Calling all marketing teams who use Confluence - we want to hear from you!

[Kesha Thill]

Hi Community! me again 🙂

If you’re a marketing team using Confluence, we want to hear your story! How did you start using Confluence? What are your use cases? What have been some of the benefits? We want to know it all!

(PS - if you're not a marketing team, we still want to hear from you here!)

[siboconnection]

I used Confluence in a Global Marketing team from 2010 to 2016 and have continued to use it personally and with clients as a freelance consultant since then. I'm a big fan of Confluence, but getting the full benefit in a non-technical team is a huge struggle (as others have mentioned in the related discussion).

In our Global Marketing team, a few product managers used Confluence for project management. I too used Confluence in that context. Also for distributing content and files, for an internal newsletter, and for an editorial calendar. I would have liked to include much more in terms of workflow, but this can only really happen with everyone on board. Instead, the main benefit for me was (still is) in terms of knowledge management. I quite like being able to log a history of thinking on topics of interest that don't (yet) belong to a formal project. Commenting on pages and blogs is a great way to track developments in thinking or on competitive intelligence, for example.

Eventually, our whole Global Marketing department began using Confluence for monthly reporting and dashboards. For a while, our shared services team also used Jira to track layout and design service requests. This is not the same as Confluence, obviously, but the considerations for use in a marketing team are similar. Both of these whole department efforts were short-lived. @Kesha Thill, I'm not sure if you are looking mainly for success stories or instead for product development input and a better understanding of the use cases. I can help more with the latter. If you want to talk with some users, let me know.

[Kesha Thill]

Hi @siboconnection! 

Thanks for your detailed response! It sounds like while it was in use, it served value as a central repository to share and store information across your Global Marketing team (and totally agree - page commenting is a great way to just document related thoughts, and surface subject matter experts in particular areas as well). We, as a marketing team, also use Jira to track our design and web requests, so it's definitely relevant, and a great way to work with the cross functional teams that are supporting our work.

Do you have any insights into why it was so short lived and why there wasn't more buy-in? It is definitely hard to get non-technical teams onboard and able to see the full benefit, which is exactly why I'm trying to talk to as many non-tech teams as possible to understand why. 

I'm also curious to know how you use it as a freelancer if you can add any insight into that!

In terms of what I'm looking for with this question, it's all the above - I want to know where it was successful, use cases, where it wasn't successful, why it wasn't, why it is, etc. I'd love to get in touch with some users if that's an option and dig into it more! and of course, if you have anything at all to add here, (especially on those use cases) please do - I want to know the good and the bad :) 

[siboconnection]

@Kesha Thill, I should clarify that there were several projects and activities that did successfully rely on Confluence - and still do, as far as I know. These cases hinged on one or more of the following:

• A cross-functional leader (typically a product manager) whose project team included, or at least interacted with the technical teams that already used Jira/Confluence—meaning the cross-functional leader could use the tools with minimal change management
• Shared commitment among a team/workgroup—meaning the amount of change management required was manageable without the help of major top-down initiatives. As long as the team got on-board effective collaboration could take place. Again, I am thinking of product management teams (I was part of one of these and collaborated daily with a partner team).
• Content maintained mostly by a single user—meaning that training and change management were not required. NB: This was in a highly regulated industry (medical devices), and different regions used different document management systems for formal approval, so my regional counterparts could not easily locate marcomms and other collateral, even if they knew it existed. One way I used Confluence was to easily distribute such collateral (formal and otherwise), from brochures and white papers to competitive intelligence.

Where Confluence was not used or adopted there was a multitude of reasons, some product-related, many not. It's worth mentioning that this was in Sydney at the home of Atlassian, so Jira/Confluence rolled out in their early days, when Confluence at least was highly functional but not nearly as user-friendly as it has become. That elemental nature of Confluence is precisely what many of us like about it, but the same ethos does not always apply in the marketing department. I would not want Atlassian to shed that personality, but I do think there is room for improvement in making the experience more comfortable for people coming from a different style of thinking. I would like to explain more, but it will have to wait for the moment.

[Kesha Thill]

@siboconnection - I have not forgotten about you! Shame on me for the delay here.

In regards to why and how it has been successful, a cross-functional leader and shared commitment seem to be the most important here, at least for using it in the way that we'd want teams to use it to get the most value out of Confluence.

Content maintained mostly by a single user is interesting. It totally makes sense, especially being in a highly regulated industry - I get it for documentation that is supposed to be mostly consumed. But did this extend to other types of content as well? I ask because, as you have seen from previous threads, most companies don't give a lot of their employees the permission to create, etc.

To your comment on being more user-friendly, we are definitely working on this. For Confluence Cloud I think we've made some great progress here from where we used to be, but we are always reiterating. 

I really appreciate all of your thoughts and insight here, Ryan! Thank you so much. And if it's still possible to talk to some users that are willing, please let me know!

[siboconnection]

@Kesha Thill No worries.

As far as I know, everyone who had an Atlassian account at the office in Sydney (and other locations) could create content in Confluence - but only a few were space administrators. Now that I think of it, this open style that I love so much about work life in Australia could be what made Atlassian happen in the first place!  :-)

If you are thinking of neatly composed documentation, drafts of marcomms, and tidy approval processes, it was not like that (most of the time). This was more of a giant company evernote initially installed by and for the software development team and used liberally by D&D (product development), R&T (pre-product) and pockets of us everywhere else (Global Marketing in my case). Think team pages, meeting notes, news and updates, project pages, timelines, product roadmaps and so on. There were also many 'important' pages tied to Jira and/or designated as part of the quality system for regulatory purposes.

I would say that quite a lot of content not strictly intended for one-way distribution was created on Confluence, but I am not sure if I understand entirely what you mean.

I probably should have described the single-user case like this: Confluence as a share drive. Regional sales staff would not just pull content from Confluence and start using it in the field. However, we might have developed content - let's say a powerpoint presentation - in Sydney and shared it via Confluence with regional counterparts who could then download it, regionalize, and subject it to their own review and approval. The final home would be enshrined in the regional document management system after clinical and regulatory approval. From there, the powerpoint could get pushed out to the sales team's iPads, for example.

It wasn't a model system, but that's part of why Confluence was so helpful. I might add that when sharing files via Confluence, you can easily provide an explanation of what the file is, why you made it, who this version is for, display some screenshots of important bits or what has changed, collect feedback, track downloads, link to related content... Sharepoint? Sharefile? Google docs? Dropbox? Not so much. IBM Connections? Maybe, but it will take a couple of hours to do and no one will ever know about it.

[Kesha Thill]

@siboconnection - hahaha! I mean it did start there so I believe it :) 

The giant company evernote is basically how we how we use it at Atlassian - team pages, project pages, timelines, you name it, all made ad hoc but within a Space so it's still organized.

Sorry if I wasn't clear! You mentioned content being maintained by a single user somewhere above as a reason for success, and I took that to mean that only a handful of people had permission to maintain that content. Meaning most people didn't have the ability to just create on their own but I think I misunderstood! 

I think whatever system works for your company is great, which is why Confluence is so flexible! I don't believe that Confluence should be this neat and tidy place that's heavily permissioned - it takes away from what makes Confluence so valuable! 

Thank you for recapping all of this for me - really appreciate it!

[Phil]

Hi Kesha, 

Here at Blend we use confluence as our internal wiki, knowledge sharing and community building tool. 

As our agency grew, we saw that we needed a place to capture and share our best practices, processes and findings. It needed to be flexible, scalable and accessible anywhere. 

Prior to adopting Jira for our project management I'd looked at other ways of doing it like Sharepoint, Onenote, Tettra and others. But Jira really showed us the power and potential of the Atlassian stack - and we never looked back. 

Now our entire team use confluence, wherever they are, to power their work. 

In addition to documenting important work related stuff, we hold regular 'off-topic' discussion on Confluence to foster familiarity and adoption. These are a fun way to get feedback on ideas, share personal stories and support our agency culture. 

In order to enhance our use of Confluence, we recently created a 'Confluence Champions' group. This cross functional team take responsibility for building the use case for confluence, maintain key content, run our regular #wikiwednesday article sharing, and gather feedback and requirements from our wider team. 

Confluence has been a total hit. 

Cheers, Phil.

[siboconnection]

That's my kind of place! Nice work, Phil.

[Kesha Thill]

Hi @Phil!

I love how you're using Confluence! Particularly the community building part - it's my favorite part about Confluence :) I have a few questions if you don't mind - answer whichever you feel comfortable answering!

-Was it the integration with Jira that mostly turned you on to Confluence? It looks like you researched a lot of other competitors, so what is it about Confluence that made you choose it? 

-Would love to know how your team is using Jira as well (and if you're using Jira + Confluence together, that too!). As a marketing team we use Jira to 1) run weekly sprints, even as marketers and 2) submit any requests to cross functional teams like design, web, online marketing, etc. 

-This is more clarification, but feel free to expand, it sounds like your team doesn't just consume information in Confluence but you all regularly contribute to each other's pages/blogs with comments? Does everyone create content/pages within Confluence or is it usually just a few people who are actually creating and more people are just liking/commenting, etc.?

-Do you use any other documentation/content creation software in addition to Confluence? For us, we do everything in Confluence. Meeting notes, all of campaign plans and documentation, blogs that we're writing for our customers - you name it. 

-Does all of Blend use Confluence or just certain teams?

-Last question - how did you get teams to start using Confluence? Was it just like "hey we're using this thing" or any formal onboarding? 

Also Champions group - so awesome! Hopefully this team attends some AUG gatherings in your city to learn from other champions too!

Thank you so much for sharing Phil! 

[Phil]

Hi @Kesha Thill

Happy to answer all questions :)

- It wasn't the integration with Jira per se. It was more about ease of use. All the other solutions I'd looked at required a less than intuitive workflow for my team. The single sign on and shared UI of Jira and Confluence really appealed. And once I'd figured out how well it met my knowledge sharing objectives, I was convinced. 

- Jira is our sole project management system, internally and for clients. We run month long sprints and follow a modified agile/scrum process. We use Jira and Confluence side-by-side, but not quite together, if you know what I mean. I'd like to see that evolve in the future, but its not critical to success right now. 

- Everyone is free to create content in Confluence. As you might expect, the Champions tend to create the majority of the wiki articles and the majority of the input from others is in comments - with some exceptions as follows.

- Yes and no. Our team uses Confluence for all meeting notes, capturing client kick-offs, sharing strategies, etc. The number of uses is always growing. But, individuals are free to use other tools if better suited the needs of the client, the task, or themselves. 

- Everyone in Blend uses Confluence but the most value is had by those delivering client work.

- An initial step we took was to put all of our 'New Starter' and useful office information on to Confluence (it was on Trello). New joiners are pointed to the New Starter space on day one to learn about the company and the office. We recently moved office too so that gave existing team members a reason to look at this content too. 

I hope that was interesting!

Cheers, Phil.

[Phil]

Thanks @siboconnection. We try! :)

[Kesha Thill]

Hi @Phil ! Same comment as above, shame on me for the delay here! 

-Nice! Were there any particular features unique to Confluence that made it a must have (besides the SSO and shared UI with Jira)? And I assume you heard about Confluence because you were using Jira? Or did you hear about it in another way?

-It's interesting that you've instituted freedom to create across the whole company - I never see it but I love it! Of course there are some who create more than others, but I'm curious how you came across the decision to let everyone create versus implementing regulations/limitations on who can create and who can't. If you have info here, I'd love to know! I think this is one of the hardest things we try to get teams to allow since it involves a bit of cultural shift and change in mindset.

-Cool, I'm assuming Google docs is probably one of the software tools that is used in conjunction or in place of Confluence. 

-I like that you've put onboarding information here so it becomes one of the first places people look at when they join.

Very interesting for me - thank you so much for sharing Phil! 

[Deleted user]

Hi @Kesha Thill

We use Confluence for preparing blog posts for our website. Our employees are writing blog posts on a prepared site in Confluence. Until now we have made no template, but this will come for sure. They can  write their text, upload images, edit tables etc. Other team members of the social media team can read, edit, comment and correct the blog posts. 

Our website publisher takes texts and pictures directly from Confluence when she got the information, that the final editing is done. 

This is the easiest way to share, comment and edit blog posts written by different people and handle this workflow without any word documents anymore.

Furthermore we use Confluence as a company wiki for intern knowledge and share special information with our customers (also including jira filters). We use it for meeting notes and project planning.

Best wishes,

Marina

[siboconnection]

@[deleted], have you developed a Jira workflow for the blog? The line between Jira and something like Comala worksflows is a bit blurred to me, especially considering visibility to external collaborators/customers. I am also curious how you manage images and attachments. For instance, have you established a file list for images, or do you just add attachments to the page where you are working (maybe with labels for organzation)?

[Deleted user]

Hi @siboconnection.

No, we haven't created a special workflow for the blog. We have a intern project in jira which we use for timetracking (with tempo.io). So we have an issue for working on a this special blog post. 

The writer just writes his/her blog on a confluence page and loads up images etc. at the right position. In the planned template we use the attachments macro for listing all attachments of one blog post. 

the website publisher can download images etc. directly from confluence and use this on the website.

Hope this helps.

[Kesha Thill]

Hi @[deleted]!

Awesome! I do content and blog writing as well and use Confluence in the same way for this process. We'll be coming out with a very simple blog template soon, that looks similar to this screenshot below:

To help with workflow if you don't end up using Jira is either using Trello and linking to Confluence pages from a card for that specific blog post. You can also (in conjunction with Trello) add task lists on the page and at-mention users when they need to do something with a due date next to their task.

Just some suggestions!