In this blog, I am going to explain how we leverage Slack integrations to automate our flow of information and save precious time every day. 

We use a lot of different tools: Google Analytics, HubSpot, Google Sheets, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. Those generate a lot of data like number of visitors, followers, revenue, cost, etc.

It is quite cumbersome to login to each platform and get all data every day/week/month and merge it in a nice dashboard that will give us valuable insights of what we need to do.

Databox

Databox itself already has built-in integrations with almost every tool that we use out of the box and a very easy drag-and-drop interface that allows us to create any dashboard we want.

Every week on Friday before our Leadership meeting, Databox notifies us of the latest numbers with a link to our dashboard for everyone to see.

Another cool functionality is the alert to slack once you reached your goal

Notion

Most of our internal communication happens via Slack or through documents using Google Docs.

Slack is a great place to have conversations and share information but, when asking or asked by a colleague the usual answer would be something like:

I remember sharing that (link, video, question, answer) on slack, but I don't know which channel and when.

Google Drive with Docs brings a lot of value for us, but when the subject is organizing information and find it back, they fall short.

Some time ago, I was going through some personal problems and I was in search of a tool that would help me organize things for me the way I want. Myself and FourScouts have tried so many tools (Basecamp, Confluence, Jira, Trello, ZenKit, OneNote ....), but all of them fell short for me.

Until I came across Notion, and to this moment I don't know how I did without it 😀. It is a really flexible tool, but not flexible enough to keep you lost. 

Pretty much all of our internal documentation, communication, book sharing, todos, workshops, ideas are now in Notion and it keeps growing. You can check our templates in here.

Notion has an integration with slack that notifies a channel when changes occur, including the changes.  

When we were gathering feedback  for our podcast (Roasting Marshmallows), instead of adding the feedback directly on Slack for a quick conversation that would get lost in the big pile of messages, we added them into Notion and Notion drops a message in slack to notify everyone.

That way we have it saved in our internal documentation and can notify everyone about it and still have conversations on slack about it. 

Google Calendar

I no longer need to go to Google Calendar website. Do you need to schedule a lot of meetings with your colleagues? And like me, you are not a fan of doing that via the confusing UI of Google Calendar? Well, this integration will change your life, I am sure of it!

This integration has 4 key features for me.

• Visualizes who is in a meeting.
  
  
  
• Shows my schedule including notifications from my calendar
  
  
  
• Enables us to Schedule a meeting with everybody from the channel with time conflicts.
  
  
• After scheduled via Slack, everyone can see that we schedule a meeting, and who is attending.
  

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Gmail

We managed to kill emails for internal communication 💪, whenever we need to share an email we used to copy that to a channel on Slack to have a conversation about it.

The main issue was, people did not know how to format it properly or forgot to select parts of the message. It would be very handy if you could only click on a button and don't be bothered about format.

You get the gist of it by now, another integration 😂. Directly from Gmail you can send the whole email to a channel to discuss it with your colleagues. 

And this is how it would look on your slack:

Simple Poll

That is very easy. Whenever you want to decide, what the podcast name will be? Who will organize the next event? What do we buy as a gift for a customer?

Just create a poll like this and wait for people to vote.

Conclusion

I believe that these tools are a great way to push communication to the team; it makes us ask less, search less and find more. Do you have any tips of how your team does it? I would love to learn and integrate more in our way of working.