Plan Your Ho-Ho-Holiday Office Party With Trello

It's beginning to look a lot like you'll be the one planning the office holiday party.

You’re in the holiday spirit, and since you know all the words to Jingle Bell Rock and incessantly hum it around the office, your co-workers graciously charged you with planning the Office Holiday Party.

In this scenario, your chipper Buddy the Office Elf persona can easily go from “Ho! Ho! Ho!” to “Ho! Ho! NO” fairly quickly when every water cooler chat becomes a deluge of questions about the holiday party: what should they bring to the potluck, who is bringing a guest, and most importantly where should you hide the karaoke machine after Sheryl from HR exceeds three drinks?

But there’s no reason you need to become a Scrooge over your new responsibility. Here are some ways Trello can be more helpful than a handful of elves in planning the perfect holiday party.

Get In The Holiday Spirit With An Organized Trello Board

First of all, think about how to structure your holiday office party planning board. With Trello, you can create a workflow and change it instantly by moving around list names as you add more categories, like “Favorite Holiday Songs!”  (or on second thought, decide to get rid of them later).

Start the board by creating an “Important Info” column. You can create a card for each relevant piece of information: date, time, location, dress code. 

Custom Fields come in handy here: You can add in more information, such as due dates for claiming a potluck dish, on the front of the card for team members to easily see. This way, every time you get bombarded with questions, you can just point your ever-curious (but always pleasant) coworkers to one central repository of information. 

In addition, you can always add more cards to this list as you add pressing details like “What time is Santa coming?”

The Nice And... Not So Nice Guest List

Next, you probably need to figure out who is making it to this holiday shindig, if they are bringing a plus one, and how to convince them to make their famous candy cane brownies for the potluck. Create a column called “Invited” and make cards for each person in the office (or rather, whoever your boss tells you to invite). Instruct those attending to drag their card to the appropriate list to the right, and add details like what they're bringing, and whether they will have a guest.

RSVPing using Trello is super simple: All people need to do is move their names from the “Invited” list to the appropriate RSVP column. They can even note if they are bringing a guest right on the card’s title. You may also choose to have labels that signify dietary restrictions which guests can put on cards. This way, everyone can enjoy the office potluck without the worry.

Don’t Get A Lump Of Coal In Your Stocking

The next column may be “What I’m Bringing to the Potluck” or “I’m Participating in Secret Santa” where co-workers can opt into holiday festivities by creating a card with their name on it. They may also choose to include the recipe of their famous latkes with sage butter (yum!) or attach a nice picture as a card cover to make everyone hungry when viewing the board.Since everyone can see the running total of attendees, guests can easily see how how many batches of cookies they need to bake.

In the Secret Santa list, you could also choose to add a card that describes how much people should spend on a gift, and whether it should be wrapped. Remember, the goal of this Trello board is to make you look as cool as Santa on Christmas Eve while keeping your stress levels to a low.

Before sending out your holiday party board to the rest of the office, make sure to check your settings and set the board to “Team Visible.” You can encourage coworkers to subscribe to the board so they get updates on changes, or just check in every once in awhile. Just make sure you don’t get a ton of emails from coworkers saying they can’t access the board because it’s still private:

Pro tip: Recommend that coworkers download the Trello desktop app and enable desktop notifications so their inbox doesn’t get bombarded with holiday planning updates.

Let your imagination run wild like Donner, Dasher, and Prancer! Here are some other ideas of how to impress coworkers while staying insanely organized:

1. Add a festive board background to your holiday planning board. Unsplash has some beautiful images available that are free to use for your boards!
2. Make a list called “Song Requests” so you only have to hear “All I Want For Christmas Is You” once.
3. Decorate your cards with all the trimmings using custom stickers.
4. Have coworkers participate in a holiday toy drive by adding a “Toy Drive” calling and creating cards for participants and gifts.
5. If someone insists on emailing you the details of their song requests or potluck recipe ideas, you can turn the email into a card thanks to the Trello Add-on for Gmail.

We’ve created a sample board you can easily copy to get the party planning started. Check out our sample board!

Next: Cards, Community, and Cleaning: Trello Holiday Hacks