10 Reasons to Use an Online Whiteboard Tool Like Stormboard
The world has changed drastically over the last year, disrupting all facets of life, including the way we hold meetings, manage projects, and interact with our colleagues.
This disruption has led businesses to look for ways to digitally transform their workflows. Businesses everywhere have been searching for tools to use in the midst of this new normal that will allow work to get done but also foster collaboration, creativity, and connectedness.
Stormboard is an all-in-one online whiteboard tool where high-performing teams hold meetings, monitor projects, and get work done every day no matter where they are located — down the hall, in a different building, or somewhere else in the world.
But what does a digital meeting tool actually help you do? And, why should you consider changing the way you work and switching to a digital workspace like Stormboard?
These are important and valid questions, and exactly what we are going to address in this article.
Why use an Online Whiteboard Tool like Stormboard?
Capture and organize content anytime, anywhere
With Stormboard, everyone can add content to their Storm (what we call our digital workspace) as soon as inspiration hits. Whether that’s in the middle of a meeting, while working remotely, when you’re out for a run, or wherever you happen to be.
Content can be added as text, video, files, free-form drawings, images, and more, and can then be organized by color, category, or into specific template sections in order to be prioritized and acted on. An online whiteboard tool should be just that, a blank canvas where creatives can add, subtract, and organize ideas that push their projects forward -- and in a productive manner.
Easily share content with members of your team
Do you have a great idea that you want to share with all of the members of your team? How do you do it? Send an email? A text message? Write it on a sticky note and put it on your wall?
With Stormboard as your online whiteboard tool, as soon as you add any content to your Storm, you can share it with your team by tagging specific people or sending an email to all of your team members to join you in the Storm. There’s no waiting for the next meeting, or for everyone to reply to your email. Stormboard acts as a central hub where people can quickly and easily hop in and out to communicate and give feedback on a variety of content types.
Make remote collaboration significantly better
Conference calls where people talk over each other (or don’t talk at all), webcams being held up to a wall, photos of sticky notes being lost in a long email chain — remote collaboration isn’t always easy.
With Stormboard, digital transformation in workflows and meetings couldn’t be easier. Every single person is an active participant in your meeting — whether they are located a few floors away or across the ocean. As an online whiteboard tool, Storms can be accessed at any time on any device with a web browser, which means that teams in one time zone can pick up where their team members on the other side of the world left off without skipping a beat!
Stormboard’s chat function allows for members to send messages to each other within their Storm, and ideas can also be commented on for clarification or additional collaboration. No need to Slack or Google Message your co-worker. All your project communication can now be centralized in an intuitive and responsive online whiteboard tool.
Teams made up of people who speak different languages also benefit from Stormboard, as many remote employees are often too timid to speak up during conference calls because they are not comfortable in the language that is being spoken. They will be able to add their content to the meeting space in other ways so that their ideas and comments are still heard.
Hold productive meetings that actually get work done
The majority of meetings held at your average company are a waste of time or get very little accomplished.
With Stormboard, you can save 10 minutes before and after every meeting, generate more content than in a conventional meeting, shorten all meetings by a minimum of 10%, and even eliminate the need for some meetings altogether!
How?
The meeting facilitator can prepare and provide context ahead of time using one of our hundreds of built-in templates for business processes like Agile, Kanban, and SWOT, so your meetings are intentional and efficient.
Everything is captured and can be assigned after one meeting, so you don’t need to meet again in order to check-in on a project’s progress, assign tasks, share ideas, or ask questions — all you have to do is monitor the Storm and have everyone who participated in your meeting continue to add updates and any new ideas to it.
Online Whiteboard Tools Deliver Space for Brainstorming
Creative ideas don’t just appear out of nowhere — anyone standing at the front of a boardroom trying to lead an effective brainstorming session can tell you that.
Different people require different times, places, and spaces to come up with the best ideas, and being forced into a stuffy room and pressured to come up with a new product or a hot new marketing strategy doesn’t work with the ebb and flow of an individual’s creative energy. People usually end up feeling pressured; they get overwhelmed, and then shut down, leading to an ineffective, uninspired meeting — a waste of everyone’s time.
Stormboard is the best online whiteboard tool, and with it, people gain a more productive and comfortable environment to contribute ideas from their own devices, in their own words, and on their own timeline.
The best part is that your ideas won’t get rolled up in a flipchart or lost as a blurry photo on someone’s phone — they are saved in your Storm and can be organized, refined, and acted on to keep the momentum going.
Quickly set priorities and assign tasks to team members
Generating a bunch of great content with a motivated group of people isn’t often the issue that teams have. It’s following up and breaking through where roadblocks usually occur in the process.
Assigning tasks or setting priorities often gets pushed to the next meeting, or left in the hands of someone who doesn’t end up following up until a few days (or weeks) later.
Stormboard allows teams to quickly prioritize and assign tasks directly in the Storm.
You can use Stormboard’s “dotmocracy voting” system to quickly and seamlessly vote on the best content, and then continue to whittle down the list until you are left with the top content that addresses the problem you are trying to solve. Then, you can assign individual sticky notes to members of your team to ensure that everything is getting done.
Monitor projects
Project management involves a lot of moving parts, and sometimes getting everyone in the same room for a status update is next to impossible. With an online whiteboard tool like Stormboard, meetings can happen quickly and efficiently in-person, as all of the information has already been added or updated in your Storm.
You can also avoid meeting altogether and 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.
Standardize your business processes
Whether you are working with a known process like Agile, or have a company-specific process, ensuring that everyone is meeting, managing projects, sharing information, and working in the same way can be next to impossible.
That’s why online whiteboard tools are a major player within organizations’ digital transformation process. The use of an all-encompassing platform like Stormboard enables businesses to cut out unnecessary work practices, reduce the number of applications used in workflows, and increase employee engagement.
Stormboard has hundreds of templates that can be used for standard business processes or customized for a specific internal process, which makes meetings easier to organize and keep consistent across the entire organization. This means that sharing information between different teams, departments, and management levels can be done seamlessly and efficiently.
Analyze complex problems or projects
Having space and time to really dig into problems or projects is an issue for teams. It often requires lengthy, or multiple, meetings that tie up boardrooms for days or even weeks due to sensitive information needing to stay up on whiteboards or flipcharts.
Using Stormboard to digitally transform these meetings means freeing up space and giving people time to dive into different ideas at their own pace. It also allows you to easily bring in new people, or remote employees, for a fresh perspective without having to explain to them what is going on — they can just read through the sticky notes, chats, and comments that are already in the Storm in order catch up.
Create instant, actionable reports
Traditional meeting minutes tend to get lost in email chains (or are unreadable), content gets erased off whiteboards, and flipcharts get rolled up and end up gathering dust. The moral of the story is that your work disappears or becomes too disorganized to salvage. With online whiteboard tools, no great idea will get lost to time, erasers, or bad penmanship.
With Stormboard’s reporting feature, good ideas are never lost but are gathered together and converted into professional reports that can be collaboratively edited to reflect a company’s voice and structure. These reports can then be used as meeting minutes or presentations that can help get buy-in from the executive team or key stakeholders.
Reports are available in PNG, PDF, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and more, and are the most efficient way to ensure that your best ideas make it into the hands of the decision-makers.
Get Started With The Best Online Whiteboard Tool
Are you interested in learning more about how you can use Stormboard’s digital workspace to improve the way you work? Learn about our subscriptions (including our 30-Day FREE Trial) on our Plans and Pricing page, or book a demo using the button below.
Keep Reading
