I’m meeting tomorrow to begin to implement Asana for use by the Board of Directors and its subcommittees for a large, local-community primary healthcare non-profit serving low-income individuals and families. The use case is all communication and activities among/by the Board and its subcommittees
I searched all the posts here but came up empty looking for any others who might have done this already.
Do you have any tips/best practices specifically for this use case? Or might you recall any already posted here that I’m missing? This seems like an ideal use case for Asana and I have plenty of ideas how to proceed, but would appreciate hearing from anyone who’s done/is doing this or something similar.
My work on this project is 100% pro bono–as an Asana consultant, I otherwise wouldn’t be asking this question here! (Part of my practice is to regularly do pro bono or reduced-rate Asana consulting for those who need it.)
Unfortunately, I don’t have any experience on this topic. But Thank you for providing pro bono work to a very worthy cause. The more efficient this organization is, the more lives they can touch.
Hello. I should preface my comment by noting I am by no means an expert, or even close, with Asana.
With that noted, our Board has been using Asana. And the business person inside of me loves the ability to organize, categorize, manage tasks and committees. However, what we have recently learned, and something you should definitely look into, is that using Asana or any other similar program to do the work you are suggesting can be breaching multiple Open Meeting laws.
If this however is not an issue with your Board I’ll explain how we used Asana before we stopped.
We created projects for each committee as well as a main “Board” project. The board project is actually still used, we use it for our Board packet for our meetings.
We found the tile view worked best and allowed for different columns for different topics like “assigned”, “In progress”, etc. Tasks in the tile view can be moved around, assigned to multiple projects and tagged. So for example if some task from committee x needs to be put on a board meeting you can just add the Board project.
The things we have learned we didn’t like as much: the free version doesn’t have many of the bells and whistles such as the tasks flows and you can only assign one person to a task.
Again, I’m certainly not an expert - I hope there was some value though.
I was not aware of the Open Meeting laws, so I really appreciate your replying. I’m hoping the chairperson is already aware, but will of course raise it. Based on some searching for a few minutes, it seems different for each state, and only applies to certain non-profits. In California, I think you’re referring to the Brown Act, right?
Thanks for writing up how you use/used Asana for this purpose (which sounded pretty expert to me!). I was thinking the same thing for teams, and perhaps some more options because we’ll include the CEO/key staff in a few teams. And similar ideas for projects, though I’m only a fan of Boards (tile view) for basic projects due to some limitations. The chair is expecting to donate a Premium subscription for this purpose, so that will be nice.