This time last week we talked about the online scheduling convenience of Tungle.me, which offers subscribers the opportunity to block out available times on their calendars within which prospective colleagues or meetings can choose mutually convenient meeting times. This week, as promised, we turn to a web suite of scheduling materials that expands the elegant calendar of Tungle to include a suite of project-management tools: Deskaway. As the name indicates, the suite offers a number of tools that allow subscribers to carry out a number of organizational duties while away at from their desks.
Any decent task-management system will flex with your charity’s projects. Sometimes a To-Do List with the names of those responsible for the list is all that’s necessary. When a task is done, someone on the team marks it as such – and the entire staff knows it is done.
But larger projects need Milestones, Reminders, Breakout Teams, and space to upload the latest draft of a Keynote presentation that a subcommittee is drawing up. Deskaway provides all that and more, with the tiers of payment based on the number of users accessing the tools, not the tools available. The basic ‘Professional’ level of service, for example, is $25 per month and offers 2 Gigabytes of file storage for 20 users on 25 projects. The next tier up (Plus) allows an unlimited number of staff members to handle 55 projects. Every level of service offer internal email (‘Deskmail’), backup services, and custom branding with your nonprofit’s colors.
A feature of Deskaway that seems uncommon among Project-Management Systems we have used or reviewed is that it includes a Time Tracker and the opportunity to follow how many hours individuals put into a project, and a running total of staff time the entire project required to be completed successfully. The one-stop quality to track one’s time while editing the document a colleague posted while adjusting a milestone while on the road makes the product a tantalizing replacement for Outlook and a stream of email attachments filed by different colleagues in different ways.
One of the testimonials comes from ‘The World Is Fun‘ a volunteer-organizing nonprofit in Seattle, WA. The Executive Director, Amy Faukner, stressed the economic efficiencies that a service like Deskaway offers such organizations:
DeskAway allows us to have a staff of 20+ dedicated organizational volunteers WITHOUT an office – which means we can use our resources that would be paying for an office to do things like feed the homeless or have beard & stache festivals. We previously used other programs but DeskAway is the first one that truly gave us the team collaboration we needed to be successful.
If you still are not sure if it is the right one for your organization, sign up for the 30-day free trial. Whatever project-management system you use, you will certainly enjoy the efficient flexibility of the saved paper, of the unambiguous scheduling, and of no longer having to hear “I didn’t get that email about the meeting…”