Module 6 checkpoint: your free PM stack

Your free PM stack: one spreadsheet, one Drive folder, one calendar, one talking layer, one optional Site. Five tools. Zero dollars. Everything else is luxury.

A complete community-PM stack on the free tier looks like this. Spreadsheet for tasks, decisions, KPIs (Google Sheets). Drive folder for documents, organized by phase (Google Drive). Calendar with the project's key dates and recurring meetings (Google Calendar). Talking layer for real-time team coordination (WhatsApp, Slack free tier, or Signal). Optional: a Google Site as a project home page that links to all the above.

Total cost: $0. Total setup time: about 90 minutes if you do it deliberately. Cohorts of organizers run six-figure campaigns on this stack. You do not need anything else until your team grows past ten people or your funder requires it.

When you do graduate to paid tools, do so deliberately. Asana, Notion, and Monday all have nonprofit discounts and useful features — but they earn their way in by removing a real bottleneck you can name, not by promising organization in general. The right time is when the team has outgrown the spreadsheet, not when someone sees an ad.

The skill you are building is not "which tool to pick". It is "how to set up the lightest scaffolding that lets a team trust each other to follow through". The tools come and go. The scaffolding skill stays.