37signals Product Blog

How to use Basecamp to plan a wedding

Outstanding Occasions, an event planning company, recently posted about how to use Basecamp for a wedding business.

1. Client Login: You can create a new project for each client and assign them a login so that you can give them tasks, share timelines and important documents they need to complete or allow them to collaborate on the wedding design. This might work really well for your business and your clients. We actually do NOT use Basecamp in this way for our wedding clients. We DO use this model for our mentorship clients. There are several planners that use this model of Basecamp and actually include the login page on their website. Cynthia Martyn Events and Andria Lewis Events are two wedding planners that do this.

2. Internal Company Use: Another way to use Basecamp is internally for your company (which is nice if you have more than a team of 1.) This is how we use Basecamp for our wedding planning side of our company. It acts as our complete virtual office for Outstanding Occasions. We have a Main Office (which includes our document templates for our company and wedding pro packages and pricing), Mentorship file (where we keep all of our internal documents for the mentorship program), Business Book Library (where the Outstanding team members share their business book reviews of the business books that we all have read), Owners File (where we keep internal documents for Jennifer and I only), and then we create a new project for each new client that we get (but again, we use it internally only and do not share it with our clients.) As stated above, we also have a separate project set-up for each mentorship clients. The mentees are the only clients that we share files with.

In the second part (Basecamp for Wedding Business, Part 2), Outstanding Occasions walks through the actual Basecamp process it uses for wedding planning.

Outstanding Occasions is co-owned by Heather Crabtree (left) and Jennifer Thinnes (right).

Launch: The Basecamp Calendar

Since launching Basecamp in February of 2004, Basecamp has had a feature called Milestones. Milestones were used to keep track of major dates in a project (phases, launches, deliverables, etc).

Over the years our customers have been asking for a proper calendar to replace the basic list of milestones. They liked the milestones functionality, but they wanted to be able to add and view their milestones in a traditional calendar layout.

Further, they wanted to add items to the calendar that weren't major project milestones. Things like meetings, appointments, lunches, someone's out on vacation, phone calls, etc.

Today we introduce the new Basecamp calendar

We've been listening. Over the past few months we've been hard at work building out this top customer request. Today we're proud to release the brand new Basecamp calendar. The "Milestones" has been replaced with the "Calendar" tab in your projects and on the Dashboard.

When you add something to the calendar you'll see two options: You can make the item an event or you can make it a milestone. A milestone has a checkbox and is marked late if the date passes without the checkbox being checked off. Same as before. Events don't have checkboxes and aren't marked late.

An event might be "9am Team breakfast" while a milestone might be "Client review and signoff" or "Launch". You can use events or milestones any way you'd like, of course.

You can also set up spanned events. Spanned events let you designate events that last more than one day. You can even use spanned events to label project phases.

The 14-day view on the Dashboard and Overview screens have been updated as well.

And here's a real bonus: You can now add events or milestones to any project on the calendar on the Dashboard. When you add an event or milestone from the global Dashboard calendar, you'll see a pulldown that lets you select the appropriate project. Now you don't have to go into a project to add an item to that project's calendar.

It's live in your account right now!

This feature came directly from customer requests and feedback. Thanks for your patience while we developed the new calendar feature. We hope you love it as much as we do. As always, thanks for using Basecamp!

37,000ft brings every Basecamp milestone, todo, Highrise task, and Backpack reminder to a single page

37,000ft is a third-party tool that shows you every milestone, todo, task and reminder on a single page.

I’ve long wanted to see, on a single page, all the tasks required of me across the multiple Basecamp accounts and projects that I’m a part of. I’m thrilled to announce that now, any user of the 37signals products can do just this. And for good measure, you can see all your Highrise tasks and Backpack reminders on this page as well.

There's a full explanation of why the SignalKit team decided to build the tool at Introducing 37,000ft.

Easily download all your Basecamp files to your Mac desktop with Canister

Canister is a third-party Mac app that allows you to easily download your Basecamp files to your computer. It's priced at $9.99.

Whether you are looking to keep an archived backup or need a way to easily interact with your files, Canister can help. Utilize the power of Mac and Finder to easily interact with all your Basecamp files. With multiple-account support, you will be able to download all of your files, no matter how many accounts you work with.

Animation company explains how Basecamp helps it keep promises

Switch Video is an animation company that makes videos that “explain what you do.” At the company blog, Andrew Angus explains how Basecamp helps Switch keep its promises.

Having all communications about client projects in a central place keeps our team on track and our clients informed. Basecamp goes a long way in helping us meet our three promises:

1) We will set reasonable timelines and meet them.
We won’t promise what we can’t deliver.

Basecamp Task Manager lets us add tasks, assign them to individual team members, and set deadlines. This helps us lay out the project from start to finish to make sure each project plan is realistic and achievable.

2) We will keep you informed.
It is important to know where things stand, so we will keep you up to date.

In Basecamp, we can send general project-related messages to clients or team members anytime, and they’ll all be together in one place. Instead of replying with a new message (as you would in email), you post a comment to the original message, which keeps everything neatly together in one stream. Or we can even send comments right from the task list as we’re working through the project.

3) We will complete all aspects of the job.
You won’t have to ask twice.

With Basecamp, we don’t lose track of any tasks because we can set up project milestones to see at a quick glance which tasks are coming up – in both calendar and list view. Individual team members can even download calendar items into our individual calendars – cool stuff!

With Basecamp on our side, we’ve proven time and again that it IS possible to deliver brilliant creative work and still be on track, on time and efficient.

Google Chrome plugin brings autosave to Basecamp

Autosave for Basecamp is a Google Chrome plugin created by digital-telepathy that saves your progress when writing posts in Basecamp in case something unexpected happens.

How many times have you been writing a comment and clicked on a link in the comment thread to reference something and lost your comment in the process? Loose a message because Chrome crashed for one reason or another? Accidentally hit the refresh button?

The Autosave for Basecamp plugin will automatically save your message in real time as your typing it using Chrome's HTML5 local storage technology. Hit the refresh page, write a message and come back to it later, close the browser - your message will still be there!

Add a Basecamp login box to your own site

A customer asks: "Can I add a Basecamp login box to my own website?" Answer: Yes. Plug this code into your HTML (note the customizing required).

Basecamp app for BlackBerry seeks beta testers

Are you a Basecamp customer who also owns a BlackBerry? Unvired is looking for beta testers for a new app that brings Basecamp to your BlackBerry. If you'd like to help them test it out, send an email to support [at] unvired [dot] com along with the type of BlackBerry device you own.

Update: Unvired says, "We have received lot of requests and are not accepting any more requests for now." You can still email them to receive an announcement when the app launches though.

How Erskine Design uses Basecamp's To-Do lists to create "The Project Backlog"

Let's flashback to an '09 post by Erskine Design's Jamie Pittock: Project management is easy. In it, he offers some good tips for getting the most out of Basecamp To-Do lists.

The obvious answer to avoiding forgetting things is to write them down. Project related things could be tasks, ideas, requirements, feature requests, websites to look at, something a client’s said: anything at all.

For all of the above we create a to-do list in Basecamp called the Project Backlog: this is where we write everything down that needs to be remembered and isn’t actionable by a specific person in the near future (more on what to do in that case soon).

Some Basecamp specific tips for you:

• empty to-do lists are automatically moved to the completed lists sidebar; to force the list to stay put, even when empty, add a to-do labeled “———————————” at the top of the list;
• add a description to the list and explain its purpose at the start of the project to both project and client teams;
• don’t assign items in this list to anyone; they aren’t actionable yet, so you don’t want them to appear in anyone’s global to-dos yet.

The main thing is to get everyone using it and to not be precious about what goes in there.

There's also a good section on using lists for weekly reviews. Read the full piece.

More control over to-do permissions in Basecamp

We recently updated the way that permissions work in Basecamp to give you more control over your to-dos. Now you can you decide which people can and cannot check off to-do items.

How did the permissions work before?

 When you are inside of a project, you can see the permission screen by clicking the "People & Permissions" tab and then clicking "Add people, remove people, change permissions." That screen shows you some permission options inside of a green bar for any person that belongs to a different company than your own.

When the right-most button is selected, it means the person can do everything. If the middle button is selected, the person can add/edit messages and files as well as to-dos, but not milestones. Finally when the first option, "Messages & Files" is selected, it means the person cannot change to-do items or milestones.

But there was a small wrinkle in this system. Even if somebody only had access to change messages and files, they could still check off to-do items.

How it works now

Now, if you restrict somebody's permission to only "Messages & Files", they will no longer be able to check off to-do items. You will have to give people "plus To-dos" access in order to allow them to check off items. By default, anyone you invite has full access (messages and files, to-dos and milestones). It's up to you if you'd like to restrict their permission after they are invited. 

This change could affect people on your account

It's possible on many accounts that people are currently taking advantage of the old system: they were checking off to-do items even though their permission was only set to "Messages & Files." If anyone on your account complains that they can no longer check-off to-dos, you can easily fix the problem by going to the permissions screen and setting their permission to "plus To-dos".

We made this change so you can have more control over which people can check-off to-do items and which people can't. The old behavior wasn't completely logical, so we think this is an improvement and we hope it makes more sense to you too.

Best of luck with your projects,

The Basecamp team