Hi all - I’m reaching out about a situation I’m in and I’m looking for a good communication platform that also manages content well.
A little background info:
I help lead an educational project based in VA. VA is broken into 8 regions, and we have representation on the project from each region. In all, our team is about 14 adults. We also work with youth (ages 13-21) and have about 25-30 youth leaders, also divided somewhat evenly across the regions. There are statewide events where all hands are on deck, and then localized smaller efforts where one region will be working. My role is to oversee the work of the project as a whole, so that means keeping an eye on both state and regional level activities.
Up until now, we’ve been relying on email, dropbox, and google drive, but youth don’t respond to email, not everyone has enough space on their dropbox account, and google isn’t quite meeting our needs for communication and is difficult to “unshare” with those who move on from our project.
We need a system.
We need an internal communication system that can also house resources for both our adults and youth to access. I need to be able to communicate both publicly to the whole group and smaller groups, as well as to individuals privately. My teams need to be able to access meeting notes, documents, and collaborate with each other. I also need the ability to onboard and offboard individuals as they are added or removed from the team.
I’m not necessarily looking for one tool to rule them all if I can find a few things that work really well for our needs. Also, we do not need these to be free, although free solutions are welcome. An emphasis on safety and privacy is also required since I’m working with minors.
I’ve looked into some options like Slack, Basecamp, Discourse, Discord, Mighty Networks, Microsoft Teams (I’m based out of a university that is Microsoft based, so I can get access to that for free), and a few others.
What would you suggest? What other info do you need from me?