Stormboard 101: What is a Storm and How do you use it?
Sticky notes, whiteboards, index cards, Storm, Substorms — we use a lot of lingo here at Stormboard, but the one word that we want to make sure you understand is “Storm”.
What is a Storm?
A Storm is what we call your digital meeting and collaboration space.
It’s a place where you can capture, store, organize, and prioritize your ideas and then create, monitor, and evaluate the projects that turn those ideas into outcomes.
Storms are persistent and don’t care what device you use or when you use it — they are always available!
How to use a Storm for a meeting
Before a Meeting
Most meetings are not prepared ahead of time or don’t have a set agenda, which means that time is often wasted due to small talk, set-up, or trying to keep everyone on task. Meetings need to have strict goals, direction, and agendas before they are held in order to ensure that time is not wasted.
Using a Storm for your meeting allows you to set up your agenda and prepare well before the actual meeting date. You can also have attendees review material ahead of time, or even start contributing ideas before you are ever in a room together.
This allows your meeting participants to think through any topics on the agenda and thoroughly prepare so that your meeting time can be shorter and more effective.
During a Meeting
Once the meeting starts there are a number of ways to collaborate.
You can open the Storm on a large screen or Microsoft Surface Hub and have your meeting attendees come up to the screen to add their ideas to the digital workspace.
Or, you can have all meeting participants open the Storm on their laptops, tablets, or phones so they can contribute in real-time from their own devices.
You can also invite remote attendees who can contribute to the Storm as easily as they would if they were in the room with you. Or, if they are in a different time zone, they can catch up on the meeting’s progress and add their own ideas and comments once they are awake and in work-mode.
After a Meeting
Stormboard provides instant reporting so no need to take a blurry photo of your whiteboard or have someone email out hastily typed meeting minutes. Stormboard outputs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more and even understands the structure of your meeting. You can use these reports as meeting minutes, presentations, and more.
You can also use the Storm to manage and track the progress of a project.
This may involve planning for multiple meetings daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on the length of your project, or regular status updates from team members based on when they reach their individual milestones. You can track project tasks in Stormboard from your Dashboard, within a Storm by clicking on the Tasks tab on the upper right-hand side of the page, or by exporting all of the tasks from a Storm into a Microsoft Excel document.
What else can you use Storms for?
The short answer? Anything!
The long answer?
We have hundreds of templates that can be used for specific business processes like Kanban, Design Thinking, Agile, Retrospectives, and more.
Any template can be customized to suit your needs, whether its to create a social media strategy, monitor a project, schedule your team, teach a class, or anything else you can dream up.
You can also create personal Storms to keep private lists of your ideas, goals, strategies, and plans — the possibilities really are endless!
Get Started
Are you ready to start using Storms to make your life easier? Sign up for a FREE Stormboard account now
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