Your Collaborators Don’t Have Asana Accounts? Here’s How to Keep Them Informed

Your Collaborators Don’t Have Asana Accounts? Here’s How to Keep Them Informed

Throughout the course of your project, you will most likely have to collaborate with people outside of your team, such as contractors, vendors, freelancers, partners, or clients. While it’s easy to share information with people who have Asana accounts, what do you do if they don’t?

Luckily, you can still keep non-users in the loop and exchange information about key project tasks using email notifications. The notifications include project reminders as well as updates on activity and dashboards. This lets non-user collaborators have a one-way view of the project’s progress through daily report emails or weekly project digests. You or anyone on your team can also @mention the collaborator’s email address in any comment. Asana will then send them an email with your message. The collaborator can reply to the emails, and your team will get notifications about their reply and be able to read it directly in asana.

How do you get this done? Let’s walk you through the steps of one of our favourite Asana tips:

 

1. Create a seperate email account. You will use it to forward Asana notification emails. For example, “management-team@yourcompany.com”.

 

2. Go to the Asana team that the collaborators will contribute to, and send an invite to managementbusinessX@yourcompany.com.

 

There are three ways you can send an invite on Asana:

 

At the sidebar, select the + button under your team’s name.

 

 

Click the orange + button and select Invite.

 

Click the + button below your page’s header.

 

 

If you’re using several accounts on your computer, you can log-in to managementbusinessX@yourcompany.com in one browser and log-in to your main Asana & Gmail accounts in another browser.

 

3. Accept the invite in your email inbox and create a new Asana account.  

 

4While logged into management-team@yourcompany.com, take a moment to configure your email notifications. Next, select the + icon below the header and visit the “My Profile Settings section.” Navigate to the email tab and check or uncheck any of the checkboxes to configure your email notifications.

 

There are 3 kinds of notification emails: Reminders, Activity, and Weekly Digests. One of the key Asana tips is to make sure that you pick the right kind of subscription for your collaborators.

 

Reminders

Reminders will send out email notifications for assigned tasks as they approach and pass their due date. For the collaborator to receive this notification, any of the following conditions must be satisfied:

  • The task is incomplete
  • The task is assigned to managementbusinessX@yourcompany.com
  • The task has a due date

 

If all three conditions are met, your collaborator will receive the following notifications:

  • 7 days before the task’s due date
  • 1 day before the task’s due date
  • On the day of the task’s due date
  • 1 day after the task’s due date (overdue)
  • 7 days after the task’s due date (overdue)

 

Reminders are only sent to the task assignee. Task followers will not receive reminders.

 

Activity

 

These notifications are sent whenever there are actions and changes (i.e. likes, comments, conversations) performed by people on the project or task. You won’t receive notifications for actions and changes you’ve made yourself.

 

Dashboards

 

These notifications consist of progress charts and status updates for the project, and are sent once a week.

 

In your Profile settings, select the type of notifications with your external collaborators in mind. You might want to subscribe to the weekly dashboard. If you subscribe to the activity feed, limit the tasks you are assigned to. You don’t want to send too many email notifications and get marked as Spam by the people you work with.

 

5. Once you’ve chosen the type of notifications you’ll send, open the email account you want to forward messages from like managementbusinessX@yourcompany.com. Turn automatic forwarding on to send notifications to external collaborators in your mailing list. Here are the steps you need to follow in Gmail.

 

Do you have any other Asana tips for working with an external collaborator? Let us know in the comments or tweet us at @unitoio!