Your company might use different external collaboration tools for daily exchange, e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom. However, communities can be a perfect addition to organizing teamwork, project groups, or exchanges between different teams or departments in a central location. Especially for blue-collar employees, communities can be beneficial since they might not have access to external collaboration tools. Use a community to update your colleagues on shared projects, divide tasks and collect all necessary documents, data and knowledge in one place.

Aim of the community

Before creating a community, consider its objectives:

• Informing everyone who is part of the collaboration.
• Sharing all documents, knowledge, and updates in one central place that is always accessible.
• Discussing specific topics relevant to all members.
• Providing an overview of tasks, next steps, and other milestones.

Set up in Haiilo

We recommend using the following apps:

• Timeline app
• List app
• Documents app
• Wiki app
• Content app

Example

This is what an "Employer Branding" community could look like. The apps used and their purpose are explained below. For a better overview, it's always recommended to use app groups and structure the community's content according to different use cases.

The following apps were used in the example above.

• Timeline app: A timeline app is a good tool for providing important updates relevant to all community members, who then have the opportunity to respond. To keep the timeline as clean and relevant as possible, we recommend using other collaboration tools or the chat to discuss details on a one-to-one basis. 
• List app: The list app is an easy way to list all relevant video recordings. It can also help you organize the division of tasks.
• Documents app: The documents app allows you to upload and manage relevant files for all community members. Use folders to thematically organize the files you want to manage and use deep links to refer to them where needed.
• Wiki app: The wiki app (here "Guidelines") is a great tool to display information and knowledge in a compressed and structured way. This makes it the perfect app to provide guidelines, describe the tools you use or document access permissions. If content is updated or changed, users are automatically informed about this via a notification.
• Content app: Use the content app to show which team is responsible for what. 

Further tips & tricks

• In our example, we added a link button widget to provide fast access to the shared Google Drive folders of both teams. 
• Add other widgets to your community to adjust to the team's needs and make the community visually more appealing.
• Depending on the size of your team or the aim of your community, you can additionally use the blog app to make regular project updates more visually appealing. The reach of blog posts can be increased by sharing them on one or more timelines across other pages or communities, for example, if you want to share the project update with the entire company.