Communication is always key in any organization or relationship no matter the size. Even for our small team of two, we must be organized when communicating when it comes to collaborating on delivering on many different projects. Enter in Slack. I’ve personally been using Slack for years across many different organizations, and have found Slack to truly be one of the first tools that every team should implement.

Why to Use Slack

Slack’s biggest benefit is moving our communication from email. Email is useful in a lot of scenarios; however, Slack’s real-time communication really opens up the team to collaborate in real-time. Within Slack, channels (the different message chats or categories) ensure that conversations stay on topic and are highly organized. In my experience, getting people to stay on topic via email has been a tough task.

Slack’s flexibility allows it to be useful for many organizations. I am personally involved in 11 Slack workspaces that span both personal and business and church groups. Having one app for all of these groups is very handy.

Automation

Not only do we use Slack for real-time communication between the team, we use it for automation of other business processes. Slack easily integrates with a multitude of other software tools to allow notifications from those other tools to be delivered to Slack. Below are a few examples of how we use automation.

• Website uptime – StatusCake, the tool we use to monitor uptime for our clients, sends Slack notifications whenever a client website goes down.
• MailChimp notification – We get notifications from MailChimp whenever there new are new mailing signups and when our newsletters are successfully sent.
• New prospective client signups – From our business website, we receive Slack notifications whenever a new prospective client completes our contact form.

Slack has definitely become of those must-have apps for our team. Just like most of the other tools on our list, Slack utilizes a freemium model. The Urban Geeks is still on the free tier. We will upgrade as our team grows. I have been on other teams that have upgraded and been very happy with the value received from using Slack. Check out the link below to improve your team’s communication via Slack.

Try Out Slack | Tools We Use Series