eduFire.com has a simple (but not easy) mission: Revolution education. The site says, "Our goal is to create a platform to allow live learning to take place over the Internet anytime from anywhere." Below, Jon Bischke, CEO/Founder of eduFire, tells us how the company uses Basecamp, Campfire, and Highrise to manage a number of aspects of our business.
A virtual company
eduFire is a fully virtual company at this stage with employers and contractors spread across a number of states. We're an early-stage start-up and so two things are important to us: the ability to move quickly and keeping costs low.
We use Basecamp, Campfire and Highrise to manage a number of aspects of our business. While our Campfire usage is pretty standard, we've used Basecamp and Highrise in ways that I think would qualify as pretty unique.
Using Basecamp for new hires
At eduFire we have a team of part-time, work-from-home contractors who help us with everything from guerrilla marketing to welcoming new users to the site. We don't have a very extensive hiring process. Rather we bring them on, set them up with a Basecamp account and assign them an "Intro Level" project. If they do a good job we now give them access to a "Level One" project (something a little more advanced and more mission-critical). If they prove themselves there then we graduate them to a "Level Two" project . It's incredibly important to us to have a piece of software that we can get new users up to speed very quickly with minimal training. I can't think of any other piece of software that would work for this other than Basecamp.
Using Highrise to recruit hundreds of tutors
As for Highrise, it was the perfect case of the right software at the right time. When we were recruiting many of our tutors prior to launch we needed a piece of CRM software that would allow our team members to add contact information, make notes and share contacts remotely. At the same time, like Basecamp, we needed it to require as little training as possible (many of the people inputting data on the tutors were part-time workers or interns). Before Highrise, there wasn't anything that would have worked (I know...we looked!). Using Highrise we were able to recruit hundreds of tutors and manage their information very efficiently.
No more headaches
Personally, I'm a huge fan of using the 37Signals applications with FluidApp. I'm able to quickly switch between our two Basecamp accounts, Highrise and Campfire using Quicksilver. My productivity has increased dramatically by having all of these applications at my finger tips.
I also use 37signals applications for a number of other tasks including managing all of my contacts in Highrise and it's great to have applications that work both personally and professionally. The cost and headache associated with software has been reduced dramatically and we have both the open source movement and the 37signals to thank for this!
Numbers
We're a new company so we don't have any year-over-year numbers but we can say the following:
* Using Highrise we were able to recruit over 400 tutors for eduFire. Highrise allowed us to keep all their bio information and our contact history with them in one place and share it amongst a half-dozen people that were helping us recruit new tutors.
* For our Community Manager team we manage them in Basecamp. Each member of the team is their own project (so we can communicate to them individually) as we have a project for each different task that team members are performing. We currently have about 10 people on this team and plan to expand it to 20-30 by year's end.
Related: In this piece from Unified Communications News, Bischke said using Basecamp and similar tools has "a number of fringe benefits, such as almost eliminating training time because of simplified interfaces and allowing outside parties to easily join in conversations."
