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NEW Feature: Introducing Custom Fields 🎉

Oct 16, 2018
Post Masthead

Rindle is thrilled to bring more power to your workflows through a new feature called Custom Fields!

Have you ever been assigned a new task or decided to check up on a particular process and wished you had immediate context as to what you’re looking at? Maybe you just wished you could store information in a specific task so the next person who looks at it doesn’t have to go digging through a bunch of documents to understand where something is.

That’s exactly what custom fields will help you do. Custom fields enable you to store any relevant information in the actual task — making it more clear and efficient for anyone working with that task.

Custom fields can support:

  • Text fields - both numeric and text
  • Radios
  • Dropdowns
  • Checkboxes
  • Dates

We know you’ll come up with some amazing ways to leverage custom fields in your workflow, but here’s a few ways you can start using them today.

Client Onboarding & CRM

Custom fields enable you to store all kinds of data within a task, so if you’re using Rindle to manage a client onboarding process, you can now store information about the account type, specific setup requirements, main account owner, dedicated project manager, email addresses, notes, along with anything else you think will help the project run smoothly.

As tasks move through your workflow, you can also communicate as to whether certain activities have been completed yet or information been provided through the use of the “radio button” option. For example, let’s pretend that you need to communicate to your IT team to set up your new client’s account in your system. You can create a radio selection or dropdown in the task that says “Has account been configured?” and then “Yes / No” for the options.

As the task moves through the workflow, you can mark it complete after it’s confirmed that it’s completed, and anyone viewing the task afterwards will know that the crucial step has been finished.

You can also leverage custom fields if you’re using Rindle as a CRM. You can now store information about the company or person — like primary contact, budget, primary department, company size, company location, revenue, MRR, etc.

Marketing Campaigns

This is probably one of my favorite use cases — purely because I myself run a marketing team and always feel the need to communicate as much as possible to my freelancers and teammates.

Custom fields enable you to provide context for your marketing activities to anyone viewing them. Store information like target persona, stage of the customer journey, goals, type of marketing activity (like product marketing, retention, outbound emails, etc.), OKRs, etc. for the tasks in your marketing campaign (and overall marketing function).

That way, when your boss or CEO wants to see what marketing is working on, not only will she be able to see the actual tasks, she’ll have a clearer view of who marketing is targeting, and what impact the tasks have on any specific strategic goals.

The possibilities are endless with custom fields for marketing campaigns, and can help provide an entire layer of context, communication, and efficiency to your workflow.

External Deadlines

Often, our workflows have internal deadlines — meaning the things we need to make sure we’re executing on and preparing ahead of time. There are also external deadlines — the looming deadlines we need to make sure everyone is aware of at all times.

A perfect example? The deadline for GDPR — the global data regulation for Europe that officially became enforceable on May 25th, 2018.

Naturally, you wouldn’t want your team scrambling to get everything done on the date. You’d rather be early and prepared a month or two in advance to make sure all of your ducks were in a row, but it’s still important to communicate that extremely important external deadline.

Otherwise you get the question “When are we supposed to be ready, again?” every day.

A custom field for a date would be perfect in this scenario: it communicates the true deadline for the rest of the world, but you can still set your own due dates and start dates inside of Rindle for when your team will need to act on the tasks.

Plus, you can configure a custom field to display on the task-face.

These fields would also be excellent for virtually any kind of launch dates, event planning, or other external deadlines that are crucial (or detrimental) to your success.

Editorial Calendar

If you’re managing a content marketing function in your business, whether internally or for clients, you’re going to love working with custom fields — they are perfect for working efficiently with many writers, content mediums, official publish dates, and keeping track of if graphics are done, and more.

Similar to the marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to store important information like the target persona for the content piece, verify if the piece has been optimized for SEO, or the keyword you’re planning on targeting for the piece.

Using custom fields means content marketing has just gotten a lot easier, both for your business and your clients.

Product Launches & Management

Every now and again we get the question, “Can we use Rindle for managing a product?”

Absolutely — even more so with custom fields. If you’re working with product in any kind of way, you can include information like release name, official release dates, technical requirements for your engineers, and even scrum points if you’re leveraging the scrum methodology.

Getting Started with Custom Fields

Giving custom fields a whirl in Rindle is super easy! Have your account administrator configure whatever custom fields you need in a board, and then add them to your tasks.

More information on step-by-step instructions can be found here in the Help section.

Plus, get some more ideas on how to leverage your custom fields from our podcast Workflow! We cover a few ideas and use cases for custom fields that will help your team move as effectively as possible.