Musings of a Marketing Maven

I often work with an extended team of expe­ri­enced design­ers, writ­ers, web pro­duc­ers, devel­op­ers and so on. Col­lab­o­rat­ing with other team mem­bers — or our mutual client — used to be a chal­lenge before we dis­cov­ered Base­camp from 37Signals. Base­camp offers a safe, secure, inex­pen­sive hosted ser­vice to coor­di­nate our activ­i­ties. It’s light­weight, easy to use, and works well for both Win­dows and Mac OS X users across a range of browsers.

How We Use It

We can man­age a joint cal­en­dar with mile­stones and sim­ple assign­ments, keep an active to-do list, post mes­sages, upload/download project files, and share com­ments on work in process. The user inter­face for man­ag­ing con­tent is sim­ple and straight­for­ward, as long as you rename Basecamp’s default cat­e­gories into tags that are rel­e­vant to your client and/or the project.

Recently I’ve used it for sev­eral projects:

• brand strat­egy and brand archi­tec­ture — for a lead­ing online adver­tis­ing tech­nol­ogy provider, as well as a leader in the casual games arena
• a busi­ness plan for a consumer-facing start-up — mul­ti­ple con­trib­u­tors work­ing on dif­fer­ent com­po­nents of the busi­ness plan

It also sup­ports RSS feeds, email noti­fi­ca­tions, and cal­en­dar syn­chro­niza­tion if your cal­en­dar man­ager is com­pat­i­ble with the iCal format.

Great for Small Businesses

This is a won­der­ful tool for small busi­nesses, espe­cially those in the cre­ative arena, oper­at­ing with­out an in-house IT staff. It’s espe­cially help­ful if you run your busi­ness with­out an Exchange server because it pro­vides some of the core func­tion­al­ity of Share­point with much less has­sle for server administration.

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