The message board in Basecamp
is the perfect place to make announcements,
pitch an idea, pose a question, or share progress
and in many cases, it can replace email.
I’m Kimberly from Basecamp’s Customer Success team,
and in this video I’m gonna do a deep dive
into the Message Board and show you all its features
and how it can help you stay organized.
To get started,
select the Message Board tool from your project home page
which will open up a new message.
If there are already messages on the Message Board,
you’ll hit the green new message button at the top left.
You’ll give your message a title
then write your message just below it.
There are lots of formatting options here
including bolding and italicizing,
changing the color of your text, adding highlighting,
and even increasing the font size to create headers.
You can also hyperlink text to an outside website
and when you link to content
from sites like YouTube, Spotify, and Twitter,
Basecamp will give you the option to embed that media
so that it displays directly within the message.
When you paste in a URL from another part of Basecamp,
the link adjusts automatically to identify
where in Basecamp it came from.
You can add attachments to your message
with the paperclip icon
or by dragging the image or file directly onto the message.
You can rearrange your attachments by dragging and dropping
and if you’d like to split up a gallery of images,
you can move your cursor between images
and add a hard return to bump them to a separate line.
This will also make images appear larger within the message.
If you need to delete an attachment from your draft,
just click on the image or file
then hit the trashcan icon.
Above the message title, you’ll see an area
where you can give your message a category.
We’ve given you a few standard options,
but you can create your own by selecting edit categories.
Changing the category here will only affect
the Message Board within this project,
but if you’re an account owner or an admin,
you can change the message categories
across the entire account.
To do that, you’ll go to Adminland just below your avatar
and select change message categories.
Once you’re ready to post your message,
you can select who should receive a notification
in their Hey! menu.
You can select just the people
who are actively involved on the project,
everyone who has access to the project at all,
or you can pick and choose people from the list.
Now, keep in mind that regardless
of who gets a notification,
anyone who has access to the project
will be able to view your message.
The message will only be hidden
if you have clients on the project
and you’ve chosen not to share the message with them.
I made a separate video all about working with clients
so I’ll link to that
in the YouTube description for this video.
At the bottom, you’ll see three options.
You can save your message as a draft
so you can continue to edit it and post it later,
you can post the message immediately,
or you can schedule your message to send automatically
at a future date and time.
This is perfect for those night owls
who wanna work late into the evening
but post their message at a normal hour.
When you save a message as a draft
or you schedule it to send later, you’ll find those drafts
and scheduled messages in two places.
When you open up the Message Board again,
you’ll see a link at the top reminding you
that you have drafts, scheduled messages, or both.
Clicking on the link will get you to those messages
and you can continue editing the message
or post it immediately.
You can also find drafts and scheduled messages
in your navigation bar under My Stuff and then My Drafts
where you’ll find all drafted and scheduled messages.
Scheduled messages are indicated with a blue bar
along with a date and time they are scheduled to post.
When your message is posted, you’ll see the category
along with its coordinating emoji at the top of the message.
if a category has been assigned.
You’ll also see this emoji
and category combination from the Message Board list view.
You can filter messages by category
with a dropdown menu at the top right.
Now, by default, the most recent posts
appear at the top of your Message Board,
but sometimes you might have a message
that’s more important than the rest,
like a welcome message for new people added to a project
or instructions for how you like everyone on the account
to use each of the Basecamp tools.
To highlight a message,
you can pin it to the top of your message board.
With a message open, use the three dot menu at the top right
and select Pin.
That will keep that message at the top of the Message Board.
You can pin multiple messages and they’ll appear separated
from the rest of the Message Board posts.
You can unpin a message
with the same three dot menu at the top.
In addition to pinning messages,
you also have some other options
for how messages appear on the Message Board.
Using the three dot menu at the top
of the message list view,
you can change how messages are sorted.
You could sort the list alphabetically
which works great when you wanna use the Message Board
like a table of contents, or you could sort the messages
by most recent comments, which puts the message
with the most recent discussion at the top.
One thing to note is that when you change the order
for how messages are sorted,
it changes the order for how it appears
for everyone on the project, not just you.
Now, just like Basecamp to-dos and Basecamp documents
and files, any comments on the Message Board
stay with the message so you’re not having to go back
and forth between emails, Slack messages, text messages,
or any other form of communication
to keep track of the latest updates.
Everything’s organized as it should be.
So that’s the Message Board.
Now, if you’re ever not sure
when you should use the Message Board
instead of one of the other Basecamp communication tools
like the Campfire or Pings,
not to worry, I made a video all about it.
I break down the three different tools
and when it’s best to use each one
I’ll link to it in the YouTube description.
And as always, if you have any questions, please reach out.
That question mark in the bottom right corner of your screen
will get you to our Basecamp help guides
and also link to reach our team directly.