Oh, communication in Basecamp overall is excellent; it’s one of the main reasons I use it. Absolutely love the sane approach to notifications, too. However, the chat (Campfire) is not what people love about chat apps. There’s a chat instance per-project, and you have to navigate to the project and then to the chat to see it (as opposed to Slack where it’s there as soon as you open up the app, with all your channels in front of you.) The center of gravity is outside of chat, I guess, so you don’t feel like you have to be in it to do your work.
Chat is also missing a bunch of affordances people find fun (threading, extra integrations, profiles, a good emoji picker.)
Also, because chat isn’t in-your-face enough, you might have issues with the less calm members of your team texting outside of Basecamp because it’s not aggressive enough about notifying after hours for them.
Is this something that can be overcome? Your IT group might allow you to add guest members by giving them uni email addresses. You’ll probably need higher up approval, of course.
Definitely worth asking about. I haven’t had much luck before (they like to only support faculty/staff/students of the university) but I’ll ask again. They’re really pushing that we use their enterprise level solutions right now so maybe if I let them know that I can’t the way it’s currently set up, they’ll be willing to work with me.
Basecamp has a free personal plan now. It’s not as full-featured as paying, but there’s no time limit, so maybe check it out and see if you think the less-flashy chat is a deal-breaker.
Anyone can access and become a user on the educational Basecamp, you can add members who are not part of the institution. The school/university email is just needed to set up the Basecamp account, then you can add anyone.
The education license is a full unrestricted version of Basecamp with a perpetual license as long as your school/university email address is active.
Students can also set up their own Basecamp for their groupwork, and they can add people from outside the university.
To be sure, I just tested it with my personal (@me.com) email and it added me as a user fine.
Basecamp. What I like is that it is one fee for as many users as you need. I am an elementary school principal with a staff of 100. I started using it right as we were shut down for covid. It is easy to use and does lots of the things you say you need. My favorite thing about it as that it is cross platform. Looks almost exactly the same whether you are using the iOS app or logging in through an internet browser. Nonprofits get a discount!
@Jimbo How did your staff handle the transition to Basecamp? Did you offer any training or PD to get them used to it? Any tips for those who are not very tech savvy?
Update - Basecamp for education is only to be used for educators who are teaching classes and is only to be used for classroom work. I reached out to Basecamp to see about my situation, and unfortunately we do not fall under their definition for educators (even though all people who would be using it are educators and students). Unfortunate, as this would have been a huge cost savings, but I guess they have to draw the line somewhere. We’ve run into this with Google Suite as well, where what we are doing falls outside of the traditional classroom and they are unwilling to budge.
Next steps - I reached out to my university today with an in-depth email to see if they had any solutions that they already have licenses for. With the changes to a lot of virtual learning, they are in the middle of updating software, purchasing new licenses, and finding new solutions to help the university professors, so I’m hoping that there may be something I haven’t tried yet. If this falls through, I think I’ll try out the trial of Basecamp, and if it seems like a good fit, will try to rearrange the budget so that we can use the paid version.
It is pretty simple to use. I demoed it at a staff meeting a few weeks before covid hit. Even novice users were able to pick it up easily. I think just about everyone on the staff likes having the one stop shop for communications.
