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As an all-in-one workspace, Notion has a lot of features for project management that are applicable to managing a campus club. When I was a VP Design at the Women+ In Technology Society (WITS+), I was fascinated by how intricate yet efficient our Notion team workspace was. It seems pretty intimidating, but once you figure out the basics and a template you can duplicate, you’ll be able figure out what features you can leverage and customize to your own club’s ideal workflow and productivity goals.

This article will take you on a deeper dive into how to leverage Notion’s customizable features to take your campus club workflows to the next level!

To jumpstart your club’s customization process we can jump into some of Notion’s key project management use cases that are specific to managing a campus club.

Setting up a team wiki

“Hey where can I find our club manifesto again? Where’s our sponsorship package located? Do you know where we put our…”

Similar to how a lot of startup companies use Notion, setting up a team wiki is super useful as a centralized hub for all club-related things, which makes for a much smoother, more accessible team experience for all members. When your workflow fills up with different files over time — from different years, different events, and different executive teams — it can get overwhelming to backtrack in the traditional linear format that’s typical of other popular platforms such as Google Drive. Finding old resources, documents, links, contacts, etc. from the past can be a pain, especially if there isn’t a file naming convention that everyone follows.

By creating a centralized team workspace with pages and links to other pages categorized in a way that makes sense for your organization, on-boarding between new and existing or leaving team members becomes a lot easier with fewer questions asked. With less decision-making lag, your club can minimize the common happenings of organizational confusion & clutter, leaving more of your precious time to get to the good stuff — planning events, finding sponsors, creating marketing materials, training your members, etc.

WITS+ uses Notion religiously, organizing our team workspace into pages specific for our different uses. In the left navigation bar, you can see that we not only have workspaces specific to different club departments, but also a page for our weekly all-hands meetings, task management, workspace requests, and an alumni directory for our members to easily find and contact any of our previous executive members!

Meeting minutes

“I know we talked about this in our last meeting but I forgot what we decided…”

Meetings make up the backbone of a successful, efficient, and productive campus club. To take advantage of all the good stuff that comes out of team brainstorm sessions and weekly stand-ups, meetings need proper and accessible documentation for the participants, and sometimes for people who missed out or may need access to what was discussed later on.

There are a number of ways you can use Notion to make and organize your meeting notes, and mine is definitely databases. If you have recurring meetings or if the date matters, including your meetings in an in-line database is great because you can filter, sort, and organize your regular meeting notes in a variety of views.

At WITS+, I used the database as a default state to set up meetings with specific properties that would help me slice and filter my meetings by date, topic, and attendees. During my weekly meetings with my design team, I created a custom meeting notes template pre-set with headings and agendas which saved me time in meeting prep while keeping our meetings organized and conversations productive.

• In this, I’d usually put the things I want to cover in checkboxes and any meeting notes taken during the meeting under the headings I created during meeting prep
• With notes all in one database and different properties to be filters, designers and other WITS+ execs know exactly where to look if they ever need to reference something we discussed before
  • Accessible by navigating to the database or by using the trusty search function on Notion — less pain from going back and forth long breadcrumb trails on something like docs
• At the end of our meeting, I’d always delegate next steps and tasks to be assigned to the designers
  • Embedded in the meeting template, I have a link to another database dedicated to tracking, organizing, and assigning tasks

Task management

“Oh I completely forgot I had to do that…I didn’t know that was assigned to me…who’s responsible for this….”

Using a database for an agile workflow lets you take advantage of the different properties and views that suit your teams specific needs.

• Assignees — I used this property to tag and assign specific designers and other execs involved to specific tasks that we had scheduled.
• Date — I used the date property to set deadlines and reminders to send notifications to each designer assigned to a specific task, allowing for a smooth and efficient workflow within the design team and throughout WITS+.
• Relation — Creating relationships between databases allowed for a more logical flow of information, breaking larger projects down into manageable tasks for our designers

Variable views (kanban, calendar, table)

The beautiful thing about databases is the ability to customize and save different views with pre-set filters. This is great for visualizing for different use cases while centralizing all of your information in one place.

In my WITS+ design workspace, I used different views in conjunction with the properties to fully enhance my team’s workflow:

• Kanban board view to organize what tasks were assigned to who
• Calendar view to capture my team’s weekly and monthly capacity and to stay on track with marketing schedules
• Table view to easily search and filter for specific meeting notes

Conclusion

The amazing thing about Notion is that there are endless ways for your team to customize your workspace to match your workflow best. Want to keep all your club stuff in one organized spot? Notion's got you covered with its neat team workspace and categorized pages. No more digging around for meeting notes or important docs - they're all there, easily accessible. And when it comes to managing tasks, Notion's like your personal taskmaster, helping you keep track of who's doing what and when it's due. Plus, it lets you customize things to fit your club's unique vibe. So, whether you're a club veteran or just starting out, Notion's here to make your club life a whole lot smoother and more productive.

I’ve included a template that mirrors the WITS+ examples I mentioned throughout the article — feel free to duplicate it and iterate on it with your team — try, test, reflect, and try again! Good luck and have fun 🫶🏼

Get the template

Campus Club Management