A Little about Kevin Christley and 501st Legion

The 501st Legion is a worldwide StarWars costuming organization comprised of and operated by Star Wars fans. While it is not sponsored by Lucasfilm Ltd., it is a Lucasfilm preferred Imperial costuming group. Kevin Christley is a member of the 501st Legion, where he's Editor in Chief of the 501st Legion's Static Burst magazine and Detachment Leader of the 501st Special Operations Detachment. He's also a member of the Rebel Legion and the current Restoration Lead for LucasFilm Ltd's 3/4 Scale T-65 X-wing starfighter based out of the Wings over the Rockies Air Museum at Lowry, Colorado. Kevin is featured on page 174 of the 2008 Guinness Book of World Records as the 501st Legion Stormtrooper proudly carrying the flag of Finland in Lucasfilm Ltd's entry at the 2007 Rose Parade. He authored the article "Inside the 501st", published in Star Wars Insider 96, and often works with Lucasfilm Ltd and their marketing partners, such as M&M Mars and Del Rey, to coordinate volunteer staffing at promotional events.

501st Legion Challenge

Before Zoho Projects, we were stuck communicating via email and periodic video chats. It was very hard to coordinate times for schedules as people from around the world had to attend despite the time differences. We started out using CampFire, but quickly found that it just didn't come close to meeting our requirements as a world-wide team of editors and contributors.

Zoho Solution

We first heard about Zoho Projects when we were searching for an online product that would allow our geographically separated contributors and editors to easily work directly with the editorial staff of the newsletter.

We tried the trial version of Zoho Projects and it's continued to be the superior product in it's class, bringing us all closer despite being separated by thousands of miles. We create a separate project (so far, four projects) for each quarterly issue and it's made it a lot easier to work closely and to communicate well with both contributors, editors, and management staff. Each project has came together because of Zoho Project's ease of use and the ability to add new members to the team with just a click of the mouse.

The 501st Legion uses Zoho Projects to coordinate editors and contributors for the 501st Legion's quarterly 30-45 page newsletters. We produce a slick, free newsletter for the 4500 members and thousands of fans of our group, that does volunteer work for children charities, as well as representing Lucasfilm Ltd. at corporate functions and events such as the 2007 Rose Parade. Zoho Projects has met all of our expectations and more!

The Impact

The results of using Zoho Projects has vastly improved the coordination and execution of putting together a large quarterly newsletter. The readers love the slick, professional look and we've even received kudos from Lucasfilm employees when they see what the fans of Star Wars can do with an all-volunteer staff to help promote the saga while touting the good deeds of the 501stLegion.

Customer speak

We'd like to sincerely thank the folks at Zoho Projects for all of their hard work and dedication in making their product the best in class for executing Project Management tasks. We'd highly recommend it to anyone who's having problems co-ordinating and managing staff, especially on a global level. Thank you so very much for making it so easy to use and work with it's almost effortless !