Manny Hernandez is the President of the Diabetes Hands Foundation, a nonprofit that runs two social networks for people touched by diabetes, TuDiabetes.com (in English) and EsTuDiabetes.com (in Spanish), with well over 5,000 members from all over the world. He wrote to tell us about how his team uses Basecamp.
We work to raise diabetes awareness through a number of projects, such as Word In Your Hand, Drawing Diabetes and Diabetes Supplies Art.
Our main operation is in California, where our full time employees (2) work. However, the directors of our board are spread between California, Arizona (1), Florida (1) and Venezuela (1). We also have a board of advisors, most of whom are located elsewhere in California (5) as well in the Boston area (2). We also have volunteers and partners working from Texas (2), the East Coast (2), California (1), Mexico (1), Venezuela (1), Argentina (1) and Saudi Arabia (1). In total, we have up to 16 people using Basecamp at any given point.
(Pictured at left: Manny Hernandez, President of the Diabetes Hands Foundation, along with Andreina Davila, Creative Director.)
I first heard about Basecamp in late 2006, while I worked in Full Sail University. After I started using it, I couldn’t think of any other way to manage project/product communications.
Since I knew about the product prior to the start of our operation as a nonprofit foundation, I made sure that it became the way to manage projects and remote communications from the beginning. This made it easier for all those involved to stay on top of the critical information. I wanted to avoid at all costs having people in the team being left out, which I had seen happen so many times when email was the way to “manage” communications.
We recently upgraded to the Plus Plan, since we ran out of projects to manage through the Basic Plan. Our projects fall into four categories (the “companies” that we have set up): Diabetes Hands Foundation, which contains the projects that only involve the board of directors; Advisory Board, which are meant for our advisors; Freelancers and Volunteers, where we list the projects that involve the participation of volunteers or contractors; and Partners, where we manage the projects that we work on with partner organizations. This way we can easily separate communications that are only meant for one specific group.
The areas we use the most in Basecamp are messages, to-dos and files. Messages we use as I mentioned before. To-dos are one of the greatest things Basecamp offers and, since they started supporting comments, they became even nicer as you can now follow up with people who are tasked with a to-do, without emailing them outside the platform!
The Files section comes in very handy as a lot of times we need the input of our board about certain documents (typically Word docs) and through the use of Files, they can upload their changes while keep a clean track of who did what, when. Another use we have for Files is to share Meeting Minutes with the board members.
We have on occasion used the Writeboards for managing document changes, but the Files feature is best suited to our interactions with other companies and groups that send us Word files to review and work on. Writeboards we mostly use for documenting policies and procedures, i.e. documents that live inside the organization.
Basecamp helps increase our productivity and dramatically improves our internal communications. And it does this at an affordable price that lets us continue to use it in spite of our budget limitations as a nonprofit.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.
