JIRA Tutorial for NGOs. Part 4 – Confluence and You. Create a digital workspace.

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Atlassian offers many tools for successful project management. In the third part of our tutorial, we showed you the most popular of them – Jira. But in many projects, especially for non-profit organizations, there is another software product that is used almost as often. If not even more. We are talking about Confluence, Atlassian tool for the open and shared workplace. There are many ways in which we can use it. Like creating a blog post, managing the meeting notes or creating the report from your project. In this tutorial, we will show you, how you can create the space for your documents. Also, you will learn what features of the Confluence you can use in your everyday work.

Your digital workspace

First, you want to create your own space.

Now, you have to create your own space.

After clicking the “Spaces” with a folder icon on the left menu you will see a similar sight to the picture above. Here you can see all the workspaces created in Confluence. What are the “spaces” and why do you need them? Thanks to them, you can create digital workspaces for various projects. All of your notes, documents, and databases will be in one place. Also, you can choose the team for each one of them. Not everything is for the eyes of everyone in the company. Of course, if you want to create a space that can be used by everyone, you can also do that. For example, we have space for all the training materials for new employees. New people in our organization can easily read all the information they need. Thanks to this they can start working on their own tasks and issues immediately.

Click “create space” on the upper-right corner. Then, you can choose from different templates:

Manage knowledge of your organization

As you can see, some of them are created for the typical work in the IT industry, like creating documentation for a software project. We will focus on the ones, that can be used in the non-profit organization. At the start, the best choice for you will be just “Blank Space”. This is the most flexible workspace from all of them. Later you can think also about your “Personal space”, used for keeping your own notes and tasks. Also, the “Knowledgebase” could be useful for NGOs. You can create your own tutorials and sources of information for your organization thanks to it.

After choosing the name for your space, you will something like this:

On the upper-right corner, you can see the three-dot icon – ”…”. Click it to access the dropdown menu. There are many options there. For now, we are interested only in the “Restrictions”. Here you can choose who will have access to the information on this space. You can give it to everyone, only chosen people from your team, or even just you. Here you can also choose, who can edit documents or only just see them.

Create your content

For now, there is not much to see in your space. So we have to change it! Let’s create some content. Confluence is used for all kinds of notes, documentation, and other tools for open and shared workspace. After you click the plus icon “+” on the left, you can see all the possibilities for your space.

You can choose one of these templates for your project:

• Blank page
• Blog Post
• Decision
• File list
• How-to article
• Jira report
• Marketing plan
• Meeting notes
• Persona
• Product launch
• Product requirement
• Project plan
• Project Task report
• Retrospective
• Share a link
• Task report
• Team task report
• Troubleshooting article
• Review

So, as you can see, there are a lot of them. But don’t be scared: we are going to show you the most useful ones, especially for the NGOs.

Blog post

Blog posts are one of the most popular forms of creating content for the internet. Confluence gives you a template for them, that is very useful. If you ever used Google Documents or the Microsoft Word, you right away see, what are your editing options and how to use them. Everything is very intuitive. Thanks to creating the blog post in Confluence, everyone from your team, can help you with it. They can comment on your work or edit some spelling mistakes. Integration with Jira makes the writing process a structured and efficient task. Create an issue in a marketing project for creating a blog post and then write it down in Confluence. Everyone in your team will know exactly how much you’ve written. Or how much time more you need. And even eventually help you, if you have a writers-block.

File list

The file list makes sharing the most important document as easy as ever. Very often the Excel spreadsheet we need is hidden in hundreds of emails. Or maybe in the forgotten folder on the computer or cloud. The file list clearly shows everything you need for a project, so you can’t ever lose it. Organizing everything will not only help you but also your team. Later, when you will want something from the old project, the file list also will be incredibly useful.

How-to articles

This template is going to be an amazing help for every new member of your organization. Every institution has its own culture, a way of doing things. Sometimes it can be really hard for people from the outside to adapt to all of the company habits. That is why “How-to” articles can make this objective much, much easier. Wrote down instructions for the task once, and you will never have to repeat yourself again. Attach some related articles, distinguish the most important parts, and allow others to learn from your experience.

Marketing plan

All of the NGOs have to use marketing for purposes of their projects, but not all of them have experts from these fields. But not to worry: Confluence can also help you with this task. Write down your objectives, do a SWOT and competitive analysis, see the timeline for the whole project, plan budget, and do so much more than ever before. Be ready for everything and make sure, that your marketing goals will be achieved.

Meeting notes

Meetings are one of the most important parts of working in the modern organization. Sharing information, doing brainstorms, presenting the new ideas – there are a lot of things that can happen during the meeting. So it is always a good idea to create notes from them. Thanks to this you can be sure, that no information or conclusion from the discussion will be lost, and everyone will know what to do after it. Write down who were participants, who will be doing all the action items, and see the discussion topic. Make sure, that your communication is always clear, without any errors.

Project plan

Earlier we showed you how to create a marketing plan. But what about projects? Confluence also allows you to plan out all of the activities in your organization. Write down your objectives, decide when you want to complete them, see the timeline, or write down other things, you think are needed. A good project plan will make everything focused and people from your team will know exactly what they have to do, to get the thing done.

[M Amine]

Thank you @Urszula Kaczorek