Best Online Tool or Platform for Social Group/Nonprofit Board

July 12, 2016 6:37 AM

I'm looking for an online tool or platform that can help manage the event planning and activity coordination for a nonprofit board with 15 members.

I'm on the volunteer board of a nonprofit and I've been tasked with heading our board's "social committee". I'd like to go in the direction of establishing a solid platform for logistics and planning, rather than just doing all the heavy lifting on "party planning" every time events come up, but I've never done something like this before.

We currently have no shared web space and do all of our event planning and coordination through long, reply-all email chains. Obviously, this is quite disorganized and I'd like to change it, but I don't know where to start. Google sites? Meetup? Nextdoor?

I'm looking for something that can function as:

- Shared calendar
- Way to share local events or articles
- Way to coordinate activities (checklists for who's doing what or who's attending what)
- Some kind of chat or direct message function
- Document storage (minimal storage for rarely changing documents like bylaws, we're not at the stage for working docs or project management yet)

I'm looking for something that can handle around 15 non-technical users. I think everyone has a smart phone, so something app based or that can integrate with other tools would be ideal (sending out emails with updates).

I think everyone already uses a variety of different tools (Facebook, etc.), so I'm looking for something simple that people will use, rather than having another confusing interface they won't. (Like is there a platform I can use that would create a "share" button on people's personal Facebook page?)

I'm looking for free options right now, but would be open to low-cost options.

What's out there? What have other people used? What has/hasn't worked?

posted by fryman to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (5 answers total)

Google Apps for Nonprofits is pretty much the gold standard for nonprofit workgroup sharing these days, and it's free.
posted by eschatfische at 7:29 AM on July 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

Asana would do well there. It's to do list focused, but added a decent chat system a while back.
posted by advicepig at 7:59 AM on July 12, 2016

Take a look at Freedcamp - I've used it for this purpose with a couple of different groups. You can take notes during meetings, record and assign tasks, upload files, etc. It's also been embraced by my non-technical collaborators, which was a huge bonus to get everyone using it.
posted by A hidden well at 9:39 AM on July 12, 2016

Seconding Asana. It's free too! Though you'll probably want to use it with google docs for doc sharing.
posted by Brittanie at 10:26 AM on July 12, 2016

Maybe Mobilized would work?
posted by masquesoporfavor at 6:23 PM on July 12, 2016