A Knowledge Exchange community serves as a Q&A space where employees can quickly ask questions, receive trusted answers from colleagues or experts, and easily revisit previous questions to find proven solutions. Each new forum thread triggers a notification to all members, ensuring everyone stays informed and can easily respond to questions they have the answers to.

Focus your community by narrowing it down to specific, targeted subjects, and create multiple Knowledge Exchange communities for different subjects. This way, users can easily find and join only the communities that match their interests or expertise.

Separating the Q&A from an information page is particularly helpful when you expect many questions or the topic isn't relevant to all subscribers. That being said, if your topic is general or narrow enough, adding a Forum app on a general information page is also an option. 

Objectives of your community

Before creating the community, consider its objectives:

• Creating a central, searchable place for employees to ask and answer field-specific questions, moving knowledge out of messaging silos and memory.
• Sharing validated troubleshooting steps (Q&A) and best practices.
• Reducing the time spent on finding information and handling repetitive inquiries by making solutions to common problems instantly accessible.
• Providing a method for experts to find relevant topics via hashtags.

Set up the community on Haiilo

We recommend using the following simple structure:

• Forum app (The Q&A Exchange): Employees raise questions (e.g., "When using the new #Hyperdrive feature, what is the maximum number of #Data-Streams that can be processed concurrently?"). Other employees or SMEs provide answers. Once the best answer is provided, the thread is closed to signal validation. The use of hashtags directly in the title is mandatory for better global search results and enabling the finding of threads. This app is the core engine for generating retrievable knowledge.
• Content app (Guidelines): Provides a Quick Start Guide and clear rules about the community's scope. This is where you explain what topics are covered, how to submit threads, how to write titles, and how to use hashtags.
• Link collection / Link button widget: Links directly to other relevant resources on the topic, such as ticketing systems, help centers, or related intranet pages for standardized information.
• Rich Text Editor widget: Lists hashtags that recur and are highly relevant to help users along (e.g., #Flows, #Account-Settings, #API, #Zoom-Integration). This promotes consistent tagging and easy searching.

Tips for an even better community

• Clear Scope: Clearly define the community's scope and purpose. The more precise you can be in your focus, the better the user experience will be. Having too broad a scope can cause questions to become spammy, making it more challenging for the effective knowledge hub to work well.
• SME Subscription is Key: Invite all Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to become members. Since all members are notified when a new forum thread is created, encourage Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to check the title for relevant hashtags so they can jump in when a new thread is created in their area of expertise.
• Videos: To make troubleshooting more interactive, encourage users to share video clips showing the issue or the solution directly in the forum replies.