I remember when we first moved the ChurchMag back-channel onto Slack. I didn’t think it would make much of a difference, but in the end, it has been a huge help for us to bond as a team working at great distances from each other (not to mention preventing a deluge of email). And all this from a simple messaging and coordinating client.
Since we started using Slack, I’ve learned a lot more about it and heard about some really clever creative usages of Slack that could be fun for you to try out.
Personal Slack Notification Center
This is one I’ve started to do recently and will share more specifically in a future post. Slack can integrate with a variety of different services such as MailChimp, Twitter and IFTTT. This allows you to bring in different information from different places. You can add up to five integrations for free, and have five different sources inputting to one place.
This means you can have a single notification place which you can log in and access when you want (meanwhile keeping your phone notifications to a minimum and getting notifications from places that you couldn’t with just a phone.)
You could share these notifications with a team, or alternatively keep them to yourself. By doing so, you could upgrade to premium for an extra $10 a month (that’s per user, so one user = $10) and have unlimited sources plugging in.
Slack Clipboard Manager
Do you ever wish you could quickly send some text or a file from your desktop to your phone? Or the other way round? There are several ways to do this, but if you’ve got Slack on your mobile and desktop devices you can just paste some text or upload a file to the Slackbot channel and then you’ve got it everywhere. Easy. Not to mention a great way to share files with other team members.
Slack RSS Reader
Want a free and simple RSS reader? Add the IFTTT integration to Slack and then pipe-in notifications from your favorite sites into Slack. You’ll get a short preview and then you can choose which articles to read or skip. Plus, Slack shows you which articles are new since you last logged in.
Slack for Home Groups
Are you part of a church home group? Do you wish you could stay connected between meetings better so you can pray for each other, update members on what is coming up this week, or even ask people to prepare certain activities? Well Slack might be perfect for you.
With Slack, you can add all your members into a Slack group and then have channels for:
- Prayer requests
- Meeting plans
- What I’ve learned this week
- And so on…
Now instead of home group being a once a week meet up, you have the option to stay contact the whole week. Maybe it could help to “flip” the small group meeting or get to know one another faster.
Slack for Distant Friends
If you have moved, or a group of close friends have moved recently, then Slack is a great tool to keep in touch. It doesn’t have the pressure of a chat client and the barrage of notifications that can occur, instead, it can be something you occasionally log on to at the end of the day. You can also link Slack to Hangouts from Google and then have a group video chat.
Over to You
How do you use Slack? Have you found a unique use that serves you or others well?
Let us know about it in the comments below.
Riley Adam Voth says
Hmmm, I’d be interested to hear what notifications you use in your Slack channels. So far I haven’t found many use cases for notifications that are actually that helpful. The only one I use regularly is when a new blog post is published on The Majesty’s Men, the guys in our community who are in that channel get notified and can go read it / talk about it, or spin-off posts from it, if they want.
My other use cases are pretty basic: our church leadership teams all have their own channel in a space, my coding school has a channel for my class, etc. I hadn’t thought about doing it for our weekly small group. That’d be kinda cool IF everyone used it. Haha. We’ve always just used GroupMe app cause, well, it’s super simple..
Chris Wilson says
It’s a good point about notifications. I like it for a few pieces of data which are nice to occasionally look at but I don’t want instant notifications (I love that you can see a timeline of them). For a business or ministry, details like email list, twitter notifications (blog post publishing as you mention), for me personally, I’ve used it a bit like an RSS reader which feels less like I have to get to RSS zero, morning weather forecasts for my area, the score of my football team’s games and a few specific twitter accounts that I want to follow every tweet (mostly deal accounts). I think for some people it won’t be that useful, others may prefer phone notifications or just nothing, Just thought I’d show some alternatives.
I think that’s a great point about the GroupMe app because ultimately, if people are using something to communicate, why change? I tried getting some colleagues onto a slack group and in the end I just set up a Facebook group because everyone was already using Facebook and occasionally sending big group messages. Line of least resistance usually wins.
Eric Dye says
Ah, Slack. We lubs it.
Dave Ploch says
Using it for our church app/web dev. Have all activity on our got hub is automatically sent to SLACK. When I do a build on either Android or Apple I gen a notification
Dave Ploch says
Forgot, also have integration with Trello for tracking project bugs, ideas and design
John Meese says
Love the RSS feed idea! I have Slack integrations set up with Stripe and Gumroad through Zapier, so every time we make a sale there’s a “Cha-ching! You just sold ____ for $__ to _____”. It’s a lot of fun, really motivating for the team, and we get to know our customer names a bit too.
Sean Leacy says
ChurchMag Minecraft 🙂 It’s been fun to collaborate on build ideas, pranks and general geekery though Slack.