Our sister company, Innovation Women, provides a platform for women to share their expertise through public speaking and serving as subject matter experts for journalists. The platform connects event managers with awesome speakers who just happen to be entrepreneurial, technical and professional women. We asked a number of Innovation Women members, entrepreneurs and business owners all, what tech tools they find vital for their work.
Susan Baracco
Working as a ghostwriter, editor, and project manager, Baracco uses her company Story Architect for Women as a platform to tell the stories of female leaders. She offers coaching and free resources for authors, and her overall goal is to “help a million women become authors.”
Out of all tech tools, Baracco relies on LinkedIn to connect with potential clients. “I love that it is primarily a business- and professional-focused platform. It’s a great place to network, connect with my prospects, and post expert content.” If there was anything about the website she’d like to change, though, it would be reviving “the groups functionality in some practical way [because] groups have died on this platform.”
Dr. Jennifer Meller
CEO Dr. Jennifer Meller founded Navimize, a virtual waiting room platform, back in 2016. From the onset, it was meant to automate healthcare through scheduling management and use notifications to communicate with patients, removing the need for a traditional waiting room. Now, Navimize helps to ensure patient and provider safety for COVID-19 and beyond. Within her company, she said that Zoom was her tool of choice because of how easy it is to use and how rarely issues pop up. If she had the chance to change anything, she would add “the ability to catalog recorded meetings or make it easier to send links to others.”
Farhana Cannon
Cannon is the founder of iMedia Exposure, a digital marketing company that she describes as “social media and brand experts to help brands attract and convert the perfect client online.” Their focus is on developing social campaigns, assisting with branding and website creation.
With such a large focus on social media, her tool of choice is Planoly to help prepare and schedule their content. As she explained, “Instagram is an aesthetically-driven social media platform. When brands effectively tell their brand story while creating a visually appealing layout, they gain more followers. Planoly allows you to achieve this result.” She noted that it wasn’t possible to change the content of a post individually for platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, but still highly recommended the tool.
Susan Israel
As the Founder and Executive Director, Israel started Climate Creatives to conduct sustainability outreach for the general public and with partnering organizations. She uses her design background as an architect to create workshops and participatory public art.
When talking about the tech tools she uses, she said that her major focus was being able to “quickly communicate to my community with refined visuals.” She uses Constant Contact for marketing, and Squarespace to manage Climate Creatives’ website. If she could change anything about these services, she would make it easier to replicate content onto other pages or newsletters.
Addie Swartz
Swartz founded reacHIRE with the goal of partnering with forward-thinking companies. She wanted to create opportunities for women at all ages and stages of their careers. The company has a particular focus on helping women reenter the workforce and thrive in their new jobs.
With so many tech tools on the market, Swartz said that she loves G Suite partly for its ubiquity. “Since many people are familiar with Gmail, it’s allowed us to onboard people faster,” she explained. “A glut of available business tools makes it important for business owners to choose carefully to ensure they help rather than hinder the achievement of business objectives. We use G Suite for its diverse offerings, collaboration features, and flexibility, especially useful now in a virtual work environment. Overall, it is easy-to-use, multi-functional, and affordable for a small business on the rise.”
If she could talk to Google developers? She’d ask for workflow automation, because it “would be a good addition to G Suite to orchestrate the various pieces and stages of projects and reduce manual tracking via sheets and emails.”
Kimberly Y. Moore
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., Moore leads Go Together, Inc., a transportation platform for schools and educational districts. Their app CarpooltoSchool allows parents to coordinate carpooling options for their kids. Similarly, Moore named Airtable as her tool of choice because of its collaborative focus. She can manage her team’s tasks and work alongside them on their projects.
Melissa Harrison
Harrison, the founder and CEO of marketing agency Allée Creative, manages a wide variety of projects for their clients: print products, digital media, event planning, training sessions, and webinars. Considering the scope of their work, Harrison said that Asana is crucial for tracking their tasks.
“I use [Asana] daily to keep myself on task with business deliverables and client deliverables. I work on multiple projects a day and everything has different due dates and timing. Within Asana, I divide by project or client and then by tasks,” she said. “It’s a platform that you can invite others to join as part of your team or that you can use individually. You can drag and drop to reorganize, view in calendar or list formats, track goals, and sync workloads with other team members. It’s the ultimate tool for tracking daily to-dos (and planning far into the future). With this tool, I never miss a deadline.”
Robyn Bolton
MileZero’s Founder and Chief Navigator Robyn Bolton centers her business consulting around one key idea: innovation. She works with Fortune 1000 companies to help establish meaningful revenue streams through coaching, roadmap development, and other projects. Because she works with clients directly, she has to schedule plenty of meetings. For that, she utilizes Calendly “because it saves the email back and forth normally required for scheduling.”
To expand on the service, she said that she’d “like to be able to send custom scheduling options. For example, I’m happy to have a call with a client any time. If the call is more social, though, I’d like to send options that are a bit later in the day.”
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