Since March, we’ve been spending a lot more time at home on our laptops and developing new ways of working. Since this has been a familiar experience for many of you, we decided to compile a small list of our favourite digital tools that have kept us going.

Trello

It’s no secret we’re big fans of Trello as a project management tool. The idea is you use tickets or “cards” with tasks on them and move them along “lists” or columns on the board depending on the progress as you complete different stages. This is great for individual work tasks when managing a team, or working with clients to achieve one project in particular. The free features include assigning tasks, uploading documents and checklists. For the paid version, you can get “Power Ups” to get even more functionality, for example, to turn the board into a calendar.

Canva

An old favourite of the team, the graphic design tool for non-graphic designers. But did you know that you can share templates between team members if you’ve all working on similar design tasks? You can also create teams to develop a central media hub – This is great if you work in a social media team all in different locations.

Dropbox

If you’ve got a large number of high-resolution images to share with other individuals or companies, Dropbox is a great way for different parties to access these files. This is also handy for video and other media files and removes the frustrations of emails going into junk because your email client doesn’t like the attachment. The filing system keeps everything organised, as opposed to hunting in your email inbox.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets allows you to work on documents in real time. If you’re updating a spreadsheet with another team member or managing a project tracker with a client, then you can make changes that are immediately visible. Again, this takes away the stresses of sending everything by email, when you’ve never quite sure what the latest version of the document ought to be.

Zoom

How would we have survived all this time without Zoom? In fact, we’d go as far as to say this could replace a lot of our face-to-face meetings. We’re very much in favour of meeting up in person from time to time, you do lose a lot of work time travelling to venues for a chat that lasts an hour. This has been a great way of keeping projects on the move while staying safe. It’s provided a bonus in terms of training – You can share your screen and record training sessions. We’ve also created lots of interviews for social media just by using the record feature.

Otter

This one has come in late in the day but has been a brilliant tool. Otter lets you record voice notes for meetings so you can pay attention instead of trying to get everything down in your notepad. This has also saved time when transcribing interviews. You get 600 minutes of free recording time and up to 40 minutes transcription per conversation. It’s not word-perfect transcription, but the time it takes to tidy up a few words here and there is nothing compared to transcribing everything manually.

GoFullPage – Full Page Screen Capture

This isn’t really a collaboration tool, but it’s very helpful for your website before/afters, your portfolio or if you need a screen graphic for moving images. Screen capture saves you the effort of taking individual screen grabs and putting them together in Photoshop. We just loved it and had to share.

Getfvid

A very handy tool if you want to download one of your own videos off Facebook, for example if you did a Facebook Live and you want to post it to your LinkedIn or YouTube. When using this tool, make sure you have the user’s permission to copy the video, as you don’t own the copyright. It’s just good manners to ask first.

EXTRA TOOL RECOMMENDATION: Streamyard

While we haven’t used this for our own social media, we think it’s a fantastic discovery for some of our clients.

For all those active social media personalities among you, whether you’re a coach, nutritionist, personal trainer, consultant, online educator or lawyer… If you’ve got something you want to say on all your channels at once, then Streamyard is a software you can use to help you reach all fans at once. It’s also got other cool features such as overlays that can display comments from viewers and you can stream with other participants at the same time.

What are your favourite digital discoveries during lockdown?