Knowing your audience

Understanding your audience helps you define the purpose of your company wiki. 

Who will be reading the resources you add in there? 

What would add the most value to these readers? 

What outcome or difference do you want to achieve by making your docs easier to find? 

Answering these questions helps you build a strategic vision of the information you want in your wiki — from the topics and categories you want to cover to how you want to present all these resources. 

Taking inventory

The next step is to take inventory of all the monday.com docs that fall within the scope of your defined purpose. For example, you can create a comprehensive list of all docs from a few priority project boards, quarterly dashboards, and departments. 

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Add all your selected docs into a centralized monday.com board. This will make it easier to map the right columns to a Softr block when you build the app later. 

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Now, you can categorize your documents into topic streams. You can group your documents based on the following categories.  

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• Purpose or function: E.g. company benefits, branding guidelines, employee handbook, employee directory, product documentation

• Department: E.g., Engineering, Human Resources, Marketing, Sales
• Content type: E.g.. SOPs, FAQs, checklists, meeting minutes 
• Audience: E.g. new hires, managers, go-to-market teams, engineering  

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These categories will help you define subtopics under each umbrella term and improve your wiki’s layout and navigation. It also speeds up the process of understanding and reviewing each document, naming them, and assessing information to add, remove, and update. 

Defining your information hierarchy

Your hierarchy of information ultimately dictates how you’ll lay out all resources within your wiki interface. Your inventory of monday.com docs will help you identify the top-level categories you want to make more prominent in your wiki. These topics should be clear enough for employees to correlate to a document they hope to find.

 For example, these are the top categories in Softr’s wiki template 👇 

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Within each category, you’ll then want to map out any subcategories that would simplify the search for your audience. Make sure these subcategories have a logical flow and maintain consistency and clarity when naming your categories, subcategories, and documents. 

Step 1: Setting up your Softr account

Head on over to the Softr website to create your account! It’s a simple process requiring only your name, email address, and password. You can also create an account via Google to streamline your login credentials with your Google workspace. 

If you’re interested in trying Softr out for yourself and getting buy-in from your team before committing to a paid plan, you can publish your first app with Softr’s free account! 

But to connect your account to a monday.com data source, you’ll need one of the following plans: 

• Professional: Softr’s most popular plan allows unlimited published apps and 100 app users. Includes the basic features you need for a company wiki, like forms, comments, and a Call API to integrate with monday.com
• Business: Allows for unlimited published apps and 2500 app users. Includes features that support app scalability, including global data restrictions and single sign-on capabilities. 
• Enterprise: A custom plan for enterprises that need extra security, tailored support, and advanced customization. 

Step 2: Connecting Softr to your monday.com account

To connect your monday.com data to Softr, you’ll need Admin access to your monday.com workspace. Your monday.com data will be retrieved and synchronized via Softr’s Call API. You’ll find the API token you need in the Administration tab of your Monday account. Here are all the steps to getting your data source set up in Softr 👇

Step 3: Designing Your wiki layout

Softr has a wiki template that serves as a great starting point to visualize how yours might look. Although this template doesn’t support monday.com as a data source, you can copy content from your docs into a free Airtable or Google Sheets database to start and then remap each block to monday.com later! 

But of course, you can create your layout from scratch so it best meets the needs of your team. Here are a few general tips for designing an intuitive wiki: 

• Follow your company branding guidelines: Branding consistency gives your wiki a professional and polished look. Softr’s visual editor allows you to change colors, fonts, and add your logo to create a seamless user experience. 
• Use a modular design: Lay out each section of content and resources into digestible modules or blocks so your audience can quickly skim through your wiki to find what they need. 
• Clearly label headings, calls to action, and descriptions: Use concise copy in readable fonts to help readers quickly identify what they’re looking for and skim through text to assess their available resources. 
• Create responsive interface designs: Ensure your wiki looks balanced and easy to digest on different screen sizes. 

Step 4: Adding and organizing content

Once connected to monday.com, you’ll import the docs you need via a Softr block — like a Text or List block. 

Select the board containing all the docs you want to add to your company wiki. Next, you’ll map each block field to the corresponding monday.com field. From there, you can configure how to display your content visually in the wiki. 

The most important thing to be mindful of when adding more docs to your wiki is readability and searchability. This is where the content hierarchy you’ve prepared will come in handy.

• Structure your topics logically: Arrange your content into bigger topic buckets that break out into smaller subtopics, and so on. You can group your blocks into pages that link to each other to create a logical flow of information that’s easy to navigate. 
• Create a filtering system for your content: Instead of having readers sort through documents one at a time, enhance your wiki with a category menu and tagging system so users can find and explore resources that fit a specific department, function, content type, and more. 
• Optimize your interface for search: A custom search bar is another feature to consider adding to your wiki. If you have a robust wiki that’s too time-consuming to scroll manually, then a search bar will help you improve your wiki’s usability. 

Step 5: Customizing user access and permissions

 Your company wiki will contain important information that you probably don’t want going beyond your employees. At Softr, we know that internal applications and strong user permissions go hand in hand. You can enhance your board permissions on monday.com by: 

• Allowing designated app logins for each user via password, magic links, one-time codes, or single sign-on.
• Creating specific user groups with defined permission levels.
• Managing how much access each user or user group has when interacting with pages, blocks, and actions in your wiki. 

Step 6: Publishing and maintaining your wiki

Once you’re done designing your wiki and finalizing your user permissions, you’re ready for your company wiki to go live!

But remember that publishing your wiki isn’t where it ends 👀

Your company wiki is a resource that’s constantly changing — and that means it’s going to need some regular spring cleaning. 

Softr’s integration with monday.com allows you to create a dynamic wiki without manually controlling data quality across two platforms. All updates in your wiki will be reflected in your monday.com docs and vice versa. 

All you need to do now is create a culture of consistent document management by assigning a point of accountability for wiki maintenance, scheduling regular content reviews, and empowering all team members to update their documents and contribute changes where needed.