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#54 – Organize Your Next Event with Confluence Whiteboards
Matt Reiner
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This week, we’re pulling back the curtain on how our event organizers use Confluence whiteboards to get everyone aligned. We’ll also share an opportunity to help improve the Confluence Company Hub and highlight enhancements in Confluence analytics.
Let's dive in!
Whiteboard Event Organization for the Win
With autumn comes cooler temperatures, golden leaves, and so many events and conferences. At least, that’s our experience at K15t. Over the past three months, we’ve prepared for and organized two major conferences and 5+ smaller events. Some of these involve just one or two teammates managing logistics and speaking talent, while others require over a dozen people working together to represent the company at a conference. Let’s pull back the curtain and take a look at how our amazing event organizers use Confluence whiteboards to coordinate everyone before an event.
The Organized Overview
If you’ve ever organized an event—or attended one in any capacity—you’ve probably noticed how hard it is to get everyone on the same page. Typically, it falls to one brave soul to provide all the essential information, including:
Where to be, and when
What the event will look like
Who is responsible for what
How the team should communicate
And so much more. This sort of “cat herding” is often done via a 60-minute presentation using slides. While presentations can be effective, we’ve found they’re not ideal for event organization. Why? Because, let’s be honest, nobody needs to remember all the information all the time. Most event details are only valuable at specific moments. That’s why we use a Confluence whiteboard to store everything in one place, so teammates can find what they need when they need it.
Shannon, the incredible event organizer for our recent trip to the tekom conference, is especially proud of the whiteboard she created—and for good reason, look at this thing!
The Slick Sections
To group important information, our event planners use sections on whiteboards. Sections are invaluable because they allow you to move all the contained elements at once and visually emphasize key content. This helps teammates easily find answers to questions like:
What are our event goals?
What type of attendees might I talk to?
How can I strike up a conversation?
With these focused sections, anyone can zoom in on exactly what they need. Thanks to the upcoming feature that allows others to follow your cursor on the whiteboard, our event organizers will soon be able to quickly share and highlight this information with a group.
The Educational Elements
Some event information requires nuance, and that’s where elements in Confluence whiteboards become a game changer. Our event organizers like Gabe have mastered using elements to communicate crucial information in a glanceable way. In fact, that’s what these whiteboards are all about: making information easy to digest at a glance.
Before an event, organizers host a quick meeting to walk everyone through the whiteboard. Then, they share the link in our chat tool, so anyone can reference it anytime. These whiteboards are especially handy for answering mid-event questions such as:
What’s our unique selling proposition?
How should I pitch our solution to attendees?
Why would someone choose our solution over another?
But it doesn’t stop there. Our event organizers also share schedules, booth and flyer designs, and even collect feedback—all within a single, skimmable whiteboard. With the new voting feature in Confluence whiteboards, we’re excited to explore even more interactive possibilities.
Ideation, Organization, What’s Your Hesitation?
While Confluence whiteboards are often used for the messy, collaborative part of brainstorming new ideas, we’ve found they’re equally powerful for organizing critical information and aligning teams. But that’s just us—what about you? Reply to this email and let us know how your teams are using Confluence whiteboards. We’d love to hear your stories.
Of course, there’s much more you can do with Confluence whiteboards. Check out our best practices video to learn how to use them like a pro!
Confluence News
Help Improve the Company Hub
The Confluence team is looking for your feedback to help them improve the recently added Company Hub. They’re actively building features like dynamic card filtering, company-wide notifications via email and Slack, card reordering, and text-only cards. Additionally, they’re designing tools such as a Spotlight component for announcements, live Polls and Surveys, Q&A for all-hands meetings, Carousel auto-transitions, audience segmentation for targeted content, and Calendars for events and holidays.the team could use your thoughts on. So head over to the community and share your feedback now.
More Insights with the Newly Redesigned Confluence Analytics
The Confluence team has announced a major redesign of Confluence analytics to help you gain actionable insights more easily! The update includes new summary cards for quick metrics, one-click time period filters, search bars for data tables, a modernized look for charts, and faster performance. While the Attachments tab is temporarily removed 😱, it will return with Embedded Links analytics based on your feedback. These enhancements make it easier to track page views, analyze team priorities, report on Confluence usage, and identify knowledge gaps. The redesign is gradually rolling out, so stay tuned if you don’t see it yet!
Our Two Cents
Confluence: The Multipurpose Tool for Every Team
At K15t, we’ve been using Confluence across the organization for a long time, and we’re thrilled to see how it’s evolving to become even more versatile for all our teams. With tools like whiteboards, databases, and automations, our teams are accomplishing more in less time. And maybe it’s just us, but we’re finding that many tasks are getting easier thanks to the seamless connections between Confluence, other Atlassian tools, and third-party integrations.
After all, at the end of the day, we all just want to do our work well. Confluence is proving to be a valuable partner in helping us achieve that. 😁
From K15t
Three Cheers—and a New Live Stream—for Confluence Admins!
Check out our recent live stream—or share it with your favorite admin—to discover all the latest enhancements that make Confleunce administration and collaboration even better.
