January’s CMXvan meetup was a fast-paced evening of demos and Ignite-style mini-presentations on the tools, services, and techniques Community Managers use to create more impact.What are the indispensable pieces of software in a Community Manager’s toolkit? What are our secret weapons to allow us to work productively?

Community Manager’s Toolkit Demos

NOTE: this is gonna be Mac-centric, but there’s equivalents for all of this on the PC. 

Loom

Sophie Bujold uses Miro to create instantly shareable videos for tutorials, stewardship, and relationship building.

• Get Loom
• Free plan available

Miro

Sophie Bujold’s key key of software for working remotely with her clients is Miro. Scalable, secure, cross-device and enterprise-ready team collaboration whiteboard for distributed teams. 

• Miro | Team Collaboration Software‎
• Free plan available

Google Forms and Form Ranger

Dylan Morgan demonstrated Google Forms and Form Ranger.

Form Ranger allows you to auto-populate the choices in list, multiple choice, checkbox or grid question options from columns of data in any Google Sheet or Doctopus roster.

Then Eli did a string of demos…

TextExpander

Putting An End To Repetitive Typing

• Pricing: $40/year

Screenflow

Creating screencasts for member support and training

• Event example
• Helping example for my Father
• $129 forever

Pastebot

Copy and Paste board…. keep your last 100 items in your cut and paste board.

• Alternative: Ditto. Free! Awesome!
• $13 forever

The Noun Project

Icons for every topic.

• Site
• Free, but with attribution and only in B&W
• Or the paid version at $40/year

1Password

You have one thousand passwords. You need help!

• Pricing: $36/year

Boomerang

The Un-CRM that makes sure you never forget anything.

• Many of the features are getting added to gmail, like “nudge” and “send later”. But the “nudge” can’t be set or controlled. It’s all magic algorithm.
• But you can set it to resurface emails that have not received replies.
• Free for 10 scheduled emails, then $60/year

Markdown

Easily turn plain text into HTML (or whatever other formats you need)

• Markdown cheatsheet
• Markdown converter
• Use an app like Typora
• Show copying in HTML and then to blog.

Apple Text Services

Text cleanup and transformations built into the OS.

• Highlight text and then get: Statistics , Title Case , ALL CAPS, and more.
• Set your own keyboard shortcuts: System Preference -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts
• Additional options: WordService set