Membership communication guide

Introduction

Communication is one of the keys to a successful partnership. At ArtsPool, we’re here to empower our members with the tools needed to effectively communicate with our staff and each other. In this guide, you’ll find ways to communicate that will strengthen our work together. 

Your team at a glance

Before you can communicate with ArtsPool, it’s good to know who you’re communicating with. The three roles that make up a typical ArtsPool service team are: 

• Financial Maintenance Lead
• Financial Operations Lead
• Workforce Administration Lead

In cases where a member has opted out of certain services, they may have fewer than three ArtsPool team members assigned to them. You can find out more about these roles in the article ArtsPool: an introduction.

Who should be involved?

When working on detailed financial matters it's important to consider who needs to be involved so that we can avoid having too many cooks in the kitchen.

• If your communication with us involves just one person, using the new task form in the app and selecting the appropriate area of service from the dropdown will route your task to the correct person. 
• If your communication involves more than one person, use the the new task form in the app as noted above and then add people from your organization who need to collaborate on the task. If you need another ArtsPool added, just leave us a comment and we will add them. For more on how to add people from your organization to tasks see Adding people to tasks.

Communicating with ArtsPool: what’s the best day-to-day method?

It depends! Generally, day-to-day communications with ArtsPool falls into four primary categories:

The ArtsPool app

As an ArtsPool member, you’ll generally communicate with us through the ArtsPool management portal, a.k.a, the ArtsPool app. This tool should be your primary tool for interacting with ArtsPool, as it allows you to submit and approve bills, provide receipts and other documentation, request grant budgets and grant budget reports, ask questions, and communicate with both ArtsPool staff and each other.

The fastest way to request work from ArtsPool is to use the forms in the ArtsPool app, though you can also submit requests to the app via email by using a special email address specific to your company (aka your ArtsPool "application address"). Tasks that are submitted via forms are automatically routed to the correct person while tasks submitted via email are initially assigned to your Financial Operations Lead. More on this can be found in the article Requesting work from ArtsPool.

Questions about the app and interfacing with ArtsPool can often be answered by searching the ArtsPool Help Center.

Videoconference

Telephone records are not permanent or accessible to multiple team members, so traditional phone calls are not our favorite way of communicating. That said, we do recognize that extended conversation is an important component of our work, particularly when it comes to your monthly budget update sessions and other concentrated work with your ArtsPool team. For conversations, we much prefer to use Google Meet videoconferencing because it allows us to take advantage of other collaboration and accessibility tools that are not available with phone calls (e.g. auto transcription and summary, recording, etc). We can also use Zoom in a pinch if you have trouble with Google Meet.

Comments in a Google Doc or Sheet

Comments in Google Docs and Sheets are essential tools for working together on granular topics, e.g. specific changes to a cell in a budget. That said, for bigger picture issues that require more than a few back-and-forth messages these comment threads can get unwieldy, particularly since it can be hard to find the history of the conversation in a document with a lot of comments. For topics with the potential for a lot of back and forth, we recommend posting your comments on the related app task since this creates a permanent reference that is much easier to refer to later and much easier to read through. Google Meet videoconferences are also great tools for these types of conversations.

Email

While email dominates communication today, we’re not a huge fan of it here at ArtsPool. Why?

• Email is not an accessible permanent record. Turnover is common at every company, and working entirely out of inboxes can lead to valuable information being siloed if a person leaves an organization and their email account is archived. The advantage of working in the ArtsPool app is that the history of prior work is preserved and accessible, even if your team or your ArtsPool team changes.
• Email is unstructured data. This can introduce data validation problems, errors, omissions, and inefficiencies when data has to move from an inbox into another system. The structured forms in the ArtsPool app and the app's integrations with external systems can help mitigate some of these issues.

That being said, for scheduling meetings, simple inquiries that don’t need to be referenced at a future date, communications with outside partners on which you need ArtsPool support, and matters that are not specific service requests, feel free to email your ArtsPool team.

Less frequent communication methods

Retrospective

Your ArtsPool team may occasionally request to schedule a "retrospective" with you and the key staff members at your organization that they work with regularly. The retrospective, or "retro," is a great opportunity for us to review aspects of our working relationship that are working well and where improvement may be needed. During the retro, you and your ArtsPool team compile a list of actions for improvement, and throughout the year you review these action items together to make sure they are being completed. If there are friction points that you think would benefit from this process, you can request a retro to be scheduled at any time.

Cabana member community

Sometimes you might have a question that is out of scope for ArtsPool or want to share something with the broader member community. For that, we have a member-facing Google Group community called Cabana that allows you to email other members of the cooperative who have also opted into the group. If you aren’t already a member, you can join Cabana through this link.

Text messaging

Texting is useful in urgent situations or for quick hits like providing/requesting a 2-factor authentication code or letting someone know that you will be late to a meeting. For substantive communication, however, texting creates message fragmentation that can lead to information being lost, so we ask that you use the other communication methods listed above for your day-to-day work with us and avoid texting as much as possible.