3 Apps to Build and Engage your Communities in Confluence (And Some Best Practices)

[#1]

Booooooring…Booooooring! That’s what your teams feel when you only use Confluence to dump text and corporate jargon without giving a thought to building communities and fostering collaboration. At first glance, Confluence might give you the vibe of being a bland and basic platform (it kind of is tbh). But it’s not about the platform in itself, rather how you make the most out of it and tailor it to specific use cases. 

And as a marketer who’s been using Confluence for a while now, I can tell you firsthand, leveraging both native and third party community-driven features and apps can work wonders.

So why should your team set up a community forum in Confluence? Glad you asked!

Why Building Communities in Confluence Matters

I remember the good old days when having an intranet meant top down communication, newsletters, and the occasional blogs. Try doing that with Gen Z 😀. It’s just a recipe for low adoption and disengagement. The role of internal communications specialists became so important in helping businesses shift from the old ways into new more modern ones.  

When Confluence is set up as a place where people can share ideas, give feedback, and discuss a variety of topics, it stops being just a tool and becomes more or less a community.

A strong Confluence community doesn’t just improve communication; it creates a culture where team members feel heard, engaged, and invested. And this is extremely crucial for remote teams.

Building community within Confluence also helps centralize knowledge. More often than not, when discussing ideas, teams rely on different channels: Google docs, sheets, emails, and of course, the office cafeteria. Instead of scattered ideas buried in email threads or forgotten in chat apps, discussions live in one place, easily accessible to everyone. This transparency and accessibility make it easy for people to contribute to conversations, feel involved in decision-making, and get the context they need to work effectively.

But how do you get this right? How can you transform your Confluence site into an interactive community?

Best Practices for Building a Community in Confluence

• Encourage Open Participation

Before diving into tech, let’s get one thing straight: if you want a thriving community, you need buy-in from your team. Encourage everyone to jump in and participate. That means promoting the value of having a community, showing how sharing ideas or asking questions leads to better results for everyone. And make it easy—set up spaces and pages where people feel comfortable speaking up, sharing ideas, or giving feedback. When people see how their input shapes the team, they’re more likely to stay engaged.

• Create and Maintain Communication Channels

Setting up a proper internal communications hub in Confluence lets everyone know where to go for the latest updates, team discussions, and collaborative projects. 

Lately, Confluence introduced the company hub feature. It’s basically a hub that centralizes all  of your communications channels: email, different spaces, blogs, and more. It comes with a host of native macros designed to be the central hub for your company’s internal communications. This helps your teams stay both informed and engaged at all times.

Dedicated Confluence spaces? A must. Sometimes you want the info to only be available for certain team members. Think Dev team, marketing team, and so on. For this, you can create dedicated sections within each given space where specific team members can come in and collaborate.

• Build Dedicated Feedback Loops

Communities thrive when people feel heard—so, build in feedback loops! Collect input on projects, day to day operations, and any community initiative. More often than not, feedback is siloed within page comments, Google docs, emails, you name it. Try to centralize feedback as much as possible either by creating a dedicated space, or specific sections within team spaces. The choice is yours as long as the feedback stays within one known location, which is Confluence. 

• Leverage Gamification Mechanisms

My first introduction to gamification in the workplace came at my latest job. And I LOVED IT! Not only because of the rewards and perks you get, but having a leaderboard showing your progress and how you rank, plays a big role in driving you just a bit more. A little friendly competition can add some spark to your community. Point-based systems, leaderboards, badges, kudos—these aren’t just for games; they’re powerful motivators and a really cool tool to engage your teams. 

• Implement the Right Apps

I love Confluence but its native features can only take you so far. You can only rely on the native features, they’re extremely handy, think formatting macros, various reports, but are they enough though? Not really! And that’s why you’ve got Atlassian Marketplace.

Adding the right apps can transform Confluence into an interactive community. Whether you’re looking to foster idea-sharing, get quick feedback, or create forum-style discussions, apps like Discussion for Confluence, Ideation for Confluence, and Polls, Votes & Surveys can make your Confluence experience way more engaging.

3 Apps to Help you Manage & Engage your Communities in Confluence

1. Discussion for Confluence by Vectors

Why: 

The key to creating and managing communities in Confluence is to centralize discussions. And this is what Discussion for Confluence is built for: Creating a dedicated forum within your Confluence spaces to facilitate and hold discussions. With Discussion for Confluence, you can give your team the experience of a forum right within Confluence. 

The app allows you to set up individual discussion pages that can be later grouped within holistic dashboards. The latter makes it easy to organize conversations around specific topics, questions, or projects. Unlike endless comment threads, discussions are organized and searchable, so information is easy to find and follow.

Top Use Cases: 

Use Discussion for Confluence to create Q&A forums, project-based discussions, or even informal spaces where team members can share tips, resources, and ideas. It’s also great for retrospectives, where teams can openly discuss wins and lessons learned.

Pro Tips: 

Create dedicated discussion areas for each department or project team. Encourage team members to share updates and tag others to keep conversations active. Additionally, to help everyone grasp the bigger picture, make sure to associate statutes with each discussion.

2. Ideation for Confluence by Vectors

Why: 

Ideation for Confluence, as its name implies, is all about transforming your Confluence space into an ideation hub. The app lets your teams share ideas, vote on them, and track progress through tailored ideation workflows. It’s perfect for teams looking to crowdsource ideas, prioritize projects, and create a more inclusive and transparent process for choosing what to tackle next. 

Ideation dashboards bring out the creative, problem-solving side of your team. Instead of waiting for formal brainstorming sessions, anyone can pitch ideas anytime, and the entire team can weigh in by voting and sponsoring.

And perhaps the feature I like most is idea challenges. With challenges, you can get your teams to participate within a challenge for a specific duration. It works wonders for us when we hold internal hackathons as we can easily visualize all related ideas in one place, share, vote , and more.

Top Use Cases:

Use Ideation for Confluence for brainstorming sessions, planning company events, or even as a suggestion box where team members can share ideas for internal improvements. You’ll quickly see which ideas have the most potential, based on votes and comments.

Pro Tips: 

Encourage teams to share ideas within their dedicated idea hubs. This way all ideas are stored in one central location. In addition idea workflows are extremely important as they organize the entire process and help move ideas from simple thoughts into actionable tasks.  

3. Polls, Votes & Surveys by DevSamurai

Why: 

Making team decisions shouldn't require endless meetings or email threads. That's why the DevSamurai team built TeamPlus for Confluence Cloud.

It's a simple way to gather feedback, make decisions, and keep your team aligned - all within Confluence. Whether you're a product team finalizing your roadmap, a marketing team reviewing campaign ideas, or a project manager gathering team input, TeamPlus keeps everything organized in one place - right where your team already works in Confluence.

Top Use Cases: 

Need to prioritize features or tasks with your team? Dot Voting gives each team member votes to distribute across options, showing instantly what the team values most. It's built right into your Confluence pages, so everyone can participate easily and see results in real-time. No meetings needed - just clear, quick consensus on what matters most.

Pro Tip: 

When your team needs to make complex decisions, like choosing between several strategic options or evaluating detailed ideas, TeamPlus’s Rank Choice Voting can help by letting everyone rank their preferences right in Confluence. Instead of a simple yes/no vote, Rank Choice Voting gives you a clear view of how much each option is valued by the team. This method is ideal for decisions that need careful consideration, as it highlights the most favored options based on everyone’s input.

A well-structured Confluence space equipped with tailored apps can transform the way your team collaborates. From organizing discussions to recognizing top contributors, these tips will help you create a thriving community forum that keeps everyone in the loop. If you like what you saw, make sure to give the above apps a try.