How to Build a Trello Master Board (2-Way Card Sync)

How to Build a Trello Master Board (2-Way Card Sync)

Wouldn't it be great if you could spend most of your time in a single Trello board

and have all of your cards sync to other projects, other Trello boards that you are currently working on? Well, in today's video I'm gonna show you how to create a master board right here within Trello which is gonna make your life so much easier.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping to get you more done and enjoy less stress.

Overview

And what I've got here is an example where I have a master client board and I've got a few other boards here.

I've got something called a red client board and a green client board.

Now in this example, I've got a few different clients here.

I've got a red client that I'm working with here.

I've given them access to this board as we work together.

And the same thing for the green client.

I've given them access and I'm gonna be working with them as well.

But I don't wanna be bouncing around these boards or dozens of different boards as I work with my various clients.

That's too much back and forth.

I'd rather work with them all within a single Trello board, i.e. a master client board.

And here you can see my labels.

I've got my green client tasks and I've got my red client tasks.

And the beauty of this setup is that anything that I do here is going to sync directly with these particular boards.

So let's take a look at an example here.

Let's say that I want to move this red client task, cancel unused subscriptions into In Progress.

Well, it's pretty simple.

I'm just gonna drag it and drag it over into In Progress.

Let's take a look at what happens on the red client board.

Red Client Board

And boom! There it is.

Now it's moved from the To-Do to the In Progress list on the red client board.

And I've never even visited this board.

I did all of those actions within my master client board.

What about in the opposite direction?

Let's take a look at the green client board, and let's say that my client is wanting me to review this.

So he's gonna move this starting task into this In Review list.

So he's gonna drag it over here and now if we go back to the master client board, now it's ready for me to see as it is moved from In Progress to In Review.

So as you can see, everything is synced two ways.

No matter what I do here on the master client board, it is going to sync to these individual client boards and it knows which ones it needs to sync to based on these labels.

Now master boards can be used in so many different ways.

You can use it for a sales process or any type of workflow where maybe you want someone, a particular board to receive it or be assigned to someone only in a particular list.

Maybe if you want to assign not just a label but maybe an individual member and then you want them to pop up on a particular board somewhere else, you can use a master client board in so many different ways.

Board Sync Powerup

Now in order to achieve this, what we're using is the board sync power-up by Unito.

Now to enable the board sync power-up, you wanna come down to power-ups and I recommend that you type in Unito.

Now Unito actually has several different power-ups as you can see here. The one we are looking for here is the one called boards connected and synced with Unito.

Now there's several other different power-ups that they provide. You can see that Unito actually provides syncing capabilities with products such as Asana, GitHub, Jira, Wrike and many, many more.

But for our master board example, we want boards connected and synced with Unito.

Benefits

Once you have that set up, I'm gonna show you step by step how you can create this sync for yourself.

But just before I do, let's talk about some of the other benefits of using this type of setup. Not only is there no more back and forth between myself and these other boards that I have up here, but anything that I add in terms of a description, in terms of comments, in terms of a due date, attachments, checklist, anything you name is automatically going to sync two ways back and forth with its respective board.

The other thing that I love about this setup is that as I'm setting up, let's say I'm setting up a new task here. Let's just call this new task for the green client.

Now you can see that I haven't assigned a label yet, meaning that nothing's gonna happen yet because I haven't assigned that particular label. So I can build out a number of different cards here. I can go in here and add a detailed description. Maybe I want to take my time building out a lengthier checklist and so forth. I can do that. I don't have to worry about this being synced to one of my other boards, one of my client boards immediately. I can take my time and build out this or multiple cards.

Now when it's ready to go, all I need to do is apply the appropriate label and in this case it's gonna be for that green client. So I'm gonna apply the green client label.

Now if we jump back over to the green client board, now you can see that that new task for green client has synced over. Now they're ready to take it on and start to move it through the process, move it through the workflow.

So, so many different ways in which we can use a master client board.

Setup

Let's show you how to set up your own client board, your own master client sync.

Here I've got a third client called the yellow client and this one is not synced just yet. So let's go ahead and show you how to set up this particular sync.

So what we wanna do is select that board sync option here and you can see that I've got a few already enabled here. I've got the green client and I've got the red client, but we're gonna set up a new one. So we're gonna select add sync.

So in this case it's gonna ask us which tools do you want to connect? And because we're already in the master client board, that's gonna come up as the default. That's great. That's one of the ones that I do want to sync. Let's come over here and select the board that we want to sync to. Now let's get a list. It's gonna give you the option of all of your boards with this particular account, but you can search by name. So I'm gonna pick the yellow client board there. Perfect. So those are the two boards that we wanna sync in this case. And we do want a two-way connection. We want information to be flowing back and forth.

Now you can set up a one-way sync if you only want information to flow in one direction. But in this case, we want that two-way sync. I'm gonna select next.

And the next thing that we need to decide is what kind of tasks do we want to filter? Now in this particular example, we're only gonna choose one side of this. And this is on the master client board. The reason being is that we only want cards that have that yellow label, that yellow client label to sync over to this board. If we left this as is, everything on my master client board would show up here on the yellow client board. We obviously don't want that.

So what we're gonna do from this dropdown menu, we've got several options. We can use labels, which we're gonna use, but I just wanna show you some of the other things we can do as well. We can sync cards only from a particular list, that could be very, very helpful or from a particular member. So the instant that you add a member, maybe it goes to their own personal Trello to-do list board or something of the like.

But let's come up to labels. We're gonna say only sync cards with any of the following labels, and all we have to do next is select that label. If I scroll down, there we go. There's that yellow client label that I created earlier. I'm gonna select that. So now only things with that yellow client label are gonna be synced to that yellow client board.

We're gonna hit next here. Again, there's nothing else we need to do there. We have a few options here that is very helpful to only sync new cards when you're testing things out. When you're first wanting to test a sync here with Unito, auto sync is highly recommended because you don't wanna go in and click the sync button from time to time. You want that to happen automatically.

And then we can customize a few other things if we want to. But in this case there's nothing else for us to do. So let's just hit create sync.

Now your first sync may take a few moments for it to make those certain connections. Here you can see the gears are working here. You can also see this little label here that's telling us that only new cards are going to be syncing. Like I said before, that's very helpful when you're first testing out your sync just to make sure that everything is working well the way that you want to. And then after it is, you can take it out of that test mode.

Testing

So let's go and use an example here with our new sync. Let's make sure it is working well.

So if we go to the yellow client board, you can see that there's nothing in there just yet. I'm gonna go to my master client board and let's say here's a new task for a new client, which happens to be my yellow client. So I don't have a label on it yet. Nothing's gonna happen. It's not gonna appear anywhere else, not in the red, not in the green, and not in the yellow just yet.

However, if I come down here and let's apply a label, let's apply that yellow client label. Now we've got that yellow client label. Let's see what's happening in the yellow client board. And beautiful. Now we have that task represented here. We have it in both places, the master client board where I created it and now my client can see it and access it and start to move it through this workflow.

So many different uses for the board sync power-up by Unito. So if you are interested in creating a master client board or to have a two-way sync between one or multiple boards within Trello, I recommend that you check out Board Sync by Unito.

Now, I'd love to hear from you next. How are you planning to use this type of power-up, this type of connection in your own Trello boards? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.