hey there it's Jason freed from 37 signals and today I'm going to walk you through a really interesting use case for Basecamp so last week in real life we had a full company-wide Meetup in Amsterdam so we flew everybody into Amsterdam hung out for a week together some business time some social time it was really wonderful and we used Basecamp to manage and organize the event so that's what I want to walk you through today and show you the actual project we used to do this it's also a great use case for um you know thinking or I would say expanding your idea of what a project can be typically we think of projects as you know a website redesign um adding some functionality to software a client project you know that kind of thing an ad campaign but using them to manage an event is also a really wonderful use case so let's take a look at that so here's the project it's called October 22 or 2022 Meetup in Amsterdam so I'm going to click that and a little bit of brief introduction for those who are unfamiliar with base camp at the top we've got the name of the project a little bit of subhead here and then here's a list of everybody who's been invited in this case the entire company was invited so there's even more people than are listed here and we've got a series of tools so let me walk you through how we used each one of these tools and how this whole thing happened so first of all stepping back anytime there was anything to say about the Meetup it happened and was said in this project there was no other place there's no email sent out there's no other chat tool we use there's no other functionality anywhere else it's all right here now we did use Google and I'll show you how that works in a second but it was hosted here in the Basecamp project so we have a message board we've got to Do's we've got a four reference section which is also known as a docs and files section campfire for chat this is a door to a Google sheet which I'll show you in a second then we had a schedule as well so let's walk through each one of these so I'll start here with to-do's we use the to-do lists not for traditional to Do's necessarily but to sign up for certain things so we had a um little section where you could give a lightning talk on tuesday morning and so um people just signed up to to give talks here right so um you want to add a talk you just put the name of the talk who's going to be giving the talks in this case it was Chad and Kimberly and uh it was just kind of a list that was created and then um they were scheduled separately but this is where you could sort of sign up to put your name on the list right down below here um we're doing these fancy t-shirts I don't know if you can see this here in the camera but this is a Amsterdam 37 signal shirt hopefully that shows up um and uh you know you had to specify your size we could print the right number of shirts so people could just sign up here on the to-do list and we use what's called to do groups this is a to-do group in Basecamp you can add these groups to a specific list to segment the list itself so we made a group for extra small for small for medium and so on you put your name in there and then we would know how many we needed to order for each size I think that was the only oh and then we had a volunteer section for Eos EOS stands for everyone on support So during the Meetup we still provide customer service as normal but since we're a little bit distracted we ask other people to sign up to help out who's interested in helping the support team uh this week so people could put their name here some AV stuff to bring that sort of thing so that's how we use to-do list a couple lists really simple sign up simple list groups the whole thing is great right in here um we had a a section this is called docs and files but we renamed it to for reference you can rename any of these sections just to kind of fit with the way you're you're speaking about things internally and um we made a document here called agenda so this is our agenda literally um people would show up Sunday there was an opening dinner Monday here's kind of roughly the the schedule of things that were going to happen these links were linked up to to another thing I'll show you in a minute Etc and we had a little bit of a sort of floor plan for the hotel and this is sort of the the definitive and there are some discussion and comments down below as well so this this is sort of the definitive agenda for for the Meetup everyone who had a question about what was going to happen when could just come here and check it out and if you had any questions you just post a comment down below and this is one of the wonderful things about base camp is that everything is in context so if we're talking about the agenda we talk about it right below the agenda and then everyone's privy to the whole conversation about the agenda in one place versus spreading the agenda stuff out all over the place so it's all right here so we used a document a base camp document to do that and we colored it green so it's just easy and you also put it we put it first so to color things you just click that little thing and change the color if you want um we have a folder for photos that people are sharing I'll just quickly scroll through a few of these but these are all photos that people shared uh collectively so we're going to throw them all in here and we'll probably do something else with them later but there's one place to drop all the photos we have recordings so there was a handful of different presentations that were given and these were all recorded for some people who couldn't make the Meetup and also just for future reference so those are all stored in here this is our all hands on Monday we had some presentations on Tuesday I'm starting Wednesday and then we had what we call the appreciation session on Thursday where people can come up and talk about someone they work with so that's what this is so that's all right here um people needed tickets for a bunch of the activities that were planned for the week so if you're going go-karting on Thursday like here's the go-karting receipt that you need right um there's some museums uh some some other tours and if you needed that stuff to present to the the event itself uh here it all is so it's a really nice centralized place to get that stuff if you need it um and then we also had a sort of another document of agenda stuff around group activities so there's you know Van Gogh Museum tour Rex Museum tour Bike Tour you know who's going to go on it where's the address for the place to go some notes that sort of thing that was all here in this document and then I believe down below there are some additional um comments if you had any of those so that all lived in the four reference section which is again docs and files by the way to rename that you go up to change tools and you can hit rename here and call it whatever you want all right um we had campfire for just chat and just you know random stuff we wanted to say during the uh during the Meetup really in real time that all happened here um we had um uh the sign up sheet so there were these group dinners that you could uh you know join if you wanted to and so we we set this up in Google Sheets so we added a door I'll show you what this looks like you go up to change tools and you click this and then you can pick um a another product or or a resource or something that's outside of Basecamp to add to your Basecamp project in this case we added a Google sheet so that sheet then shows up on the project as a tool and if you click on this sheet here it's going to open up the Google sheet and these are the sign ups for the different restaurants and who's going to be attending and what time it's going to be at and the reservation information and all that stuff so that was all here in Google and we just linked that up from within the project so again the project is the is the canonical official place for all these things even though we can link off to other things that are stored elsewhere we had a schedule um the week has passed so there's nothing on it but if I go back here we also put some of the stuff on the schedule that wasn't on the agenda for example a spin class some people were organizing that a support dinner sometime in the gym that kind of stuff was also just added to the schedule so people sort of could have an ad hoc place to put things that were dated and timed so that was all here as well and then um last I'll show you the message board so this is sort of a place where we posted things that people needed to know so so whenever you post something to The Message Board a notification is sent out to everybody or you can specify exactly who um and so for example um uh there's just an FYI on the team rooms we'd rented this hotel and there was some space some specific rooms for us and this is again the map and which rooms we had to ourselves that sort of thing um Andrew had posted a reminder ahead of time for everybody on September 19th notified 70 people that's all up here in this in this line this metal line here and um had some further updates you know by the way if you need a power adapter don't forget that here's some links to some other things Etc there's some big delays at the airport so be prepared um and then there was an update to to covert regulation so before or when Andrew initially posted this you had to show um I think vaccination and a booster within the last 300 some odd days or something like that and then there was an update that the Dutch government removed that requirement so she posted an update there for everybody um Marissa wasn't going to be able to attend so she wanted to know if there was going to be a zoom available yes and uh and that was linked up elsewhere so um again comments on this document happen right below the document and there were some other things there was a train strike for a while although that was eventually canceled and so anytime everybody needed to know something you just posted the message board notification goes out and everyone has uh has access to that and so that's essentially it so we had a message board for Big Time announcements everyone needed to know we used to-do list to sign up for certain things um reference materials the agenda photos the people are dumping photos into now now that they're pulling them off their camera uh links to recordings activity tickets everything people needed was right in here a place for real-time discussions a place to sign up for restaurants uh group dinners and then a schedule for ad hoc events that happened throughout the uh the week and then of course down below you can just scroll back in time and in this case there's gonna be a lot of photos being shared right now but on the day of the event um there was a lot more you know information that you might have needed links that were being shared that was all posted down here below so there you have it this is a really wonderful way to organize an event keep everything in one place all the tools you need again all in one place rather than having stuff scattered all over the place this is the official record the official reference in the official place for the October 2022 Meetup in Amsterdam so if you have any questions please post them down below happy to answer them and if there's any other videos you'd like me to do about Basecamp post those in the comments below as well and I'll try to get to those too so hope this was helpful thanks for watching