Brian Lundberg of McPherson College

What does your department do?

We manage the college’s brand and produce all of the marketing and communication material. Everything from websites, video and social media to print, signage and apparel design.

What is your work routine? How do you start and end your day?

Coffee. Email. Brightpod. Repeat throughout the day and hope to produce something creative in between.

"I wanted a tool that was easy to learn so any of our staff could log in and get to work without having to train them."

How did you find or learn about Brightpod?

I had used Basecamp and Liquid Planner while working with some vendors but didn’t feel like they fit our needs. After googling and test driving a few services I picked Brightpod. I wanted a tool that was easy to learn so any of our staff could log in and get to work without having to train them.

How many projects and team members do you have in Brightpod? Could you give us some insight on what kind of projects/ work you manage with Brightpod?

I thought Brightpod was going to be an internal management tool just for our Marketing office. We started out small with just a few team members from other departments across campus that needed to track projects in their areas. It has grown to become much more of a communication tool and integral part of our production process. We have almost 40 team members/clients including faculty, staff and students that collaborate on projects.

Were you using any other tool or method before Brightpod? Why did you make the switch?

When I took over we were using Excel spreadsheets which was very cumbersome – not only to keep updated but to distribute. I couldn’t imagine going back to that.

"Starting up Brightpod was easy as the interface is very intuitive."

Have you ever relied on Brightpod for something unexpected related to a project?

I only recently started using the search function and was surprised to see the results included completed and archived projects. Very handy!

Was there a learning curve associated with Brightpod? How did your team adapt to a new software?

Starting up Brightpod was easy as the interface is very intuitive. Since this was our first time using a tool like this it took some experimenting to figure out how our clients and projects best fit into the Brightpod structure. We’ve actually changed that structure a couple of times since we first started. At first, we thought of individual projects as pods but as we increased the number of projects and clients using Brightpod, we’ve changed that structure. Now, departments are pods, types of projects are lists and then individual projects are tasks. What was great about this was the copy and move functions in Brightpod that allowed us to reorganize our project structure without having to start over.

What is your favorite, or most used Brightpod feature?

Probably the Me tab. It’s a great way to scan through all of my tasks and see what I need to work on.