Project Templates

Do the same sorts of projects or to-dos over and over? Save yourself time by creating a project template.

Jump ahead to:

• Creating a New Project Template
• Adding Doors to Templates
• Inviting People
• Starting a Project with a Template
• Using the Schedule
• Using To-dos in Templates
• Copy/Duplicate a Template
• Working with Clients?

Creating a new project template

Click the "View templates" link found right on the Home screen:

Click the "+ New Template" box. Like regular projects in Basecamp 4, you’ll want to name your project template and give it an optional description. You can always change this later:

You can create a template based on an existing project on your account. Here's how:

You can rename all the tools and toggle them on/off. That way, if you run a lot of projects that are just to-dos and messages, you can disable tools you don’t use. Just click the More options button "•••" and select the "Change/rename tools" option:

Email Forwards are a little different. You can turn them on, but we won‘t provide an email address until you create a project from the template:

Adding Doors to a template

As you set up the tools in your template, you'll also see an option to open a Door to an external service:

Doors are a fantastic way to bring everything you use into Basecamp — to make your Basecamp account a central resource. Set up links to services like Zendesk, Github, Notion, and Google Drive to name a few. If you don't see your external service listed, that's no problem! Choose the "External Service" option at the bottom of the list. Paste the link to what you want folks to have access to then click "Add this Door:"

Inviting People

Similar to regular projects, you can add people to events, and assign people to Card Table cards and To-dos in your template:

When people are assigned to tasks, cards or events in your template, they'll be invited to the project automatically when it’s created from your template:

Invited users will also be notified of their new assignments in their Hey! menu. These notifications will come from the project creator:

You can also wait until a new project is created from your template to invite people. This will give you a chance to tweak dates and modify the content before anyone has access to it.

Once you invite people to your new project, everyone will get a summary email. This email will contain all their assignments (if you've assigned any to them in the new project), events, and other project info.

Starting a project using a template

Once you create your first template, you can create projects from it. Click the "Make a new project" found right on the Home screen:

On the next screen, you'll see a link to "Choose a project template":

Click the "Create this project" button and that's it! You've got yourself a new project.

Schedules

Any dates you add will be scheduled relative to the start date of your project — the day the active project is created.

When you add an event to your template, you'll choose the week, and the day of the week for that event. Click to choose the day of the week, and click the arrow to change the week number:

The project's start date is the day you create it from the template. Week 1 of your project begins on Sunday of that week:

Here’s how the Schedule will look once you add a few events and to-dos:

You can tweak your dates manually in the project before or after inviting people to join the project!

To-dos

Like Schedule events, due dates on to-dos are relative to the project's start date. You can specify a due date or start/end dates, just like regular to-dos. To-dos inside project templates cannot be completed:

Copy a Template

Copy/Duplicate an entire Project Template from the ••• menu at the top right of the template. Here's more on this.

Working with Clients?

Create a new project template with the View Templates link on the home page, then click New Template. Toggle on the Work with clients switch to see the client visibility options throughout the template.

To add client settings to an existing template, use the ••• menu and select Edit template settings. Flip the Work with clients switch to set client permissions.

New projects created from the template will maintain your visibility settings. When you spin up a new project from your template, the hard work is already done! No more repetitive clicking to get things just right.

Have a project you used with clients that you want to turn into a template? We’ve got you covered! When you create a template from a project, you'll see the option to keep the settings, so what was shared with a client from the project is carried over to the template.

From the project page, use the ••• menu and select Save as a project template. Check the Remember client visibility option, then click Create template.

Your new template remembers which items were visible to the client and which were private to your team, so it's faster and easier to get started when you have similar projects with that client or others.

Next up: Forwards →

Jump to:

• Intro to the Project Tools
• Chat
• Message Board
• To-Dos
• Card Tables
• Hill Charts
• Schedule
• Automatic Check-Ins
• Docs and Files
• Doors
• Templates (you're here!)
• Forwards
• Drafts
• Boosts
• Searching
• Trash, Archive, and Restore
• Moving and Copying
• Printing
• Embedding Outside Content
• Lineup