Why should I create topics?
Changemakers for Children is a place to access and share knowledge. We want to build a strong, collaborative database full of knowledge, including resources, interesting stories and discussions, to support child rights professionals globally. The way we can do it on Changemakers for Children is through topics.
Topics have more options for editing your text, are searchable throughout the platform and can be included in the resource library by the Changemakers moderators. You can add attachments, images and online videos to your topic, and apply tags to help organise it in the resource library. This is why you should use topics, and not posts, to share resources. Use posts only for quick communication, to ask questions and send reminders to other members.
In this tutorial guide we detail the steps to create a topic from the Changemakers' homepage and from inside a group.
I- Creating a topic from the homepage
1- Access the homepage and click on "Start a topic"
2- Select the topic type:
Choose between the following topic types:
- Blog - select this option to share an interesting story like this one
- Opportunity - share courses, job vacancies, or funding opportunities
- Podcast - share podcast recordings, like this one about child's participation
- News - share relevant news to the child sector
- Resource - use this option to share toolkits, reports and articles
- Webinar recording - share webinar recordings, like this one
3- Add a title, a description and a banner image:
Your topic must have a title and a description. You can use different text styles when creating your topic, as well as add links, images and videos from the web.
Adding a banner image is optional, but recommended. The ideal image size for banner images on topics is 1200 x 420 pixels. If you add an image with a smaller or a higher resolution, the platform will automatically crop it, and you can adjust it as you prefer.
4- Select the group and the visibility settings:
Choose a group to publish your topic, or leave it blank if you want to publish it to the wider Changemakers for Children community. Choosing a group might reduce your options for content visibility depending on the group's settings.
The following visibility options are available:
- Public - your topic will display to everyone, and can be shared externally
- Community - your topic will display to everyone on Changemakers
- Group - your topic will display only to the members of the respective group
- Family Members - visible to Family Alliance Members only
- Family for Every Child Secretariat - visible to Family Secretariat staff only
5- Attach files to your topic
To attach a document to your topic, go to "Additional information" and upload your file.
When sharing resources, we strongly recommend that you add attachments to your topic whenever possible, rather than sharing a link to an external website for people to read or download. That way you'll contribute to building a richer and larger resource library that will benefit our community.
6- Add tags to your topic:
Applying tags to your topic will help others easily find it when searching the resource library. Select the care setting, what community of practice it relates to and if relevant, the focus areas and region.
Important: adding a community tag to your topic will not publish your topic to that community, rather it will identify that your topic is of interest to the members of that community. If you want to publish your topic to a specific community, choose the respective group in the group's dropdown list. Currently, it is not possible to post one topic to multiple groups at once.
8- Preview your topic
If you want to see how your topic looks like before you publish it, you can simply click the "Preview" button at the bottom of the page, on the left-hand side.
You can leave your topic temporarily unpublished if you wish, so you can always come back and finish it later. To do it, expand the "settings" tab and uncheck the "Published" checkbox.
7- Publish your topic
Simply click save to publish your topic. You can come back and edit it anytime by clicking on the pencil icon next to the banner image. Once your topic is published, our moderators will include it in the resource library.
II- Creating a topic from inside a group
You can also create a new topic from inside a group you are a member of. To do so, navigate to the group and click on the 'Topics' tab, then select 'create topic' from the left-hand sidebar.
Follow the instructions above. The only difference, in this case, is that the group will already be selected from the start.