At Nicer we've used Notion to help wrangle projects and track our work both internal and client. We've even found ourselves helping get partners and clients setup and using Notion with their teams. Throughout this process, we've started to develop a structured pattern of connected databases that work for us. We thought we'd share that setup as a template for everyone. Hopefully, this helps spark some ideas, conversations, or merely ease the daunting nature that can be a brand new notion workspace.
The three tables you need to run an agency.
If you think about the life of a typical project, it starts as a lead, perhaps its an RFP or Referral. Your first step is to create a new entry in the CRM table (ours is based on the Lightweight CRM Template from Notion, with a few key additions).
Once a project closes, we'll add an entry to the projects database, and relate it to the corresponding entry on CRM. The project page is where we add high-level, relevant, project details. This page will vary based on your workflow, but for us, it typically looks like a collection of Dropbox links to the root folder, the Scope of Work, and the occasional Figma embed.
Here is where things may get a little overwhelming at first, but bear with us. We use a separate table for all tasks. Here you add every task across your entire agency, and then assign essentials, such as owner, project, client, due date, etc. By keeping all the tasks in a central table, we can pull in filtered instances of this table anywhere we'd like. One example of this is on individual project pages we often embed an instance of the tasks table and filter by that specific project.