Time for your group to make the most of all the tools

With a range of online collaboration tools at your fingertips, now is the time to use them! Did you know that Knowledge Hub offers many features that can help you be more productive working in groups online?

With these tips, you can find new ways for your group to interact, share, learn and work together. Encourage participation and help your members to engage, connect and work effectively across your project, programme, organisation, profession, locality or sector.

You don’t have to use every tool – just pick the ones that will best support you today.

At this critical time, Knowledge Hub continues to support the public sector by offering free open and restricted groups for knowledge sharing and collaboration across public service.

Group Activity (Home) 

Your group’s home page provides members with the most recent content and activity. So, whether they visit your group through an email notification, join as a new member, or log in directly to your group, they can scroll through, catch up on the latest group activity comment on and like content and use the direct links to read more and get involved. 

Encourage members to use group activity as an easy way to keep up-to-date.
 

Polls 

Polls are a quick and useful way to gather members’ responses and help inform important decisions. Use the poll tool to quickly gauge the views of your group. 

Ask members to cast their votes on trending topics, collective issues, and alternative scenarios
 

Announcements

As well as triggering an email notification, group announcements are also displayed on your group’s home page. It’s a handy way to share important messages, direct members to key content, and flag any key issues across all your members.  

Create links in your announcement to make it easy for your members to go straight to the latest content and activity. 

Messages

Group messages trigger an instant email notification to your members and are a good way to give important updates. 

Customise your message to signpost, reinforce and promote useful content or activity across the group, and encourage wider participation. 
 

Library

Your group’s library provides easy access to documents and digital media that members want to share regardless of their location or IT  systems. Create online documents, spreadsheets and presentations that members can update in real time or share content that is read only. Use folders and sub-folders to organise your knowledge  assets. 

Retrieve, download, preview (if available), edit, add comments and share. Give authority to worthy contributions with a ‘like’. 

Discussions

The group’s discussions can be used to host a variety of timely and topical  discussions with members. Start a new thread to talk to colleagues,  ask questions, convene discussions, raise concerns, share feedback,  signpost to useful resources and much more. 

Engage your members and invite them to get involved so they can share their views,  ideas, knowledge, and experiences. 
 

Events

Keep members informed of upcoming events that might interest them. Whether these are face-to-face or online events, share event details with colleagues who would benefit from attending. 

Build up your events calendar for members to keep checking. Link to agendas, booking forms, pre-event activities, and follow-up information.  

Wiki

Collectively constructing wikis is another good way for members to come together and pool knowledge. Whether it’s a table of useful resources, drafting an agenda, gathering expertise and experiences,  or inputting content for a publication, the wiki editor enables members to create and edit web pages in your group. 

Use the full editor to add tables, images, formatting and HTML (optional). 

Ideas

Give your members the opportunity to share their views by posting  ideas for them to vote and comment on. Use this tool to spark new innovation, engage creatively and inform decisions. 

Discuss the direction of your work, challenge the focus of your group, and use the results to support what happens next.  

News

With so much content available on your subject area coming from different sources members may miss out on key bits of news.  Using the news function you can collectively share the latest news about your subject area in one place. 

Keep your members updated on the latest news on your subject area in one place.