Newbie nonprofit pipeline setup

I work with a nonprofit that does garden education and have a question about how to set up our boards.

One workspace will deal with curriculum development. So far I have created a horizontal board with columns for the following steps:

-Lesson Drafted
-Collateral Materials Drafted
-Internal Team Review
-1st Revision
-Teacher Feedback
-Team Discussion
-2nd Revision
-Pilot Lesson Feedback
-Final Revision
-Lesson Kit Assembly

My rows were going to be the lesson topics, for example “2nd grade compost lesson.”

That is all well and good…but now where do I put the specific tasks that vary by the type of lesson? For example, “set up meeting with second grade teacher Ms X to get compost lesson feedback.” Is that a low-level board? If so, does each lesson under development become its own low-level board with vertical groups for each of the steps above? My first thought is that is a lot of freaking boards. I don’t want our team to get overloaded by too many boards.

Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

Hi @barrio_botany! It seems like you have a strong concept so far.

Here is an idea for you (this is based on you keeping the columns the exact same as you have them now, I have some suggestions below that may be of interest to you to help streamline your board a bit):

  1. Create a set of subitems for each lesson type:
  • go to the lesson you want to create a set of tasks for and hover over that lesson (in the items column) a grey arrow will appear on the left, click on that to expand the item and access the subitems section.
  • Create your subitems and then you can create a mirrored column on the main item/lesson to track their progress from a high level view.

My suggestions

  • You could condense all those columns into one status column and have a collaborative document that is being updated the whole way through this process. (Depending on what all needs to be done for each stage of the lesson planning)
  • You could have automations that occur every time you change the status to a new stage in your pipeline that would add specific subitems, notify certain people to inform them of revisions or feedback, assigning to individuals or groups, and much more)
  • With the status column, those steps to completion could be made into groups on your board in which items will automatically be moved to when they are updated, keeping every step separated and organized, avoiding any confusion.

If you would like to discuss further or would like help for a full overhaul and implementation, feel free to reach out or schedule a call with me (no charge).

I hope this was helpful,
Nathan Kind (nathan@kinder-technologies.com)
Lead Software Consultant - Kinder Tech