Why Basecamp is Better Than Yammer

Inter­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Your Team

How do you com­mu­ni­cate in your com­pa­ny? Do you rely on text mes­sag­ing, email, call­ing one anoth­er, or an inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion (social net­work)? We have many dif­fer­ent ways to com­mu­ni­cate these days with friends, fam­i­ly and cowork­ers thanks to pop­u­lar sites such as Face­book. Those sites make it more fun and very easy, right? Now, with that in mind, I want­ed to do a bit of a tech­ni­cal arti­cle talk­ing about inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions between your team mem­bers. Let’s look into why this type of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is impor­tant, men­tion of some of the prod­ucts on the mar­ket (specif­i­cal­ly: Yam­mer) that do this sort of thing and then round it out with my favorite pro­gram and why I rec­om­mend it for the home improve­ment industry.

Why Inter­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is Important

First, why is this impor­tant? It is real­ly quite sim­ple. A busi­ness needs a way to com­mu­ni­cate with the team in a quick and easy way- these days more than ever. It is becom­ing more and more com­mon to have team play­ers that work in dif­fer­ent loca­tions. Your book­keep­er might work from a remote loca­tion and rarely come to your office. Your field employ­ees are nor­mal­ly on the job site. Your mar­ket­ing guy might be out­sourced like me. So, it is essen­tial that you find a sim­ple way to com­mu­ni­cate with your team. It is then just as impor­tant to be able to recall that infor­ma­tion at a lat­er date. You need to be able to save that in case you need to know what was said when, by whom and what was sup­posed to take place next. Obvi­ous­ly using the right type of inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion is vital to the suc­cess of your com­pa­ny.

What Are Some Pop­u­lar Ways To Com­mu­ni­cate These Days

Now, let’s get into some of the pop­u­lar ways small busi­ness­es are using tech­nol­o­gy to com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er. Below is a very quick list:

• Yam­mer and Sharepoint
• Base­camp 3
• Ever­note
• iMes­sage
• Tex­ting
• What­sApp
• Wun­derlist
• Face­book Groups and Face­book Messenger
• Email
• Google Chat (aka: Hangouts)
• Slack
• Chat­ter (by Salesforce)
• Com­mu­nifire

I just named a small hand­ful of pro­grams. There are hun­dreds more, I am sure. The most pop­u­lar ones I have seen con­trac­tors use as they search for an effi­cient inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem are Yam­mer & Base­camp. Many paint­ing com­pa­nies have used Yam­mer, for exam­ple, to cre­ate a group of teams such as: Crew Lead­ers, Sales, Mar­ket­ing, Finance and so forth. Ongo­ing, they use Yam­mer very much like Face­book, updat­ing, com­ment­ing, and shar­ing. It is an enjoy­able and easy way to keep every­one in the loop on com­pa­ny updates, fol­low ups, etc.

But Why Do I Rec­om­mend Base­camp over Yammer?

This is where I want to move into why I believe Base­camp, not Yam­mer, is the best tool for a home improve­ment busi­ness to adopt when it comes to com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the team. Yam­mer is easy to use. I have used it with sev­er­al com­pa­nies I work with in the paint­ing indus­try. I have tried very hard to like it and adapt it to try to make it my favorite. Yet there seemed to be a miss­ing piece, some­thing very impor­tant. Yam­mer does not have a cru­cial tool that I think all inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion soft­ware needs to have built in: task man­age­ment. Your inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion soft­ware must find a way to keep your team account­able — a way to fol­low up on things! 

Auto­mat­ed Check-ins: This is auto­mat­ed and cus­tomiz­able so it hap­pens with­out you hav­ing to remember

This is where Base­camp shines above Yam­mer and many of the oth­er pro­grams I men­tioned above. Base­camp is a super sim­ple inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions tool with built in, easy to use, task and project man­age­ment tools. It saves the com­pa­ny valu­able time to use one tool to com­mu­ni­cate, man­age, fol­low up and even keep documents/​files in one place. Now, this was just my opin­ion. I had to con­vince some of my cus­tomers that Base­camp was bet­ter than Yam­mer. I, myself came to this con­clu­sion when I had to use Yam­mer to com­mu­ni­cate as a mar­ket­ing man­ag­er and then my own Base­camp account to cre­ate task and fol­low ups. When I need­ed to fol­low up, I had to rely on email or Yam­mer to do so. It took a lot of unneed­ed extra steps. One day, I was able to show one of my favorite clients how I used Base­camp. I did not sell them on it. No I just walked them through the details of Base­camp. They want­ed me to describe how they could use Base­camp for their paint­ing busi­ness. The short sto­ry is that a com­pa­ny that absolute­ly loved Yam­mer and orig­i­nal­ly thought they hat­ed Base­camp switched to Base­camp 3. Their entire com­pa­ny uses it today. And their hard to con­vince VP? Well she sent me an email after the changeover to let me know how much she was ​“lik­ing Base­camp”. [cap­tion id=“attachment_3316” align=“aligncenter” width=“1024”] Exam­ple of basic tools with­in Basecamp[/caption]

My Team and Basecamp

I am not going into all the fea­tures and ben­e­fits of Base­camp; I invite you to take a tour and learn more about what it can do. Do your­self and your com­pa­ny a favor and watch this 2 minute video. I will close with men­tion­ing that I have been using Base­camp for over a decade. I have been with them since they had Base­camp Clas­sic, then Base­camp 2 and then when they released their best prod­uct in the fall of 2016, Base­camp 3. It was in ear­ly 2016 that I moved my team over to Base­camp 3 exclu­sive­ly. What I mean is that my core team is only ​“allowed” to use Base­camp to com­mu­ni­cate. This means no email­ing or text mes­sag­ing out­side of Base­camp. The only oth­er tool we use a lot with­in our team is Google Dri­ve (which docs/​sheets inte­grate with­in Basecamp).  There are still things I want Base­camp to do. I am con­stant­ly email­ing their sup­port to put my two cents into their idea cup of future updates. Yet for what it can do here and now, it is the best way for a paint­ing, remod­el­ing or oth­er home improve­ment busi­ness to com­mu­ni­cate, pro­vide com­pa­ny updates, fol­low up and keep each oth­er account­able. When you can keep your staff account­able in a fun and easy way, your busi­ness will run even bet­ter than ever! Let me know your thoughts or ques­tions in the com­ments below.