One of the questions we receive a lot about our business is “How do you manage your clients?” We actually do not use a wedding planning software to manage our clients (although we believe that My Wedding Workbook Pro is probably the best one out there and a lot of wedding planners use it.) We also know that some of our wedding pro friends use ShootQ to manage their clients.
We use 37 signals’ Basecamp. We believe there are two great ways to use Basecamp for your wedding business.
1. Client Login: You can create a new project for each client and assign them a login so that you can give them tasks, share timelines and important documents they need to complete or allow them to collaborate on the wedding design. This might work really well for your business and your clients. We actually do NOT use Basecamp in this way for our wedding clients. We DO use this model for our mentorship clients. There are several planners that use this model of Basecamp and actually include the login page on their website. Cynthia Martyn Events and Andria Lewis Events are two wedding planners that do this.
2. Internal Company Use: Another way to use Basecamp is internally for your company (which is nice if you have more than a team of 1.) This is how we use Basecamp for our wedding planning side of our company. It acts as our complete virtual office for Outstanding Occasions. We have a Main Office (which includes our document templates for our company and wedding pro packages and pricing), Mentorship file (where we keep all of our internal documents for the mentorship program), Business Book Library (where the Outstanding team members share their business book reviews of the business books that we all have read), Owners File (where we keep internal documents for Jennifer and I only), and then we create a new project for each new client that we get (but again, we use it internally only and do not share it with our clients.) As stated above, we also have a separate project set-up for each mentorship clients. The mentees are the only clients that we share files with.
Of course, you can do both and use it internally for your company AND allow clients to use it to login and become updated on the progress of their wedding planning.
Do you use Basecamp? If so, how has it worked best for you? If not, what do you use to manage your clients?
Check back next Wednesday when we delve into the way we use each part of Basecamp (To Dos, Files, Milestones, Messages.)
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Per Heather’s recommendation a couple of years ago I implemented Basecamp into my company structure over the last year. I can honestly say it has enabled me to organize my company and clients over the last 6 months in such a way I never knew possible. Couldn’t manage without it! Thanks Heather!
Thanks for sharing! I am in the process of incorporating BaseCamp into my process now with clients and am looking forward to its benefits.
Yay Rik! So glad it is helpful to you!
It will change your life!!
Just wondering why you choose to not use Basecamp for the client-side of your business? It seems it would cut down on the excess client inquiries and requests for info, details, etc. Thanks for sharing any insight regarding this.
I am in the process of setting up a photography and video business. I am working on standardizing project processes and am also curious as to why you have chosen NOT to use Basecamp to work directly with clients.
We tried using Basecamp with our wedding clients and it just didn’t work well. We would love to be able to use it so all of our conversations with our clients are in Basecamp, but they just didn’t take to it. For most of them, it was another thing to learn or login to. We realized for most of our clients, it was hurting their wedding planning experience because in their eyes they were doing more (even though it was just getting comfortable with Basecamp) and they hired us to do less and not have to think about all of this stuff. So for us, we chose to just use it internally. I don’t think there is a wrong or right way, but there are ways that may work for one company and not another. And sometimes what is great and convenient for the business is not for the client.
We tried using Basecamp with our wedding clients and it just didn’t work well. We would love to be able to use it so all of our conversations with our clients are in Basecamp, but they just didn’t take to it. For most of them, it was another thing to learn or login to. We realized for most of our clients, it was hurting their wedding planning experience because in their eyes they were doing more (even though it was just getting comfortable with Basecamp) and they hired us to do less and not have to think about all of this stuff. So for us, we chose to just use it internally. I don’t think there is a wrong or right way, but there are ways that may work for one company and not another. And sometimes what is great and convenient for the business is not for the client.