With daylight savings times upon us, we are susceptible to fall forward into a bigger heap of work. Now is the time to review your schedule, identify your time sucks, and see where and what you can automate.
Below are nine time-saving tools our IC Pro team could not live without.
Time savings from newsletters, creating and posting content
Cerkl Broadcast Suite - cross channel communication
Cerkl Broadcast has saved our team at least 40 hours per month from the horrendous tasks of designing and creating newsletters along with the never-ending posting and reposting nightmare. This tool has modernized our communication to provide a personalized, high-end experience for our subscribers. They have an entire suite built specifically for internal communicators that allow you to create once then distribute to email, intranet, mobile, and more. Everything busy internal communicators need, in a single platform.
Time savings from posting to social media
Buffer
We use Buffer to visually plan and schedule our social media campaigns. Based on the needs we hear from our listeners, we plan our content and social media 1 to 2 months in advance. The platform saves us from manually posting to our social media channels.
Time savings from email collaboration with team members
Slack
Our team uses Slack as our internal messaging app. It provides lots of cool features to chat one-on-one or in groups. Great use for a younger workforce and cuts down on phone calls, meetings, back and forth emails.
This has also helped our team stay connected during the new remote nature of our new virtual offices. In Slack, you can create channels not only for specific work topics but we've created channels for special employee interest groups like, "running club" and "pupdates."
Time savings from creating art and design work
Canva
Canva saves us time and money on creating art and special design features that accompany our social media posts. The templates are endless and come appropriately sized for every social media channel. Canva also has a new social media scheduling feature. Like Buffer, you can schedule posts within Slack - great for internally communicating with your team.
Time savings from transcribing scripts for podcasting
Trint
Trint's AI audio transcription software makes any audio and video searchable, editable and shareable. Trint uses artificial intelligence to automatically transcribe the spoken word in 31 languages, making it easy to find the moments that matter. We use Trint to transcribe our podcast episodes, making it easier for post-production.
Time savings for video production
Animoto
Animoto is our go-to when we need to quickly create and share videos. They have ready-to-go templates, copyright-free music, etc. You upload your photos and video clips and the videos look professionally produced. Here is one we did for our live show, Backstage.
Time savings finding copy-right free music
Purple Plant Music
Many of the songs you hear with the Internal Comms Pro: The Podcast come from Purple Plant Music. They have easy to search genres and the songs are free to download. Be sure to credit Purple Plant Music and the name of the song in your production.
Time savings with project management and work collaboration
Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process. Imagine a whiteboard, filled with lists of sticky notes, with each note as a task for you and your team. We use this to collaborate on our production of the IC Pro podcast and our events.
The lesson is to pick the tool that fits within your budget, has amazing customer service, is quick to learn, and quickly gets results. All of these tools have done that for our team.
We're curious, what are your must-have time savings tools? We'd love to hear what you've automated to save time and stay above the work.