Our team has realized over this season that we need some sort of official communication platform. Currently we use Remind for official announcements, but the inability for side communication has hampered its usage. The students have went on their own and created a Whats app group to supplement it, but with no mentors there has been a visible disconnect and a few issues. The mentors mostly use in person communications supplemented with emails currently.
I originally was exploring slack from the recommendations of a few local teams, but after looking further it appears that we would have to pay for the Plus plan ($400+/year) for full exports.
I’m wondering what other teams use, and what alternatives there are to Slack that have the features we would need.
Full export logs is the main requirement, but other than that we need a platform for subteam discussions, full team discussions, and one on one discussions.
I had reached out to them and the only thing they offered was a 85% discount on the “Plus” plan. It would be $12.50 per member per month (without discount) , or about $450 for our team per year, not really what I was expecting.
Microsoft Teams is a good alternative to Slack, and without the… unprofessionalism… of Discord. My team switched to it this year at my suggestion, and we made decent use of the embedded wiki functionality (think of it as having OneNote or Word inside your messaging client)
For the record, it doesn’t have everything, but it may do what you need!
We switched to Basecamp this year from Slack and loved it. It is free for educational organizations, like FRC. I highly recommend creating a trial and exploring it to see what you think. Let me know if you have any questions.
We trialed Slack this year and I think it works well. Not without its pros and cons. Biggest con is not every student likes being on yet another platform. But these same students never really participated when it was all by email either…
We reached out to Slack and they upgraded us to the paid tier for free.
For multi-site video conferencing (we meet in multiple locations) we found Zoom to work well.
The Toasters have switch over to Basecamp from a combination of apps including slack. This program has worked great for us and has helped organize our team communications.