When it comes to communicating with your VA, it’s not a case of one size fits all. At The Arts VA, we tailor the way we work with our clients to fit their needs and preferences. Here are five of the most popular ways to communicate with your VA.
1. Slack
This is a messaging app for businesses to easily communicate with their team. You can have group chats or informal one-on-one chats and you can create channels for specific projects.
We also use Slack to share documents and pin important messages. You’ll be able to see when your VA has read a message so you can keep track of what they’re working on. The app can be used on all devices so it’s a great way of communicating on the go.
If you need help managing your to-do list, Asana and Todoist are apps that we use a lot (there are other similar apps, but these are our favourites!). These allow us to easily keep track of the tasks we need to do for our clients.
We can share our to-do lists with our team and our clients, and they can easily assign tasks for us to do as well as comment or message us on the app. The lists can be project based with invites to relevant members of the team and you can set up alerts so you are notified when your VA completes a task.
We provide inbox management for many of our clients, and it can be useful if they use an email app that allows you to share and comment on emails. There are other similar apps around but Spark and Front are the ones our clients use - although we’re not a massive fan of Spark as it’s currently not available for Windows.
These email services allow you to assign emails for your VA to deal with, keep track of deadlines, and easily communicate with them.
4. Phone or video call
Some of our clients prefer to have a regular call over the phone or video call, such as on Zoom or Google Meet. This can be weekly, monthly or whenever you need to chat about something.
You may find it helpful to talk things through and delegate tasks or you may just want to use your VA as a sounding board to talk through an idea or a deal you’re not sure about.
5. Email or Whatsapp
You may prefer to email tasks over or forward emails to your VA that you’d like them to deal with. The downside to this is you always need to check who the email is being sent to as you don’t want to reply to your client when you mean to send the email to your VA. As VAs, we check and check our work again to avoid mistakes.
Some of our clients worry that emails get lost in their busy inboxes and find Whatsapp is easier. While some VAs have boundaries in place where they prefer to not be contacted by Whatsapp, if this is your preferred method of communication ask your VA. You can read more about how to find the right VA for you in this blog.
The Arts VA
The Phantom of the Opera will take to the stage in China next year. This will be the first time the show will be performed in Mandarin.
Vault Creative Arts are launching a new cafe, bar and creative space. The Glitch, in Waterloo, will include a performance space with a capacity of 80 people and will host theatre, comedy and spoken-word artists, as well as quiz and open mic nights.
Get in touch!
If you have any questions about working with The Arts VA, you can contact Charlie here.