David McDonald is a graphic designer who runs a freelance creative company designing print and digital publishing solutions. He recently wrote to us: "I just read the article on your blog: Social Signals uses Basecamp and GTD for project management and workflow and thought to send you the welcome message I put into all my new Basecamp projects for the benefit of my new clients."
Here's the message:
I have now set this project up on my Basecamp workspace.I’m posting this message as a brief guide to how all this works, it’s quite simple really and I think you'll like it once you see the project history take shape. Most features of Basecamp are straightforward to understand and, most importantly, they will ensure that all relevant communications on this project are in one easily-accessible place.
As the main project manager I will set up the following elements:
*Milestones* (deadlines)
*To Do’s* (tasks)
*Writeboards* (shared publishing spaces, usually for written content)
*Files* (anything that needs to be kept in it’s original format, eg: PDFs, Word Docs, Excels sheets etc.)As it is early stages for this project this info will be scarce at the moment but will be added as soon as I have the relevant information.
You can see these categories on the tabs at the top of this page.
Probably you will be using the Message area most of all as that is where the dialogue and progress is most obvious. You can start a new message anytime or you can comment on post made by anyone else please use a new message for any new topics or comment if your info is relevant to an existing post/topic.
The same common-sense approach is used on the Writeboards. You can post an item (usually text content for the project) or you can comment on a post.
Using email:
Essentially you don't use email when using Basecamp
The Basecamp system only uses email as notification of activity on the project, you cannot reply to an email generated from Basecamp. This is important because emails created outside the managed environment will be absent from the project flow, if this happens the project soon becomes disorganized and the collaborative features of Basecamp are lost.
You may be a bit uncomfortable with the absence of direct email communication at first but Basecamp offers much more effective project management than ad-hoc emails, as I hope you will see during the lifespan of this project.
Apologies for ranting on here but I hope you find this useful in getting the best out of this system.
You can also check out the help files when you are logged in, the videos are particularly useful.
And now, on with the work...
David is a fan of Highrise too:
I already signed up for the free trial and so far there’s a lot to like about Highrise, in particular the way the data can flow out from site activity via RSS feeds and into your workflow by way of a clever email inbox system.I can see Highrise becoming as essential to my working day as Basecamp has already become. If you’re in the market for a fresh look at how you manage your customer relations (and even if you aren’t) its well worth taking a look.
Do you have a welcome message that you use when inviting others to a 37signals product? Let us know.
