Creating a Status Updater with Trello
For all your big events, your apps, and anything else!
Ever had something big going on (at work, or in your personal life) and everyone is asking you about it so you have to copy and paste the same text message and email to everyone?
And then because you’re, you know, juggling the big thing, you inevitably forget to update someone and they’re bothered. What do you do?!
Although it might be a little less personable, I thought of a cool way to do it with Trello. (I know, you’re shocked.)
Want to watch this instead of read? Watch the 5 min video version.
So let’s take a hypothetical situation. Yours could be a baby being born, a vacation you’re taking, a product launch at work… anything really! My hypothetical example is not so hypothetical. My lovely girlfriend is taking the Louisiana Bar this week (wish her luck if you’re reading this), and boy have we had a lot of people asking how it’s going (which we’re super grateful for btw).
So, that’s my “big event”. I’ll be using the “Vy’s Week Taking the Bar” to show how you can use Trello as a single status update that keeps everyone informed. It’s a little less advanced compared to some of my other content, but I figured a step back could actually be kinda refreshing and I’m curious to see if people prefer more simple use cases or want to see the advanced and robust ones. (Feel free to comment on this post or reply over email to let me know your thoughts.)
Create your categories board
I created a board with a list for each area that I’d be likely reporting events on, as well as different statuses. Vy’s studying for the bar, and all of this week, she’s been doing one of five things:
Sleeping
Eating
Studying
Recharging/relaxing (but… not really)
Kicking butt at the test
So I made a board with lists for each of those categories.
Depending on your event, yours might look differently! Think about the questions you often get asked. If it’s a product launch at work, you might be asked about things like “How are the ads performing?” and “Have you engaged with Influencers?” and “How many downloads have we had so far?” You can make each of those areas a list.
Each card is an event
Now just create a card every time there’s an event! You can see someone my examples 😊
If you wanted to, you could get really fancy with these cards.
You could use due dates to be able to visualize these updates in a calendar view. You could use labels to indicate the current mood.
You could assign members if they were involved.
You could add the Voting Power-Up as a way to let people react to the cards.
You could use the List Limits Power-Up to have limits for cards in each list so you can tell if you’re overdoing it (or underdoing it) in certain categories.
You could also record short videos and photos and attach them to the cards to help people really feel like they’re experiencing it!
The beauty of these is you type up the card once, and then everyone can see it. No more copying and pasting that text and sending to everyone in different text and email groups!
And you can even update it from your phone. No need to be near your computer to give these updates!
“Current Status” card
I got kinda excited about this one! I created a card named “Current Status” and gave it a green cover.
I can drag that card around to show whatever she’s currently doing right now! A great way to help people feel like they’re really “monitoring the situation”.
Sharing with everyone (or whoever you want)
To make it simple, I just made this board publicly viewable so anyone could see it if I sent them the link. They don’t even have to have a Trello account!
If you wanted to restrict access, you’d need to add those people to your board, and they’d need to have Trello. So if you have something extremely sensitive you don’t want to publicly share updates about, and the people you want to update aren’t currently using Trello, then this might not be the right approach for you.
Anything else this needs?
You tell me what’s next! Could you actually see yourself using Trello like this? Or is it too niche/not a good fit? What’s it missing to make it truly powerful for you? Let me know and I’ll try to build it!
PS - There’s definitely tools that might work better for this, like StatusPage for instance (which is mostly meant for incident alerting for apps, like when Slack was down earlier this week 😂), but also can be used for updating just anyone who subscribes about any event you want! I chose to build in Trello because it was the lightest way, and as a public board, anyone could view and I didn’t need to worry about adding folks.
Prefer to watch?
Here’s my beautiful shining face explaining this post 😊