Teams and Projects

Learn more about: 

Teams

Teams are where people in similar roles share things with each other and stay coordinated. Think of them like mini-HQs. Use them for ongoing groups or departments like Customer Service, Marketing, or Sales. Clients cannot be added to teams. 

Add a new Team

To create a new team, click the button beneath your company logo or company name:

Then you can choose a to make a team on the righthand side:

Projects

Projects are the heart of Basecamp. You can make projects for every major thing you have going on — like a marketing campaign, a new product launch, or a project for a client. Inside projects, you’ll post announcements, chat, organize and assign work, set deadlines, share files, and present ideas.

Add a new Project

To create a new project, click the button beneath your company logo or company name:

Then choose the option on the left hand side to make a project:

Once that’s done, you’re in! Click on the project and you’ll see the six tools that are part of every project by default:  Campfire, Message Board, To-dos, Schedule, Automatic Check-ins, and Docs & Files. You can organize these in the order you want them in.

Change your tools

Personalize the tools you need to get your work done! 

If a project or a team doesn't need all of the project tools in it by default, you can turn them off. Click on Change tools link in the ... menu.

Any changes you make will be reflected to anyone else on the project. For example, if you turn off Automatic Check-Ins, it turns them off for everyone in the project or team.

Then toggle off the tool that you don't need it.

Need to add a link to an external service like Github, Zendesk, or Google Drive? You can add direct links to those services and more using Doors. Learn how to enable those here!

Below your tools, you'll find the activity timeline, where you can see all the updates that have been made to this project!

Adding multiple tools

You can add more than one of each tool to a project by clicking on + Add another:

This comes in handy if you'd like to to have different to-do tools for unrelated tasks, like marketing and bug reports:

A couple of caveats:

  • Additional campfire rooms will not include everyone in the project by default when they are created. Folks will have to choose to follow the campfire, or be @mentioned in it in order to be notified about updates in it.

Removing multiple tools

If you've set up multiple tools, you can remove them when you no longer need them. Be sure the tool is completely empty — if you had set up another To-Do tool, delete all the lists in that tool first. 

Inviting people

When you’re ready for other people to join the project so you can work together, hit the  Invite people to the project button at the top of the page. Read more about adding people to a project.

Switching team members and clients

Sometimes a client joins your organization, or a team member is accidentally added to a project as a client user. It happens! But don't fret, there are ways to switch a user's type. The important thing to remember is that folks in Basecamp can’t be a team member in one project, but a client user in another. They can only be one type of user in the account. 

An account owner or an admin will need to make this change in Adminland. If that's you, please follow the full guide on that here.

Settings

Click the  ...  toward the upper right corner to update the project’s name or description, change what tools are visible, or archive/delete it. We’ve got a couple of Developers’ Tools included there too.

Tip: If you'd like to assign a team or project lead, include that info in your project description. It will show up on that project's page, and on the project card.

Closing comments

Folks can close comments in content they created themselves, and account admins can close comments on anything in the account.

When comments are closed boosts are also disabled. You'll be able to see older boosts but not add any new ones.

When comments are closed or enabled, it will be logged in the item's change log.

Turn a project into a team (or vice versa)

Have a project that would be better suited as a team (or vice-versa)? No problem! You can swap it over. Click in the  ...  menu to Edit name, description, or type.

Then you’ll see an option to switch it to a team. 

If you don’t see the that option, your project probably has clients. Teams can only have team users, so remove the clients from the project, and the option should appear.

Using the directory of all projects and teams

Just beneath your top 12, click on the link to view all projects and teams:

You'll get to a view that includes all active, archived, and deleted projects and teams, including the HQ and client projects. There are filters at the top of the page to see all of them, see only your pinned workspaces, just projects, just teams, projects with clients only, or all the inactive projects — all the archived and trashed projects.

There's also a search bar at the top! When you start to type what you're looking for, our system will search for matches in the titles as well as the descriptions of your workspaces. You can search everything by clicking on A-Z, or narrow things down by choosing a filter in addition to your search terms.

In this example, these are all the results for the search term "logo" for all projects and teams:

Your account will also remember what you last searched so if you find it useful to see your pinned cards in a list, you'll go right to the pinned section every time you return to the directory.

More on pinning the projects and teams you want to see can be found here. 

Next up: Organizing your Home screen →

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