Non-profit migrates event planning to the 21st century

I’m a board member of a local non-profit called Health Connect of South Dakota. We have about nine board members and in general are very low-tech, as compared to my work at BrightPlanet. Recently we started working on event planning for our annual fundraising event called Health & Safety Festival, which started out as a two column bullet list in a Word document, emailed around to all members. Immediately, I decided we needed a shared project management tool.

Over the years, I’ve used a lot of different project management tools but I knew we needed something that was free, super-easy to use, non-technical and required virtually no configuration – after all we are a low-tech non-profit. Trello immediately came to mind.

Within about two minutes, I had our Health & Safety Festival board set up, invites sent out, and lists created. Next, I took our Word document of 75 tasks and literally copy/pasted the bullet list into a Trello list – done. Adjusted a few assignments, split up a few tasks and five minutes later we were in the 21st century.

Trello brings a simple model of lists and cards to project management. With a quick drag-and-drop, cards can be moved from lists to list, building a simple workflow. Each card has a title, description, labels, checklists, due date, and the ability to attach files or images. Card summaries have icons to summarize the properties for a review.

The pricing model for Trello allows for any number of boards, cards and members for free but charges $45/year for users who want to customize their view with fancy backgrounds, stickers and custom emojis. This makes it ideal for non-profits, personal use or small side-projects.

Trello worked perfectly for our low-tech committee members. We are already seeing the benefit by being able to quickly review unassigned tasks. Plus, NO MORE lost or out of date Word documents!

I’m confident you could find a few uses for Trello.