Overview: channels and forums help you organise your company’s internal communications, so you can reach the whole company efficiently and directly. Through channels and forums, you can maintain continuous communication with employees without overwhelming them with hundreds of emails. This article covers these two communication methods and how to get the best out of them.
Start from: Engagement dashboard > Communication > News channels and forums.
Channels
Channels are spaces where only the company can publish items such as news articles from the management system. They are listed to all users, but not all users will be able to see all the contents published in it, as each news article must be configured individually, indicating its recipients by levels.
Users cannot publish content in a channel, but they can like, dislike and comment on the news article if these options are set up.
Users cannot publish content in a channel, but they can like, dislike and comment on the news article if these options are set up.
Some examples of news channels you could create are 'Internal news' or 'Product news', or perhaps you could create channels to let employees know about 'Successes', 'Financial reports', etc.
See Create a news channel for more information on how to set up channels.
Forums
Unlike channels, they allow users to publish posts (with a title, body text and optional photo/video), as well as interact with other posts by the company or other colleagues.
Access to forums is configured for a group of people and to the whole forum and its contents, rather than for individual publications. You can add or remove specific members later.
See Create a forum for more information on how to set up forums.
Viewing, editing or removing news channels and forums
- Select Communication > News channels & forums.
You’ll see a list of all news channels and forums created.
- Select Actions (the three dots) next to a channel or forum to edit or remove it.
Ideas for news channels and forums
You can create channels and forums for a wide range of purposes, depending on whether you’d like employees to interact with your posts, or whether they’re purely informative. Here are some ideas on how to get the most out of this feature:
- Official communications: get memos and other important official information across to all employees at once.
- Repository: a place to store information or documentation that your employees can access easily and at any time. You can configure who has access to it, so employees only have access to information that is relevant to them.
- Brainstorming or generating conversations: involve your team in company decisions by asking for their opinion and encouraging idea-sharing. You could even submit their ideas to a vote by asking colleagues to like their favourite idea.
- Competitions: like the previous brainstorming ideas above, you could ask employees for their ideas on a topic and make a competition out of it. For example, create a forum for World Environment Day (5th June), where employees can submit their ideas for making the company more sustainable, and reward the best idea and implement it in your company.
- Latest news: share interesting company news with everyone (opening of new locations, new clients, etc.)
- New products or services: keep everyone up to date and aligned with your company’s product and service offering.
- Protocols: a place where you can keep information on official company protocols so that employees can refer to them whenever they need. As in the repository idea, you can assign this channel to specific groups of people so the information is relevant to them.
- New hires: announce and introduce new additions to the company so your employees can welcome them and get in touch.
- Events: keep everyone up to date with upcoming events and share photos and videos of past events.
- Recognitions and successes: give your team members the merit and recognition they deserve by sharing successes, especially if you have the Recognition or Review functionality in Engagement activated.