A principled approach – Part 2
Posted by Justin McDowell on August 19, 2009 under Analysis, Notsocommon Ventures | 
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This is the second post of a two part blog series on some exciting news and future blog topics
Welcome to The Resume Lounge
After much delay, I am proud to announce the second piece of news. True to my word, you are going to get some inside access into The Resume Lounge as we start up and get our sea legs. So let’s start from the beginning:
We are Getting Real at The Resume Lounge, and that is already paying dividends operationally and philosophically.
We started on this journey realizing that even though our core team is located in the metro Atlanta area, our schedules would still lend towards working independently. Members of our core team all have full time jobs so we tend to burn the midnight oil, or rise early in the morning to work a couple of hours on the project. Therefore remote collaboration is essential to our success. Price is also a big deal. We are a non-profit and my default answer when it comes to spending my time or money is NO. I knew from the very beginning that we needed to be as laser focused on our mission and our tools needed little to no maintenance and needed to get out of our way. Lastly, none of us are using the same hardware and software. These requirements naturally lend itself to the notion that we needed a web office. We simply don’t have time to manage all of this ourselves, we have people to help. So without further ado here are some of the tools we are using to get things our work done:
Balsamiq Mockups – We use this extremely useful and flexible tool to mock up designs for our website and collaborate with our designers and developers. It makes my life at The Resume Lounge easier. I sent an email to Valerie Liberty at Balsamiq explaining what we are about. In 10 minutes Valerie sent us a free license. We can’t thank you enough Valerie (our thank you letter is in the mail)!!! Follow her on Twitter, she has interesting things to say.
Backpack – This serves as our company intranet and group scheduling calendar. We store all of our appointments, legal documents, our board of directors meetings minutes, our expense receipts, our staff meetings…. etc all. Anytime we need a quick webpage created or a quick to do list thrown up that isn’t worthy of a formal “project”, we put it in there.
Basecamp – We need a simple and flexible collaboration tool to help us with project management. It keeps us on the same page and soon we will roll this out to our partners and sponsors so we can keep track of what they have going on. It truly lives up to its motto “The Better Way To Get Projects Done.”
Highrise – is a dead simple customer relationship management tool. It helps James and I keep track of who we talked too and what was said. We need to keep track of our open deals (they might be pledged donors that we need to follow up with, a proposal for services that we will need to pay a third party vendor for, or corporate sponsorships) and if they were won or lost.
Gmail – We use gmail for our email platform, and Google Talk for our instant messaging capability. We occasionally use Google Docs.
MailChimp – We use MailChimp to create and track our email marketing efforts. There automagic integration with Highrise and attractive price point (including a discount for non profits:) made this an extremely easy decision. It saves me time and takes one problem completely off the table. The analytics and reporting really helps us slice and dice our target markets.
We are in the process of evaluating web accounting software, because for us Quickbooks isn’t an option. Right now Less Accounting is the front runner.
What other web office tools do you recommend?
– Justin McDowell
