Many of us deal with work e-mail as a necessity, but it’s a pain for internal communication! I used to be part of an organization that used LISTSERV, and it was frustrating because not everyone who needed to read the e-mails did, and occasionally replies would get lost in a thread with a lot of activity. Everyone was expected to be caught up on the posts when they arrived at work for the day, but this was not enforced and resulted in mistakes that turned into data loss for the company’s research.

One of our clients introduced us to Slack, and GAM has never looked back. This platform has it all:

• Tailored notification settings — for instance, I get pinged when “social media” or “marketing” are mentioned in a post
• Tagging for specific team members (“Hey @Sarah, check this out!”)
• Integrations with other platforms, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Trello, and more
• Everything is searchable! Documents, posts, messages, the works. So much time saved now that we don’t have to hunt through emails!
• Organized channels by topic — again, helping with the organization of discussions so everything is easily found later
• Private messages & sub-groups — allowing project partners to collaborate without making “noise” for everyone else

It has all the benefits of instant message without being intrusive, and all while avoiding your e-mail inbox. And they have a free version available! On the occasions when a team member needs to work remotely, we don’t miss a beat. At the same time, it reduces office interruptions because it can be turned off and responded to at the appropriate time.

TL;DR: Slack enables organizations to have searchable, orderly discussions without being a nuisance.

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