Do you miss the agency must-have of having stuff up on the wall? Have you run out of wall-space in your makeshift office at home? Or maybe you’re in the office, but the rest of your team is in another country?

Whether there’s a lag on your Amazon post-it note order or you just need a better way than holding your phone up to a wall on Zoom to show work in progress, Miro could be for you.

It’s an online whiteboard that allows real-time collaboration, with multiple people logged in to work on the same board. Think of it as like Google docs, but for stuff you’d put up on a wall rather than a screen.

We’ve used it recently for everything from strategising for our agency (prioritising the most effective actions we want to put our effort behind) to evaluating the behaviours a brand could adopt (from product development, to internal comms and culture to marketing) in order to reposition itself. The latter involved five different people across three different time zones.

The pluses

1. Much better than holding your laptop up on Zoom so your colleague can see your post-it wall (we’ve honestly done this during lockdown when developing a brand purpose, it worked better than you might think)
2. Much easier to collaborate in real time (no lag, nobody has to be the one typing/writing)
3. Can keep a record of your work in Miro (no “OMG somebody moved my post-its” dramas)
4. Variety of different templates for different tasks (quadrants, critical paths, etc)
5. Relatively intuitive to use
6. It’s free

The minuses

1. The writing is very small (maybe it’s my age). You can zoom in but it can still be a little fiddly when you’re trying to keep a workshop pacey (people need to zoom in to read things, zoom out, the cursor can sometimes be tricky)
2. As far as I can tell you need to have Zoom open (for audio) but work in Miro (not on screen share) to collaborate together. It’s fine, maybe a little clunky. Having this in Zoom would be dreamy
3. You need to keep order – everyone being able to collaborate (ie ,move things around) at the same time could spell chaos unless you’ve got clear facilitation and structure to your session

Conclusion

Well worth a try if you haven’t found a way that works for you so far. Not just a lockdown tool, but one that you could use when back in the office full-time (for example, to cut down on all agency meeting travel or work collaboratively across markets).

Written by Gemma Moloney, co-founder of communications agency SHOOK