Collaborating on a project is growing increasingly complex with remote teams and many granular tasks. Brightpod is a new project management tool designed for the marketing professional but useful for anyone in business. If you struggle to keep up with all your content, your campaigns, and other marketing functions, this review of Brightpod is for you.
Since Brightpod is an online, cloud-based, collaboration app, there is nothing to download. You will need to spend a little time setting it up, but it is relatively easy to use. You design pods (projects), assign tasks to your team, keep track of activities, and focus on specific tasks. The service also comes with a calendar, which of course is handy when scheduling tasks. But more so, with scheduling content. (Think editorial calendar.)
If you already have pods set up, you can go straight to the attention tab to see what is on the agenda for the day. To keep track of what is happening with your team, you can click on the activity tab for a real time update. In addition, every morning you will receive an email update of all the activity that happened on the previous day. These features allow you to stay on top of what you and your team are doing.
You can create custom workflows for each pod, but Brightpod recognizes that the process you follow from one project to the next may be the same or similar. They save templates for you of workflows from your other projects. You can upload them to your new projects in a flash.
As you can see above, highlighted in pink, once I created a workflow, I placed a focus star on one item to help me prioritize it. You can drop and drag your tasks, from any of those workflow columns above, to help you keep things organized. You can create your own workflow or choose one of their savvy templates. The calendar feature allows you to coordinate tasks between pods. Once you create a task, you can just drag it to a new day if the deadline changes.
What I Really Like:
- It works with DropBox, Google Drive, and Box.com.
- The free plan now comes with 100Mb of free storage.
- I really like the archive feature. Everyone who has worked with a team has probably at one time had another team member delete something that would have been useful if it were still accessible. Brightpod automatically archives all deleted material for 30 days, allowing you to retrieve necessary items that may have slipped into someone’s trash bin.
- Daily progress report by email.
What I Would Like to See:
- An online chat function that allows you to message people outside of your company, in real time. As it is, you can include people outside of Brightpod, but it works through their email. You invite them to your discussion, and they have to read and reply to an email version of it. It would be nice if you could invite them to your discussions and they could click a link to join you. To be fair, the team has built a robust solution and “online meetings” is often beyond the scope of most project management tools.
Brightpod offers a free 14-day trial to get started and doesn’t require a credit card. After that time, you can switch to a limited free plan with 2 Pods, 3 users, and 100 MB storage. Other plans range from $19 per month to $129 per month with discounts if you pay annually. You are allowed to upgrade or downgrade whenever you want.
The more I used BrightPod, the more I liked it. Take a look and see if it can help you manage your marketing and business projects and goals.
