How to Build a Client Portal OUTSIDE of ClickUp (perfect for Notion, Dubsado, or Slack integration)

You've finally done it. You, champion of the world, have figured out how to get all of your projects and tasks and initiatives and jobs all inside of ClickUp. They're all organized. Everyone in your team is bowing down and treating you like a saint. Or at least they should be because you did such a great job. There's only one problem. Despite you just being the hero to your entire team, it's become a little challenging to get your clients, that people your team serves, to use the ClickUp based system. Unlike your team members or employees, they're not getting paid to use the system. And for many clients, including yours, that friction of having to log into ClickUp in order to use it is just way too much. It's too much work, it's too much ClickUp branding. It's just too much for what you want to provide to your customers. And so you're kind of left thinking, okay, how do I get my clients to get the benefits of ClickUp without me having to make them log into ClickUp and learn ClickUp? If that sounds like you, you are in for a treat. That is what this video is all about. I want to get one giant disclaimer out of the way. We are talking right now about ways to let your clients see and interact with ClickUp without having them be in ClickUp. Due the limitations of sharing right now with ClickUp and some of the feature requests that have not yet become features, the only way the scenarios I'm talking about here are possible are if you are alright with your client not being able to edit anything for a no login experience. We also need to be okay with a no editing experience. If you're all right with that trade off, we're going to get started here by walking through three different ways you can provide your client access into that ClickUp experience. Without having access. You get the whole idea here. In three different formats. All three are going to assume that we're starting off with a place where we already have our client tasks in ClickUp, such as what you see on the screen right here where I've got Marge Simpson as a client and I have all the tasks written out here. You need to have this first for any of these structures to work. If you're not familiar with how to create a client task list or a client plan of some kind, whether it's a list, a folder task does not matter. If you're not familiar with how to do this, or please watch these videos up at the top here and we'll show you more about that before you come back and watch this. Video disclaimers aside, what is our first option for giving our clients access to this? How do we get Marge to see what's going on with her project? The step one for all three of these options is going to be identical. So watch this one closely. What we're going to do first is to create a client focused view. For this, you can choose any view that you like that you think your clients would like. I think in this case I'm going to go ahead with a timeline view and I'm going to call this client view. Just so I know that this view is intended for client's eyes only. From here I'm going to make sure I have all my events scheduled because that's where timeline views really thrive. And let me just put a few tasks here and so on. All right, so I've dragged my tasks onto the schedule so that they're all visible here. And now I have a timeline view built with the client in mind. At this point in time, I've got all my tasks here, but I really only want to show the client certain things. This is an optional step, but you can. In my case, I'm going to filter this down to only show tasks that are the key milestones in the project. Because in this example, I've got some pretty nosy clients and I only really need them to know the things they need to know and anything else would just distract them. So I'm going to focus this down to just show those key client view dates. I'm going to then adjust my range to be a month at a time so that they can see things at a bigger picture. And voila, we've got a slightly ugly view here of what we've got going on for this client. Once we have this client ready view, it shows us all the things we want our client to see. We can go up to share and make this view a public view. This public link thing here is what we're going to need for the three options we're walking through in this video. So give this a click. If you're having a hard time finding where to locate this public link, just Google click up public link. You'll find it there. They tend to keep moving this around the interface over the years, so it may shift around by the time you see this. Nonetheless, it's in there. Once we do this, we are ready to click Copy public link to get a link that anyone can see. If we visit this link in a new tab, even in incognito, we can See the exact same unhelpful information that we could have seen inside of our ClickUp account without having to log in. This right here is the ingredient we need in order to make these logged out portal variation things. Okay, so that public link, this is what we want. I'm going to copy this here and we are going to move on to option number one. What do we do with this link to actually make it something our clients can utilize as a client portal of sorts? Well, your first option here is to take this link or the embed code below it, which is very similar. I'll show you the differences here and embed it into a public resource of some kind of. So what we're going to do is we are going to take the information from ClickUp here. In this case, let's just take the public link, I'm going to copy that and I'm going to locate any resource I have already shared with my client. Maybe it's something like a website page, a Google document. In this case I'm going to use a Notion based client portal. Notion is another software, if you're not familiar, that's kind of known for being a really cool word document database, that thing. And let's just say I have been in the habit of using Notion for my client portals. Well, Notion, like most other web based tools allow me to embed information into it. So just like a Google Doc or anything else, I could put this link in here and watch as it generates a preview of the ClickUp based information. Once I drag the handles out to give it a little bit more space on this client portal, I have taken the ClickUp based information and embedded it in inside my Notion portal. And again, this same thing could work with any other public tool you have. Again, a Google Doc, a Trello board, whatever it is that you already share with your client, just take the link that we found together here inside of our view settings and put it in that area. As long as your tool allows you to have embedded links, which most tools online will allow you to do, that will work. Even if your tool for some reason does not let you put an embedded link, you can still hyperlink in just about every tool that so you can paste the link there and that way it's clickable even if it's not able to be seen in there. Either way, that is option number one for how to get a client portal without having folks in ClickUp take your ClickUp based information and embed it in a publicly viewable or shareable spot that you're Comfortable with that, has your branding that looks amazing that you want your client to see. But Layla, this is my client portal. I don't want my embedded information to be in a public resource. I need it to be password protected or inside membership or something like that. If that's the case for you, I want to bring you to number two here. Our second option for building a client portal without really building a portal is to take that same public link and put it behind a password protected area. Now the most obvious password protected area to put this would be inside ClickUp itself in a dashboard, which we talk about in this video, which I think I already mentioned. But if we want to sidestep ClickUp and all of its spammy emails, the other tools we can look at are existing tools in your tool stack. What are the tools you use to schedule calls? What are the tools you use to manage your existing client experience? Do you have a website with a password protected page? Do your clients log into something? Wherever your clients actually already are would be the best place to put this information. For example, I'm going to take this public link, I'm going to go inside the tool called Dubsado, which is a common business management tool and I'm going to add this as a one time link inside of the membership. So I'm going to call this here. I'm going to hold this project status. This is going to be a custom link just for this client that I can add in to their client portal. I'm going to apply it here and so on. When I go down here and ensure that portal is activated and then view that client portal that I've created. Once I log into that client portal, I'm going to see that project status link here inside the existing Dubsado client portal that I already have access to. For the vast majority of online businesses that have used software in the past like you're not brand new, you probably already have a piece of software that allows you to create a password protected area just like Dubsado does here. Whether that is Dubsado, your website, your squarespace site, which I guess is still a website, your membership platform, your checkout system, your order system, odds are you already have this. But if you don't, maybe you want to consider using ClickUp for this option, in which case maybe this whole video was a strange watch for you. But that is number two. Take the private link, put it behind a password protected area of some kind that your client already has access to. That password protected area then becomes your client portal and you put everything all in that without having to make ClickUp an additional step for the client. Now speaking of additional steps, both of the things I've talked about so far is basically asking your client to complete additional steps to find the status of their project, to see the mood board they have to go into Notion, they have to go into Dubsado, they have to go into that tool. So for our third option for making a non login client portal, I want to suggest we get rid of that rather than making a client portal at all. Let's just not A lot of times, particularly in the Process Driven membership, we've had a few masterminds that touched on using ClickUp with clients. We've had countless forum discussions about it and so often it comes up that service providers or, you know, productized service providers will comment about how they build this amazing client portal. They build this client hub and no one ever logs into it, no one ever looks and they want to figure out how can I get my client to use this? Well, why? Why do they need to use it if they're not using it? Maybe they just don't need it, they don't want it. If that sounds like your client that maybe a client portal like these just aren't necessary. Your third option is to make a non client portal by simply not having a client portal. Instead, allow clients to stay in the loop as needed by using the communication form that they are already using. Again, you catch a theme here. Instead of building any of the stuff we just talked about, take this public link and put it in the signature of your emails that you send to a client. For example, here is an email I may be sending to a client and I could have this email templated as part of the onboarding process or as part of my reminders before upcoming events. And in this email I include a P.S. saying you can view the status of your project at any time by visiting this link. I include this in every single email I send to the client. Maybe not as a standard signature, but as something I bake in to every email response or email template that I use. By the way, I'm showing you this right now inside of Missive. You can learn more about that tool here. It's amazing, but even if you're using just Yahoo or Google or Outlook, you can implement this by incorporating these PSs into your automated tools or into just your plain old fashioned email templates. This PS works as the client portal. All your client has to do is click on this link or forward this email and let that person click on this link in order to see the status of their project at any moment in time. For many clients, that's way more convenient than having to log in and remember one more password just to see what's going on on a project. If you are using Slack with your clients, post this in that Slack channel and pin it. Save it to the description of the Slack channel. If you're using Voxer again, add this as a pinned vox message inside of Boxer, WhatsApp, whatever. Same deal. Put this link there and bypass the whole portal thing, particularly if your clients do not use the portals you have. Anyway, these three options that I just shared with you of taking this link, putting it somewhere public, putting it somewhere password protected, and putting it somewhere frictically lists. All three of these options are great ways to avoid those extra steps of having your client need to log in to ClickUp. However, I do want to remind you that these public sharing links that I'm showing you here that we demonstrated earlier on these links are public links. Just like an unlisted YouTube video or a public Google Doc. Anyone who has this link can see that information. For most people and what you share with clients, that's not a big deal. If someone knows that you have a kickoff call, it doesn't say anything incriminating, but I want you to be aware of that so you're not sharing things more widely than you can or should. If you have strong privacy concerns around the work that you're doing, this public view path is not going to be the best path for you, and the additional friction of those logins is probably going to be worth it for security. But if you're doing something a little bit more loose, if you just need to keep people in the loop on big picture things, this public link sharing is a valuable way to keep things super easy, super light, and yet make sure your clients know enough to feel confident in your work as a service provider. Now I want to make sure I give credit where credit is due. A lot of the ideas you heard about in this video here were based on conversations I personally had with members of the ProcessDriven membership. Oh a few months back when we had a group roundtable around the topic of clients and ClickUp. So if you are someone who has been curious about this topic for a while, you've been wondering why haven't we covered it on the channel yet? Maybe it's time that you join us inside the membership. The membership is where most of our time sensitive content comes out. It's where I spend most of my time and it's where our latest and greatest and I would say our most up to date resources and best practices regarding ClickUp and process, they all live inside that membership. Whereas YouTube here I'm recording this several months in advance and it's not always the most time sensitive the content we put out here. So if you are interested in learning more resources like this, you want to be on the inside track, get that information when it's most valuable to you. Check out the description below. I've got information about how you can join us inside the membership and get the full experience of all the work that ProcessDriven does here. But otherwise, thank you guys so much for watching here today. Like, subscribe, comment, all that good stuff. I'll see you next week and until next time, enjoy the process.