Basecamp 3 for Communicating with Your Team

Those of you who cur­rent­ly work with me or have in the past know I use Base­camp for project man­age­ment. I was intro­duced to Base­camp around 10 years ago by my web devel­op­er, David Guy. In all the years since I start­ed using Base­camp and all the oth­er pro­grams I have tried, I am still using Base­camp to com­mu­ni­cate with my team and clients. It is one of the rea­sons my staff rarely drops the ball on a task. Last fall, Base­camp intro­duced a com­plete­ly revamped plat­form that they named Base­camp 3 (aka BC3). The two pre­vi­ous plat­forms are still avail­able and are called Base­camp Clas­sic and Base­camp 2.

Inter­nal Communications

My team has been using the Base­camp 2 since this came out a num­ber of years ago. I have been beta test­ing BC3 since pret­ty much day 1 of its release and have real­ly come to enjoy the new fea­tures. I orig­i­nal­ly switched my team cold turkey to BC3 in Octo­ber of last year and then switched back to BC2. At that point, it was not quite ready for my endorse­ment. As I write this post in March 2016, I believe it is now time to give Base­camp 3 two thumbs up for a very good way to com­mu­ni­cate inter­nal­ly with your company. 

In recent years, paint­ing and remod­el­ing com­pa­nies have been ask­ing me about a good cloud pro­gram that will help with bet­ter inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions. I actu­al­ly thought Base­camp 2 did a decent job of this, yet they were look­ing for some­thing that was a bit clos­er to an inter­nal social net­work pro­gram! A num­ber of com­pa­nies switched to using apps like Smartsheet and Yam­mer with a few set­tling on Base­camp 2.

Why Base­camp 3 is Bet­ter Than Yam­mer for Contractors

Yam­mer (owned by Microsoft) is a pret­ty slick inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­gram. How­ev­er, as a mar­ket­ing guy, I can­not use Yam­mer eas­i­ly to com­mu­ni­cate with my cus­tomers. If my cus­tomers use Yam­mer, they have to cre­ate a sep­a­rate email for me. I have to man­u­al­ly login to each and every Yam­mer account to view what is going on with each com­pa­ny. It is incred­i­bly com­pli­cat­ed for me to ful­ly see the ben­e­fit of Yam­mer, which is why I have still rec­om­mend­ed Base­camp plat­forms. Also, Yam­mer is not a project man­age­ment plat­form. It is only a way to com­mu­ni­cate with your team, very sim­i­lar to how you would use Face­book: like, post and comments.

Base­camp 3 pro­vides inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and easy to use project man­age­ment fea­tures togeth­er in one pro­gram. I also do not have to login in and out to view oth­er projects or client base­camps. I can switch with­in the app.

Base­camp 3 also has a sep­a­rate ​“client side” sec­tion. This keeps BC3 com­mu­ni­ca­tion ​“inter­nal” with your team. Then when you want to com­mu­ni­cate to a cus­tomer, you can click a but­ton and get them involved in a dis­cus­sion: (i.e. talk about a project, col­ors, con­tracts, etc). Yet your cus­tomers will NOT see any­thing on your ​“team side” of Base­camp. So your con­ver­sa­tions are kept inter­nal and private.

Final­ly, BC3 allows for a quick and easy way to have pri­vate instant mes­sag­ing with one or more peo­ple on your team. Base­camp calls this fea­ture ​“Pings.” If you wish to bring in the whole com­pa­ny to chat, you would use the fea­ture ​“Camp­fire.” This is a quick and easy way to get in touch with your entire team for things such as Com­pa­ny Announcements.

Easy Way To Get Pho­tos & Videos from Your Crews In the Field

A real chal­lenge for my clients is get­ting pho­tos from the field guys tak­en and uploaded to the right place. There are many ways to make this hap­pen such as text mes­sag­ing, using iCloud pho­to shar­ing, Google Dri­ve, Drop­box etc. How­ev­er, I have come to find out that Base­camp 3 is prob­a­bly the eas­i­est solu­tion for con­trac­tors. Painters, for exam­ple, can now shoot their pic­tures of their projects and upload all of them at once into their spe­cif­ic fold­er that the admin cre­at­ed for them. They can now do all of this from a smart­phone as well. This was not pos­si­ble in Base­camp 2.

In short, Base­camp 3 can real­ly help all mem­bers of your com­pa­ny to do a bet­ter job com­mu­ni­cat­ing and get­ting the task com­plet­ed with­out drop­ping the ball.

Learn More About Base­camp 3

So if you are still look­ing for an easy way to com­mu­ni­cate with your team from a desk­top, tablet or smart­phone, I would seri­ous­ly look at BC3. I did not write this blog to give you a full review of all the fea­tures. To do this, I would watch this short video or this post explain­ing how it works. It does a bet­ter job than a lengthy post.

[embed]https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch?…[/​embed]

If you have ques­tions about how your team can use Base­camp 3, send me an email. I would be glad to help your orga­ni­za­tion set­up and use this pow­er­ful project man­age­ment & com­mu­ni­ca­tion program.

Note: BTW, One thing that yam­mer had that Base­camp 3 final­ly imple­ment­ed is a ​“like” but­ton. They just call it ​“applaud” to be different.