Live More new Guides on the way! Get notified by signing up to CAST's newsletter..

Home > Guides

Helping people find out about events and resources using Padlet

Contributed by

Salford CVS is an infrastructure organisation providing advice, information, support and opportunities for voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations in Salford.

Use this Guide to create a digital noticeboard of events and resources for your community. If your organisation is often asked to share notices about events and other activities, using a tool like Padlet could save you time. It can also help people to access the notices, whether or not they use social media.

Jump to steps
Key software:
Padlet
How they set it up:
Followed simple on screen instructions
Setup costs:
Free
Ongoing costs:
Free. Or £60-90/year for high use.
Guide in use since:
January 2023

Steps to using Padlet to create noticeboards that list events and resources

Before you make your digital noticeboard it’s a good idea to look at all the different types of notices you might want to display. Make a list of:

  • types of event or activity

  • topics or themes

  • format - for example PDF, image, text

  • audiences the notice is aimed at

  • source - for example internal, external, partners, general public.

This will help you decide whether to create one noticeboard for everything, or more than one. You might want to make a board for a particular theme or audience.

Look at what you currently do with these types of notice. You may already share them online through:

  • your website

  • your social media

  • an email newsletter.

Think about where your audiences already expect to find this information. Will they be able to access the noticeboard too?

Make a note of how much work is involved in sharing notices individually on the channels they use. Decide if creating a digital noticeboard will save you time or create more work before you commit to it.

Salford CVS (Community and Voluntary Services) provides support for local charities and community organisations, as well as individuals who want to volunteer.

As a hub for the city’s community organisations, they are often asked to share notices about events, activities, and campaigns in the area. Notices arrive in a range of formats including text in an email, to webpages, or images and PDFs.

The CVS team would share the notices on social media and in their email newsletters, but if people weren’t signed up for these they wouldn’t see them. The newsletters were so full of notices they were very long, and other items got buried. Adding all the notices to their website was fiddly and time-consuming, and there was no single place to display everything.

The team wanted a way to share everything that was going on in one place, which they could then link to from their website, email newsletters, and social media.

There are some helpful questions to ask yourself before you create your noticeboard:

  • Who will be able to add events or resources to it? Will it be only you, your team, partner organisations, or even the general public?

  • Will you check every notice that is posted on the board?

  • Are there any limits to what kind of notices you want to publish on the board? For example only events in one area, or only events which are open to everyone.

You might like to note down some brief guidelines based on your answers.

For their first digital noticeboard of community events and resources, Salford CVS decided to only share events that were free to attend. They also decided that they would only use it to promote events from the community, and not their own events.

There are several tools available which you can use to make a digital noticeboard, including Trello, Miro, and Padlet.

To help you choose which one is best for you, think about:

  • How much it will cost

  • How many user accounts you will need

  • If it will be accessible for all of your audiences

  • Whether it is easy to use

  • How many boards you want to make

  • How many notices you expect to share

  • What format notices you will be sharing

  • Whether it looks attractive and engaging.

 Example of a padlet set up by Salford CVS

Salford CVS found that Padlet was the best option for them because it:

  • has a free plan

  • was very easy to use

  • is accessible for people using screen readers

  • allows users to download each board as a PDF or spreadsheet

  • looks attractive and engaging, like a real noticeboard.

They identified two main disadvantages:

  • no analytics data

  • limited number of boards per account.

Once you have chosen the most suitable tool to use you can create your first noticeboard.

Start with one board, and add some typical notices to it to help you learn to use the software.

Padlet is very simple to use.

  1. To add a new notice, double click anywhere on the board or click the floating plus sign button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

  2. Type in your title or headline in the ‘Subject’ box.

  3. Use the buttons to add any attachments you have, like a file or an image.

  4. Then type or copy and paste text about your event or resource in the box below.

  5. Remember to include any text from an image attachment as text too, so that people using screen readers can read it.

  6. When you’re ready, click ‘Publish’.

You can drag and drop notices to move them around the board. To edit or delete a notice, click the three dots in the top right hand corner of the notice.

Decide whether you’d like to add your organisation’s logo or branding to the noticeboard. You can control this in ‘Settings’.

You may initially want to keep the board on a private setting rather than making it public straight away.

Share the noticeboard with your colleagues and invite their feedback. This might be a good time to note down some step by step instructions about how to add and remove notices.

Adding a new event or resource to Salford CVS' winter events padlet

Salford CVS started with one Padlet noticeboard sharing winter resources, activities, and events. The Communications & Information Coordinator created step-by-step instructions to help their colleagues learn how to use Padlet.

When you’re ready you can publish your new noticeboard and share it with your community! If you have written guidelines for what type of notices can be added to the board you can share these too.

Review how the noticeboard is being used and gather feedback from your community. Depending on the tool there may not be analytics data available, but you can get a sense of uptake by looking at:

  • comments, queries, complaints, or other informal feedback

  • social media shares, comments, or likes

  • click tracking, via email or social media analytics

  • an increase or decrease in people adding notices or sending notices to you.

Think about how to keep promoting the noticeboard among your colleagues, partners, and other audiences.

The first digital noticeboard was very popular, and Salford CVS soon added more boards and found lots of other uses for Padlet, for example creating private directories of resources.

The team have had very positive feedback from the public. They are encouraging more community organisations to use Padlet, and have included it in the training that they offer for their members. They now also use Canva to make eye-catching graphics for their notices.

Further information