Brightpod is advertised as a collaboration tool for marketing teams and small digital agencies. While it does have break out features dedicated specifically for marketing teams, it has many different features that make it an excellent collaboration tool that can be used by any small business team.
The interface is clean and simple. Once you sign up, you are given a brief tour of the interface. You can create ‘Pods’ for each one of your projects. You can enter as much detail as you like – about clients, team members or the project itself. When you are done creating a Pod, you will be presented with a blank canvas. From here you can create ‘Task Lists’ for your project. Remember, you can’t input any tasks without creating a Task List. Task Lists are the same as Lists (with cards) in Trello. But here, they work much faster. Once a Task List is created, just start entering tasks. Hit enter to save the current task and quickly move on to the next one. Hit Shift+Enter for a new line. When the task is created, you can drag any team member from the right pane into the task to assign it to them. This works much better than fiddling around with drop down menus.
Workflows
Workflows, along with the simple UI, are the break out features of Brightpod in my opinion. If you are a start up and are working on promoting it across the Web, the in-built workflows will be really useful. You can select a workflow depending on your need, be it Email Newsletter, Linkedin or Facebook advertising and a detailed plan is presented to you just like that. But wait, there’s more! These predefined workflows are great, but they are aimed and the masses and so they might differ from your own. This is where ‘Custom Workflows’ come in. You can create a Custom Workflow from an existing Pod. So once you run a marketing campaign for a product launch, turn it into a workflow and the planning time for the next one will be decreased drastically.
The Pods
The Dashboard gives you a bird’s-eye view of all of your Pods with a progress bar so you can see how the project is doing. You can quickly access the Tasks, Messages and the Files for a particular project from here. You can use the Activity tab as a news feed for your team mates. Focus is another tab that can come in really handy when working with multiple project. When you star a task from any of your pods, it shows up here. You can manage team members from the Team tab. Attention tab can be used to curate tasks that need your attention right away. And lastly the Calendar tab will, well, show you your calendar (which can be integrated with iCal).
Brightpod integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box.com and comes with 100 MB storage, 2 projects, 3 users support for the free plan. Plans range from $19/month for 10 Projects and 6 users to $79/month for 100 Projects and 50 users.
Brightpod offers lots of features, ones you should spend some time getting acquainted with. Brightpod is of course neither complete nor perfect. Being a web app, adding updates will be really easy for the developer and I hope to see more features like Chat rooms or direct messages being added in the future. If you run a business or manage a team of people you should definitely look into Brightpod for your next business project or marketing campaign.
