Suggested apps and programmes for small organisations
Apps and programmes for small businesses and charities
The Holy Brook Associates team is often asked for recommendations of apps and programmes that we use. Here are our founder’s (Rachel Eden), favourites.
Content Creation
Online courses and membership sites
We use Teachable to host a range of our online learning opportunities including our resource library, self-paced courses and time specific challenges. There is a free version, although we have a paid subscription:
We’d recommend watching their live 7-steps webinar if you want to get started more info here**
Website hosting
Wordpress has a free option for website hosting and once your site is created it is easy to add new posts and do small edits yourself. We pay for the premium account on our site but it is still relatively low cost.
Mailing lists
Mailchimp works for us, it is free for up to 2000 subscribers.
Social media management
There is no substitute for using social media sites directly but for scheduled posts and monitoring we use Hootsuite, this is FREE if you only have a couple of accounts. We have a paid for account
Record keeping
Accounts
We use Xero for our own business and with a number of clients. If you don’t already have a chosen accountancy software we recommend Xero for most small businesses and charities. You can get a free trial but thislink gives you a 50% off for the first 12 months if you have a turnover below £50,000: Xero.com **
Or if you are a charity you can get 25% off for ever regardless of size from this link**:
CRM
Hubspot works well for us when it comes to keeping in touch with people who may be interested in our services or we just like to build our relationship with them. It is free. https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm
For generating quotes we use the built in Xero **tool.
Time tracking
We track our time for clients and internally to help us understand how we are working using Toggl. It works well for small teams. FREE (although there is a premium version).
Collaboration
To do lists
The best app we have found for personal to do lists is any.do – the free version is good but Rachel has the premium version (about £24/year) because she likes the ‘plan my day’ function so much.
Asana
We use asana for shared projects, it’s easy to use and intuitive. It doesn’t deal with task dependencies but it is great for collaboration. FREE (although there is a paid version)
Calendar
We use google calendar, which included with your google email address, great for collaboration and integrates with the rest of the google suite.
Chat
We like Whatsap for quick informal use, it is an app a lot of people use for personal as well as business so be careful to send your messages to the right group, but it’s great for group chat and video calls. FREE. Slack is an alternative that a lot of businesses use, Free (although there is a paid version)
Sharing files
We use Google Drive for ‘rough work’ (FREE with your google email address) and Dropbox for sharing more securely and using a greater range of programmes. This has a free version although we pay for upgrades to our space.
** Most links in this document are not affiliate links, just included for convenience. However Holy Brook Associates is a partner of both Teachable and Xero, and we may earn commission if you visit their links above.
There’s no extra cost to you from this but we want to be open about this.
Have we missed anything? Disagree? Let us know what you use on our face book group