How to Share Claude Projects and Chats With Your Team
If you run a small team, the most current client context probably sits in your own Claude chats. When you're on calls all day, your team either waits for you or rebuilds work you already did.
Claude's Team and Enterprise plans let you share two different things. A shared project gives teammates your instructions and files, and they start their own chats from there. A shared chat is a read-only snapshot of one conversation, like the launch strategy you worked through yesterday.
We're a Claude-first company at Coconut Breeze Media. Most of our day-to-day client work happens in shared projects, so this is the setup we use.
What a project holds
A project is a space in Claude for one body of work, such as a single client. Every chat inside it reads the project instructions (tone, format, what to avoid) and the project knowledge, which is whatever files and text you upload. For a client, that might be their brand guide and this month's content calendar.
Chats in the same project don't read each other. Anthropic's help center says context isn't shared across chats in a project unless it's added to project knowledge. If a decision needs to reach the next person's chat, write it into the knowledge or the instructions.
In practice, whoever drafts a client's social posts on Tuesday starts from the same instructions and files the account lead used on Monday.
Before you start
Every Claude plan has projects, but sharing one with other people needs a Team or Enterprise plan, and your teammates have to be in the same Claude organization.
Project sharing is on by default. If it's been changed, an Owner or Primary Owner can find it in Organization settings > Data and privacy, under Sharing.
If you're also deciding which connectors your staff can use, read our guide to setting Claude connector limits for your team.
Set up a client project
In Claude, open Projects from the left sidebar (or go to claude.ai/projects) and click + New Project.
Add a name and a description. These are for people. Anthropic notes that Claude doesn't have access to them, so anything Claude needs goes in the instructions or knowledge.
Choose who can see it. Keep it private means only you and the people you invite. Share with your broader organization means anyone in your org can find and use it.
Click Set project instructions, write how Claude should handle this client's work, and click Save instructions.
Use the + button in the project knowledge panel to upload the files your team will need.
For client work we'd start private and invite people. An org-wide project shows up for everyone on the Organization tab. That works for your own process docs, less so for one client's files.
A made-up example: "Client A content," with instructions covering brand voice and posting schedule, and the brand guide and current calendar as knowledge.
Share the project with your team
Open the project.
Click Share (some help articles call it Share project), to the right of the project name.
Add teammates by name or email. To add several at once, paste a list of email addresses.
Pick a permission for each person and click Share. They get an email, and the project shows up on their Shared with you tab.
Permission | What the person can do |
|---|---|
Can view | See the instructions and knowledge, and chat with Claude inside the project. They can't change anything. |
Can edit | Change instructions and knowledge, add or remove members, and contribute to the project. |
We give Can edit to the account lead, who keeps the client's context up to date. A contractor writing captions gets Can view.
Your own chats in the project stay private. Anthropic's help article puts it this way: "your chats will remain private unless you choose to share them." Teammates often assume otherwise, so say it when you invite them.
To change or remove access later, open Share, click the role next to the person's name, and choose a new role or Remove access. On Enterprise plans you can also share with a group (currently in beta), so people who join that group later get access on their own.
Share a strategy chat with a teammate
Say you planned a product launch with Claude, and your social media manager needs the reasoning before writing posts.
Open the chat and click Share in the upper right.
Under People with access, enter your teammate's work email and click Send. On Team and Enterprise plans, only addresses on your organization's domain are accepted.
Or, under General access, choose Anyone at [your organization] so any signed-in coworker with the link can open it.
Your teammate sees the chat as it was when you shared it, with artifacts and your name as the sharer. They can read it. They can't reply, continue it, copy it to their account, or download files from it. Raw data pulled in by connectors or MCP tools isn't shown, only Claude's responses.
Anything you add to the chat afterward stays private until you open the share dialog and click Update shared chat.
To build on the strategy, your teammate opens their own chat in the shared project. We also paste a short summary of the decisions into project knowledge, so later chats start with them.
To stop sharing, open Share and remove the person or click Turn off. Everything you've shared is listed under Settings > Privacy > Shared chats. Chat sharing works on claude.ai in a browser; you can open a chat shared with you on any device, but you can't share from the mobile app yet.
Keep the context current
When a client sends a new brand guide or calendar, swap out the old file. Edit the instructions when their preferences change. Your team works from whatever is in the project, including last quarter's calendar if nobody removed it. We also use a setup we call pointers, which we'll cover in a later Coconut Builds episode on shared knowledge bases.
Check who has access when someone changes roles. If a person leaves your Claude organization, the chats they shared stop opening for everyone else, so move anything important from those chats into project knowledge first.
Troubleshooting
If a teammate opens Share on a project and sees "Project sharing is turned off by your administrator," an Owner has switched off Share projects. They can turn it back on in Organization settings > Data and privacy. While it's off, projects already shared with specific people stay shared, but org-wide projects become private.
A teammate who can't find a project should check all three tabs on the Projects page: Your projects, Organization and Shared with you.
Some messages you might hit with shared chats:
"You need access" means they're signed in with a different account than the one you invited. The page shows which account they're using, so they can switch.
"Conversation not found" can mean the person who shared it was removed from your Claude organization.
An email that won't go through is probably outside your organization's domain. Team and Enterprise only accept org addresses.
If your teammate sees an old version, click Update shared chat. If nobody can share chats at all, an admin may have turned chat sharing off for the organization.
Get help setting this up
If you'd like help organizing client projects, instructions and shared knowledge for your team, we can set it up with you.
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