tasks, lists, you can do this with docs and files. So for example, in automatic CSS, so that’s the wrong thing, automatic CSS, I go to docs and files and I go into let’s say official change log, I can go here and I can say get a public link and right here, now I go into an incognito private window, guess what, everybody can see the change log. They don’t have to be a member of my Basecamp. They don’t have to be added to that specific project. They can see exactly what I want them to see using a public link.

0:53:50
Like I said, you can do that on lots of different areas inside of Basecamp. All right, the next one is going to be project activity. So we’ll do this on automatic CSS, right? I come down here, look at all this project activity. Here’s just today. Here’s all everything that’s happened today and I can just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Here’s what happened yesterday and I can just quickly get up to date on everything that’s happening. It’s showing you discussion, comments, tasks that are being completed, everything in this nice timeline. Look at this right here, framework roadmap shift, I check all these things off on that task right there. I keep going. It’s just on and on and on and on and on. It’s never ending stream of here’s all of the things that have happened with this specific project. And then you can go see that on any single project that you want to access. Very important. Okay, next is review example projects. That means we’re going to click in and see how this kind of stuff is set up on a project by project basis because I want you to see how even though it’s a simple project management tool, it’s still customizable. One one one area already took you into automatic CSS. You can see here that we have development, a development list, a frames list. Oh my god, don’t look at that. Don’t look at that. We have a secret. It’s still secret.

0:55:13
Automaticcss.com. That’s tasks for the website for automatic CSS. There’s community related tasks. There’s marketing related tasks. And then like I showed you, there’s doorways and then there’s docs and files. Okay, let’s take a look at a roof claim, for example. So you could see, see, thread of discussions. Look at this stuff. Look at all of this organized discussions that we have a history on and timestamps and we can always go back and see what we talked about when we talked about it. What was said? RoofClaim.com. All of the website tasks. We’ve got website tasks, the contractor network, Spanish translation, accessibility issues, schema tasks, service area pages. Look at all these service area pages to do. Everything organized. You can see all of your completed to-dos. If they’re like what service area pages do we have? Okay, well look at this. We can see all completed to-dos. Where are we at? There we go. So there’s the whole list of completed service area pages, right? And we can always go in and we can see the dates they were done, who they were assigned to, who completed them. Yada, yada, yada. That’s just the website task. Then you have SEO article writing. Here’s another way that you can use these lists. So we have a process that articles go through. Planning is part of the process, right? We have an auto task that is assigned to me every 15th of the month. It says, hey, you’ve got to come over four new article concepts. So I will go in. I’ll create my in-planned. I’ll create four new tasks and then I’ll check off my task right there. And then I move those into writing. Now notice the client can see what’s planned, but they can’t see what’s being written right now. It’s very specific.

0:56:54
Because I don’t want the client to involved in this process. They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have to write articles. Yada, yada, yada. I only want our team involved in this. And so at this point it gets a content brief. Here’s a sample content brief for how to remove snow from a roof, right? Shows them the target word count, the target number of headings, six headings. Here’s what your headers should be. Here’s what people also ask related to this topic. Here’s all of the the SERP results related to this. Okay. It pulls this right from Google. Then we have our top 20 topics that are kind of like tangentially related topic clusters. How these are put together into clusters in the eyes of Google. Then we have questions that we may want to answer within this article. Statistics, right? With direct links. I do, I hand and I use an app called phrase that helps generate all of this. You’re handing this stuff to a writer on a silver platter. Things that they may want to externally link to. Okay. This is all very detailed. We also have check this out. I’m going to go back into docs and files. I don’t want to show too much of their stuff. I’m going to go into SOPs and then content marketing strategy. I have mapped out the entire strategy. What this campaign involves. The goals. Things to understand. The tone and voice of articles. How to edit the articles. How to format the articles. Insider knowledge. Don’t say the following, right? Other notes. I’m going to get out of there. We don’t want to give too much details away. But you can see that between the content briefs and our SOPs for how to write articles properly. The writer has everything that they need to write a great article. Then it goes into our editing phase. Okay. So editing also can’t be seen by a client. Then it goes into ready for review, which the client can see. And that’s when I assign the article to the client. The client reviews it. They say, hey, this is good to go. I drag it. And by the way, I’m just dragging these things. That’s all I’m doing is dragging them from list to list as their status changes. Okay.

0:59:05
Very, very simple. After they review it, I move it to preparing to publish. Then it gets assigned to the next person. Right now I go in for this client because it’s our biggest client. Right. And I want to make sure everything’s done perfectly. I’m going in and I am actually doing the formatting of the article. And then I move it to internal back linking. This is after the article is published. All of the internal back linking happens. We go to old articles and create links to the new article. And then finally I check it off. And I it’s done. And then we go back to the top and we make the next one move through all of the stages. So right now you can see that four articles are being written. They’re due in three or four days. This is the person writing them. And she’s just going to tag me in them as soon as they are written. They get written in Google docs. And we do that specifically because Google docs has group editing features. The base camp doesn’t necessarily have. And Google docs is better with formatting. Taking it from Google docs over to WordPress. It’s just easier to share with the client in certain ways. And you can create inline notes on things, which is really what we want. The client can actually highlight things, create a note suggestion, saying this is how you should edit it. And then in Google docs you can actually say accept suggestion and it’ll insert their edit for you. You don’t have to do it all manually. So that’s mainly why we use Google docs for that specific portion. But you can see that we took a task, a set of lists. There’s a list. There’s a list. There’s a list. And we created a process out of it.

1:00:38
So it’s flexible in that regard, right? That we have marketing and advertising tasks. So everything is kind of segmented. Docs and files. There’s their schedule. Here’s email forwards. Here’s automatic check-ins, which I have them turned off on this project because I am staying 100% focused on this project myself. So we don’t really need that as far as this project goes. But I’ll jump out of here. And we’re also going to see, let’s go back to home. Let’s take a look at an event sprout. This is where we have ongoing work for them. But their website is done. We’re just in management and marketing phase here. But we can see, you know, there’s requests from the client. There’s a landing page for verticals that we’re working on. There’s different edits that need to be done. Here’s some dev work that we’re doing. Here’s some template work that we’re doing. Component work that we’re doing. So you can see that, you know, we’re organizing these things differently depending on the needs of the client. Docs and files, if you look at their branding, we can come in here and see all the PNGs. There they all are every different version of the logo that they have. I can quick access to any of those. All right, let’s go back. There’s an automatic check-in right there. So all these people get notified every Friday at 4.30 p.m. saying, hey, what’s going on with the vent sprout? And they update it and then our project manager has the updates that they need to be doing. Okay, so I think that’s a good overview of actual projects. I don’t think we missed anything there. So let’s move on to the next thing. The top bar. So let’s go over the top bar now. So these links up here. Remember when I said it’s important to set dates, start dates, end dates on your projects. That gets programmed automatically into your project lineup. And so here are active projects with start and end dates. And this really helps you see where you’re at across the board, where projects started, where they’re ending, you know, so which projects might need more attention. And just how, what’s the current workload of everybody? How much overlap do we have in all of our active projects right now? So I really like this lineup feature. Very, very important for me. Very, very important for our project manager as well. The next is Pings. Pings are live chats with your team, with clients. This is like, it’s either direct messaging one to one or you can have groups of people that you chat with as well. So we’ve got Andrea, Mateo and Tony and Waji all on this group chat. But then I have an individual chat with Waji. I have an individual chat with Edward. I have an individual chat with Andrea. So anybody you want to chat with, and I can look in here for, you know, talking with Andrea. We were talking about the UI style guide for bricks just back and forth one-on-one live chat. I should also say that Basecamp has a really good mobile app. And so this means that all of this stuff, almost every feature that you’ve seen here, is in my pocket at all times, including live chat with my team. Very, very important to me.

1:03:51
To be able to have that kind of access on the go from a mobile device and not need my laptop, not need an iPad or a tablet, and it works flawlessly. Okay, so that’s Pings. We have the hey. Hey is really cool because it shows you, Pings that you haven’t seen, it shows you tasks that are coming up to do. It’ll show you tasks that are triggered as overdue. It’ll show you mentions, right? So you can very easily stay up on all that’s going on. And says, here’s all the new stuff you haven’t seen yet. And here’s all the previous stuff that you’ve seen. And you can go to an area of seeing all your previous notifications. But I always, when I log in, you don’t have to go project to project to figure out what’s going on. You don’t have to go ping to ping to figure out what’s going on. You literally click on hey, and it’ll tell you everything that’s happening that you haven’t seen yet. And so it’s very easy to go in and just stay up to date on all the new stuff. And you can clear stuff out. Another important thing that you can do is if something is very important, but you can’t get to it right now and you don’t want to forget it, you can click this little don’t forget. And it will pin it to this don’t forget area. So it creates a brand new area in hey, where it’ll just stay there. It’ll never go away. Even if I look at it, right? So I’m going to open it. I’m going to see what Chris is saying that I’m going to go back and I’m going to go into hey, and it’s still there. Whereas if I open this one and looked at it and see what she’s saying. So she just pinged me and said, hey, this article is done. And there’s the Google Doc link right there.

1:05:26
But look, if I go back into hey, that is gone now because I’ve seen it. But if I pin it to don’t forget, it’ll always be there until I remove it from don’t forget. That is another really, really powerful feature just to make sure that things are not slipping through the cracks. Okay, the next is the activity feed. This is like the one I showed you on projects, except this is base camp wide. So if you want to just get up to speed on all activity, you can literally just scroll down this and see everything that’s been happening with every single project across the board. You can also though isolate, check this out. So I’m doing all latest activity. I can also see someone’s assignments. If I’m like, hey, what’s Andrea been assigned lately? Because I don’t assign a lot of the tasks. My project manager assigns a lot of the tasks. If I want to assign something to Andrea, but I want to check on his workload first, I come in, I type in Andrea, and I can see everything that is assigned to Andrea. I can see all assignments or I can see just the assignments that have due dates. I can even see things that are overdue. I can see things that are coming up, right? And so before I assign something to Andrea, I can get a good sense of what his current workload is like. I can do that with any person on the team. I can do that with clients. If clients have been assigned to things, I can go look at their track record. I can see all tasks that are overdue. That’s very important for staying up to date on stuff. Someone’s activity. If I want to look at, hey, what’s Andrea been up to as far as general activity goes? I can see everything in a timeline format that Andrea has done. So what did you do today? What did you do yesterday? Very, very critical. To do is added and completed. I can see 13 to do is were added. This is for Thursday, July 7th. One to do is checked off. I can go see what happened on Wednesday. Here’s the to do is that were added. Here’s the to do is that were checked off on Wednesday. So day by day by day. And even if I go deep back into here, I can always jump back to today, right? Upcoming dates. I can see this across base camp.

1:07:36
All of our upcoming dates, little visual indicators on the actual days. I can click on that. I can see everything that’s going to happen on July 11th. Very, very powerful view. All of this happens from the activity center. There’s time sheet for ever note or not ever note, ever hour that we don’t really need to get into at the moment. But ever hour does, by the way, you will see, okay, see this little play button right here? This is for time tracking. And you can see the time that’s been tracked on every, that’s my walk reminder. To go on a walk, time to go on a walk, I’ve got to shut it down. Sorry, guys. No, just kidding. We will finish and then I’ll go on a walk after we finish. All right. So I can track time. My team can track time and it tracks it on a task by task basis. So I can see exactly where the time is going, how long certain tasks are taking. And then we can use that time either to build the client or just for internal reporting if we’re not doing billable hours for that specific client. So that is forever hour though. That’s not native to base camp, but ever hour does integrate very tightly and nicely with base camp, which is why I picked it. All right. Next thing is we did the top bar. My stuff. Another very important section. So I can see all my assignments. I can see my bookmarks. I can see my schedule, my drafts, my recent activity, and my boosts. We’re going to go to bookmarks here. So you’re going to see that I bookmarks.

1:09:07
Where’s my stuff bookmarks? Okay. You see that I’ve bookmarked a few things like roof claims campaigns because I want to be able to get to it very quickly. Something I’m going into pretty much weekly. And then you have Kevin’s calendar links and then sales call notes. Anytime I’m about to create notes for a new sales call, I open up base camp. I click my stuff. I click my bookmarks and then I click sales call notes and then I hit new and I start a new doc and I start new sales call notes. I used to not use base camp for this. But then I ask myself, why am I not using base camp for this? So very recently I created this area and that’s why you don’t see a lot of stuff going on. But this is what I’m doing all of the call notes now. And then I can move them from here to a new project. If a new project ends up getting created, which is very, very cool. Okay. Finder. Another really important tool. So search for and then you can search. Do you want to search in everything? Do you want to only search within camp fires? Do you want to only search within check-ins or client emails or comments or documents or events or files or folders or forwarded emails? The search on here is so amazing and so granular that it makes it easy to find anything. You can also say and you look, you can combine these. I want to know if we’re going to say, let’s say we were talking about a Google ad campaign. And we were talking about that. I don’t know where we were talking about. But I know that I was talking with Isaac about it. And I know we were, it’s has to do with 70 surgical. So I can say, where did we talk about the Google ad campaign with Isaac in 70 surgical? Now I just made some shit up. So it’s saying no search results.

1:10:54
But if I had talked with Isaac in 70 surgical about Google ads campaigns, it would have found the exact thing that I was looking for. Very, very powerful search feature. Another really great feature that I use every second of every day inside the base camp almost it feels like is Command J, which is a jump feature. And so I hit Command J and it brings up this little thing. And first of all, it shows me all the things that I’ve recently visited. But it also allows me to jump to a project, a person or a recent recently visited page. So let’s say I want to jump to Andrea. There’s Andrea’s activity right there. Okay. If I type in Andrea, I can also jump to my ping for Andrea. If I want to jump to a project like roof claim, bam, I’m in the project for roof claim. The jump feature is so freaking amazing. I absolutely love it. It just allows you from anywhere in base. Look, I could be deep in roof claims, docs and files, picture assets, Ohio, in this photo. I’m nowhere near any other project in base camp. But if I’m like, I have this window open and I’m like, ah, Keller Williams, I need to do something in there. Command J, Keller Williams, bam, there I am in Keller Williams project. This jump feature is a game changer. It’s something that one of the most loved features, at least for me, of base camp is Command J. What else? We did the finder. Let’s go over admin land. Okay. So I go to the home screen, my dashboard, I’m in admin for base camp. So I’m going to click on admin land. I’m the only person who has access to admin land.

1:12:33
I can add, remove people or change their access. So if you’re looking for a client, if you’re looking for a team member, if you’re looking for a third party partner or whatever, you can click on them. There’s Alicia, right? I can assign her, bulk assign her to projects. She can be on the project as like actively working on the project or she can just follow the project, which means she gets updates about things. So there’s a bunch of different ways she can assign people to projects, but you can bulk do it from this screen right here. All right. What else can we do? We can add or remove administrators. We can rename or delete a company, right? So if I want to come in here and rename 70 surgical to something else, I can do that, but you can do that all from one place. You don’t have to go to their project card and edit it and do it there and do it one by one by one. You can do it bulk. I can change my message categories, which is something that I don’t think I reviewed, but if you go into roof claim, no, we don’t want to set up people of that, by the way, is how you can view all people on a project. You can see this project is that there’s a lot of people involved in some of these projects. You think you can manage all this in email, right? And it ain’t going to happen. So another reason to use Basecamp. So I go to new message. You can pick a category. You can say, hey, this is an announcement message. This is an FYI message. This is a heartbeat message. This is a pitch message. This is a question message.

1:13:55
I don’t typically use these things, but it is another third layer of organization. And then from Adminland, you can obviously edit those categories if you want to. If you don’t like the default categories that they give you, you can merge people together if there happens to be two different people in the system that are actually the same person. And then there’s a bunch of other stuff down here. I don’t think anything super important. Oh, you can bulk manage your public items. You can see everything that is public in Basecamp. And you can go in here and unpublish it, right? So you don’t have to like go folder to folder looking for like, oh, what did I make public? What did I not make public? You can see everything that’s public right there inside of Basecamp. All right. So that is Adminland. Let’s do notification settings. So I can click on my person here. Go to change notification settings. And I can choose. Do I want I say notify me about everything. But you can say only notify me when someone sends me a ping or mentions me. You can also choose to be emailed notifications or have pop up notifications. You can show the number of unread items on your notifications if you want to. I choose to not do that because it kind of stresses me out. And then you can say, I want you to always notify me 24, 7, 3, 65 no matter what. Or I want only get notifications between these hours on these specific days. And then it’ll send a catch-up email of everything that happened all the notifications in one email after hours, right? Like the next day usually. So you can really customize how you get notified about things. And your clients can do that too as well. So if they feel like they’re getting too many notifications, you can coach them on. Hey, here’s how you can go in and actually tone down your notifications. Design settings.

1:15:45
So I believe that happens here as well under appearance. You can choose purple, blue, green, red, gray. I choose black. You can say always light. They do have a dark mode. You can say, I want to always be in dark mode. I choose same as my operating system. So when it becomes nighttime in Georgia, my base camp will go into dark mode. And when it’s morning, it’ll go back in the light mode. Okay? I prefer that. But you can set up your appearance however you would like. That is also an option to you. All right. That’s it for base camp. We’re going to talk about pricing for base camp. And guys, I’m not an affiliate for base camp. They don’t have an affiliate program. I’m literally creating this. I’m not selling you on base camp because I’m about to make an affiliate commission. I’m selling you on base camp because I truly think it is the best tool for what we do. And like I said, most importantly, your clients will actually use it. But if we take a look at the pricing, it is very, very simple pricing. There’s one option. Okay? Oh, this might be new. Base camp personal limited but free. Great for personal project students, freelancers, families, and light use. Oh, I didn’t even know they had this. Three projects, 20 users, one gigabyte of storage space. Hey, that’s a good way for you guys to get started. Their main thing that I have is $99 a month. And it’s just unlimited everything, basically. So you never like, that’s another problem with click up. As your team grows, so does your bill. And so you can click up. Can very quickly get expensive with a large team or lots of clients and things like that. I know that I pay base camp $99 a month and I pay them that every single month. And then they never going to change. And I can add as many projects as I want, as many people as I want. My team can be as big as I want. And I’m never going to pay more than that. And it says right there, grow all you want $99 a month total.

1:17:40
Doesn’t get any better than that or any simpler than that. Okay? So I just really, really think that base camp is the way to go. If you have any questions about base camp, if you feel like I missed anything, if you have any concerns about base camp, drop them in the comments below. I will be there to help answer any questions, common concerns. I can post additional screenshots, little looms or something like that if anybody needs additional stuff. But I think this was fundamentally a great overview. How long are we on our recording? An hour and 18 minutes. So I mean, there’s a lot here. We covered a lot. That’s it. I’m out. Peace.