Being short on time and wanting to get it right the first go, we often get nonprofits asking how best to set up their Jira and Confluence. There is no one right way and our tools are highly customisable so I thought I'd give guidance on how to approach it instead!
How do we set up and optimize Jira and Confluence for our nonprofit’s work?
Start by clarifying your team’s structure and goals. Use Confluence Whiteboards to align on a hierarchy of work and how you will organise knowledge.
Here’s an example from the Foundation team.
Our hierarchy is:

From here you can then align on how to structure your Jira and Confluence spaces. Will a space capture all the work within a team, or just a specific program or initiative? You know your work best and our tools allow you to customise workflows however you need to achieve your mission.

In the Atlassian Foundation, the whole team shares a Confluence space but we have different Jira spaces for each program. This means we can continue using the same spaces in the longer term, so we always know where to find work while being able to add and close projects as needed.
As another example, our partner Braven has dedicated spaces by functions across their organisation.
How do you organise your work? We’d love to hear from you!
This is my last post in the series of FAQs from our support program Ask an Atlassian. Check out the other posts: