Not a sponsor😂, but Slack is a professional chat program similar to Discord that allows collaborators to chat in separate channels. Instead of chatting about a side project with everyone, just chat with your group members! There's a channel for all the resources you need.
This article is about how to use the Care For Them Slack so you can get a jump start and feel comfortable with all the tools! We'll start off by covering some of the channels and then general slack functions.
Channels
First off, up above, our #announcements channel is for all the great messages that are both important and for everyone. Normally, our board meetings (meetings for the board and coordination team) are planned and announced in this channel. Also, any opportunities/events that we are hosting are also planned and announced here. We like to keep this channel super clean and easy to filter: anything and everything here needs to be read or you will miss something important!
**** Slack Tip #1
Introducing Slackbot! Slackbot is your own personal assistant on Slack, it'll send you messages that only you can see. If it's annoying, and it sometimes will be😂, just close it. In the future, we can also program Slackbot to respond to certain triggers. In the picture above, Slackbot responded with a preprogrammed trigger, think about the potential of this!
The next important channel is your team channel. Either #board or #coord. As you can see, these channels have a lock on them which means it's private. This means, if you type in the #coord channel, only the people in the #coord channel will get a notification and see your message. We do this so that you aren't annoyed by messages that you don't need to worry about.
And cleaning up the rest of the important channels are #general and #random. They are exactly what they sound like. #general is for all the chats that go to everyone, but aren't as important. And #random, well I don't even know, anything and everything can go in here😂. I've actually been using #random to test out some slack bot games👀 Check this out!
There is so much potential in Slack, please play around in the channels, ask questions when your not sure, and just have fun with the process. Next we'll move onto general slack functions and things to note!
**** Slack Tip #2
Want to notify someone? Just type @ in front. For example, @Jeremy will notify me. If you want to tell a joke or have some fun in chat, type @Josh, or if you want to give some college advice type in @Milla and @Jonathan😂. That's intuitive.
What if you want to notify a group of people? Well you can still use the @ feature. But now, use @channel for notifying everyone in the channel. Also, just typing in @ will bring up a list of suggested options so don't worry if you forget these specific commands!
Slack features!
These are just a few of the helpful functions you can do with Slack.
Reply in thread!
Here's an example of a funny thread. BTW, these are the best, Shower Thoughts! And this thread of Shower Thoughts is much longer than this, what a fun conversation.
Threads help organize the whole channel. Instead of posting everything in the channel, we can reply in thread and browse through larger ideas in the channel. Then, if we are interested in a specific post in the channel, we can click and open the thread and chat about it!
Check the pinned messages for resources!
Here's the pinned messages in the general chat. Yeah, a ton of google docs😂. Instead of having to share a google doc and then hope everyone else organized their drive so they can find it easily, we can just pin it on slack and check this whenever we need something. Cuz let's be honest, who has an organized google drive anyway. And btw, if you made it all the way down here, I personally really appreciate it, send me a funny joke to let me know you made it here.
Each channel has different pinned messages so just choose which channel the resource you're looking for best relates to. If I can't find the zoom link for coordination team meetings, I'll look in the pinned messages of the #coord channel.
Pretty straightforward, anyone can pin, and anyone can go and access the pinned messages.
**** Slack Tip #3
Forget the computer desktop app, but get the phone app. The phone app has been so helpful in giving me the notifications so I can receive all the important messages in a timely way. We all know the feeling when you send out a message and just wait... and then you wait more.... and then finally... nope you just wait some more. Yea, that's a bad feeling. So don't make other's wait! You know what it feels like. Just get the app and leave the notifications on! We don't spam, and our channel organization will help you only get notifications that are important to you.
All of this reading for what? Well, now you know how to navigate Slack which helps you communicate and get your ideas heard. Feel free to play around and even program Slackbot!
I hope this was an enjoyable read and that it was a helpful experience. Like the post! and Comment down below if you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback!
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