How to Create an Internal Wiki in ClickUp

Every company needs to have an internal knowledge base or wiki. This creates a central location for your team, both new and experienced employees, to find and read more about your company history, your values, your goals, your expectations for them, and how you do things as a business. So the million dollar question then becomes, how do you create an internal wiki and where should it live? Yes, there are a ton of different solutions out there, but building this inside of ClickUp allows you to to create it in one central location, as well as tie it directly to the work and tasks you're doing as a company. A lot of teams start by building this in Google Docs, which is fine, but it can be very confusing. Things are going to get lost and there's going to be a ton of questions that you get on how they can find a specific document once you've done a good job of linking everything together. So essentially you put all the hard work in and a lot of that internal knowledge base is just going to collect dust and COBWEBS. And at ZenPod, as we always say, the process needs to live where the work gets done. If I build my internal wiki knowledge base with my SOPs and instructional documents inside of ClickUp, I can tie these directly to the tasks that need it. So let's jump in to talk about how we can build all of this inside of ClickUp. All right, we're in ClickUp. Now let's talk about where and how to build a knowledge base. So what I'm going to use inside of ClickUp is going to be the doc view. So if you don't know anything about views or docs, we have a video I'm going to pop up in the top right as well as in the description below. You can find a link to that. It's going to go over everything you need to know about ClickUp Docs, from the formatting to how to actually create a doc view and things like that. So you'll want to watch that if you know and are new to ClickUp Docs. But very simply, all you need to do to add a document is really wherever you are in the hierarchy. If you're out of space, if you're a folder, if you're at a list, I can go and create a doc view view. But where do I actually need to create this knowledge base? So obviously for this I want it to be in a central location where everyone can find it very easily. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to build this here at the everything level that is essentially a place where I can see the work across my whole ClickUp workspace. It's a perfect spot to have an internal knowledge base. So if I want to add that in, you'll see I already have one here. But all I need to do is go to my everything level right here, go to add a view, add a doc view just like that. Make sure it is not private. Private means only you can see that I need this to be public. But pretty simply once I get that set up. Now, when you seem to start building out all the documents and everything inside of the knowledge base, which is the most important part. However, let me give you a couple of tips for your team so that they can easily find this. The first thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to take this view and you're going to want to pin it at the everything level. You can have a lot of views and as you'll see here, be kind of clogged up with all these views here, especially if you don't have it as standardized like I do in this demo portal. But here you'll be able to search views but we want to make this very easy to find. So what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to pin this view just like that. So you see here I can unpin that. You'll see that bounces back there. I want to make sure that this is pinned. As you see these views are pinned. I want this to be pinned as well. I'm just going to click right there and that's going to pop it to really the front of these views here. So I can, if I want it to be behind the my test view I can and I can move it right there if I want it to be on the far left for everyone to easily find. Another thing that you're going to want to do on this is you're going to want to make sure that this is favorited for everyone on the team. They're all going to have to do this separately. But what that does, you'll see here I have my favorites at the top of my screen. I have these all pinned to the top as well. If I were to unpin that, that's going to show them right here. I can easily go and pin this favorites to the top again. But if I were to come here and I were to unfavor this view, that's not going to show up at the top anymore. So you want everyone on your team, once you have this all built out. They should favorite this because they can also rename that just like that. That way I have it at the top and wherever I am in my workspace, I can easily go and find the knowledge base again. So want to make sure that is front and center for everyone. That is the first thing that you need to do as you start to build this out. So now let's talk about the overall structure of our knowledge base. So the beautiful part of ClickUp Docs is the ability for you to create hierarchy within your documents here. So I'll walk through that as you see here, just like I do my spaces, my folders and my list, I can build a pretty similar thing here in my documents. So as you can see, I have my one document view which is labeled zenpal Knowledge base. Then I have a bunch of different documents. Underneath that I have my knowledge base overview, which is essentially going to be an overview of my knowledge base. All the things that are going to be in here, just giving an instructions for someone new coming in. I could put a video in this, but I'm just saying, hey, this is what you're going to find. Welcome them to our knowledge base. Put all the instructions of what they're going to find in here. So the expectations are set. So that's the first document that you're going to want to have in your knowledge base. Then after that I like to structure it with these different sort of parent docs here. So I like to build this so that it is directly looking like what I have over here in my ClickUp hierarchy with my spaces, folders and lists. So I have my delivery space which is for my client services. I have my growth space for my sales and marketing and operations for basically everything else. I also have my CRM or process library, but I don't need to build that up here. So how I do this is I like to have delivery here. They're going to have its own sort of section growth, is also going to have its own section operations, is going to have its own section clients which this can be a little bit different. This is more public facing. So you can create this. If you want to create some public facing docs for your clients, this is not going to be custom for each client. I would do that in in their client folders. However, if I do this, if I have some onboarding instructions or basic FAQs and I want to send this to all of my clients, I just have sort of one link to send all of them and maybe sort of my intro emails or whatever it may be, I can do that. I can write all that content on here, or the operating instructions and FAQs and turn this into a public link. As you can see, this one is a public link. All I need to do to do that would be go to share and I can. If this was private, it'll show up like that. But I can just copy this public link just like that and you'll see that it's public through this little globe that shows up there the way that these sort of docs work. So if I had my parent doc and my sub docs, if I were to make this clients public right here, that's going to make these public with it. So if I share the link to this, it's going to come with both of those documents as well. So that's something that you can do that I recommend. If you have sort of public doc for clients, that would also be to all of them. In addition, I also like to have some documentation templates. So for your SOPs, if you have a template like this for sort of the way that it should be written. So as you can see here, I have sort of the basics for if all of our SOPs are written the same, it's going to be way easier for us to read them. So I'll have it sort of the TLDR here and then have my steps. Always recommend putting loom overviews or GIFs or whatever you call it. GIFs or GIFs and then screenshots and things like that, always helpful. As well as email templates, things like that. Get as much documentation as you can as possible to make it super easy to read this. In addition, for this template I also recommend having something down here with the versioning of when this was published as well as if you want anyone to be able to share input, you can put and build a process development form which can live in your operation space in the process development list. I'll go over that in a little bit. But if you have a form to that, that just gives people a place where if they have feedback on this sop, whatever may be, they can leave that feedback with that form. So it makes it super easy for you to collect all the information from the team. However, this can live inside of your process library down here if you'd like it. You can actually save this as a template. But sometimes I like to just keep it here because that makes it super easy for me to just take this, I can duplicate it and then if I need to make an SOP for my Growth team like that, I can easily drag it there and as you'll see now it's living there with my template. So you can do that or again you can just save that if I want to as a template in the ClickUp template center. And then if I were to go to deploy that, I would kind of have the same process here. Just go apply a template and then find my doc template and deploy it in to the delivery folder or parent doc, whatever you want to call it right there. So that's how I do that. But that's my main structure. Delivery, growth, operations, my clients and then my documentation templates. So delivery and growth, the way that these are going to work, this is mainly going to be delivery and growth focused sop. So delivery sops inbound SEO creative. The way that I like to organize this is to have your delivery delivery SOPs and then break it down into your service lines or whatever way you want to categorize that. I find this easiest if I open up my inbound, you'll see blog post, podcast, project call, recaps, whatever it may be. You can get those all labeled on there. This just makes it nice. Structure and hierarchy to have all that in there. If you were to have anything else underneath blog posts, as you can see, you can really make a lot of different subpages here and build out that hierarchy with your docs. You don't want to go too deep, but it is nice to keep those all organized like that. Instead of my growth kind of the same thing. We're going to have growth SOPS with our sales and marketing departments. So nothing special there. Operations is really where I'm going to host most of this stuff. So inside of the operations parrot doc I'm going to have my employee handbook and inside this employee handbook I'm going to have really all the about information of our company. Where someone needs to go to that's onboarding, they need to go to this list. They're going to find really everything they need in this. We have about and history about our company. We have our values, communication, how we do this as a team, culture, our team, our tools, which is super important. As you can see here, I have our Slack structure and expectations. This is essentially how we communicate as a team on Slack. And the most important piece in this is going to be your ClickUp usage. This is going to be walking people through basically everything they need to know about ClickUp and how they should use it. It's always helpful to have sort of a training course as a team in terms of getting people onboarded into ClickUp. So we're all using the system in the same way. That's something that we provide at zenpilot with our agency project management certification. But in this we're going to have sort of what do all of our statuses mean? We're going to go over time tracking and estimates, custom fields that we have as a team, tags, our account dashboard, task building 101, and so on and so forth. So you want to have those expectations set that's going to help your team be way more successful inside of any of your tech stacks. So whether it's Slack, whether it's ClickUp, whatever tool it may be, make sure those instructions and expectations are all listed out right here. In addition, you'll have information on onboarding, offboarding, how to spend company money, total rewards. Also thinking about paid time off. If you have a process for that, which is something you can run out of ClickUp with a form and also a list that tracks all of that time. You want to make sure all that is documented in here. So you want to make sure that everything is built in to your internal knowledge base or wiki, especially this employee handbook. Super important. We also have a thing here for your ClickUp champion, which is basically just helping them do their job well with a weekly roundup. So if you have any templates or things like that, you want to make sure that they're built into your internal knowledge base as well. So always helpful to have all this. Always helpful to have videos that are recorded for your team to watch. Just make sure you get all of that knowledge out of Google Docs or somewhere else and put it all into this knowledge base so it's all in one central location. The beauty of that, which I'll show in a second, is that you can take this and you can tie it to tasks. So if there's a document they need to read, you can tie that to a task. It makes it super easy for that to be super actionable, very easy to find for the team, as well as just have it all stored in one place. In addition to another great thing about ClickUp docs, if I come here, I have my operations SOPs, let's say I have finance SOPs, which aren't relevant to a lot of the team. I can adjust my permission settings here on who can actually see this. So if I wanted to, I can come here and I could share this with certain people. So right now it might be shared with everyone. If I come here, we'll see if I wanted to Share it with everyone. I could share with everyone in the workspace, which is going to be how it starts off at. But if I wanted to just share it with specific people, I could make this document private. And then I could go down here and just make sure I'm sharing with specific people. I click this back like that. Invite by name or email. I'll come here and let's see. We wanted to share it with Carlos. I could turn on Carlos. Zero. Same thing with everyone. Gabrielle. I can go down the list and just share it with specific people. So you can really adjust sort of your sops and documents that you have in this knowledge base with certain permission settings. The way that that works Parent doc and sub doc. If I were to set the permission settings here and only share it with specific people, then that's going to take away any document that I have underneath this. So let's say we had a couple SOPs underneath this. Operations SOPs. If I hid this from certain people, that's going to hide this, this and everything that's underneath any of these. So just be careful with that. That's one thing to note, like if I were to make this private, that's going to make everything private underneath it. So just be careful with your permissions. But it's also helpful based off of how you sort of build your DOC structure and hierarchy here. So that's an overview of the structure and really how to build it out. Now let's talk about overall building of these, the process of actual building out your SOPs, as well as how to tie these directly to ClickUp tasks. All right, so the first thing you're going to want is a process for sort of writing and reviewing and publishing these documents. So I'd always recommend you have tasks actually built out. You can build a process for this in your process library, but you want to make sure that you have somewhat of a process development or documentation development, whatever it may be, list inside of your operations space. As you can see here, I have new SOP document. Again, whatever it may be, maybe it's something else, but just have a process for that that's very simple. It's just creating the draft, reviewing it and marking as reviewed, and then making edits, publishing it and notifying the team. So very simple process, but you want to have those tasks in there so that basically we can kind of go through this and if it needs to be reviewed to make sure we review it before it's published, we can do that. The other thing I like to do on these documents in Tandem with that is if I come here, you'll see in my inbound parent doc folder here is I have blog posts, podcasts, project, and call recaps. I can use these icons to label whether it's reviewed in progress or just sort of in a backlog. So I can do a green, yellow, red. I can use different colors. Just make sure that's documented somewhere. But this tells me this blog post is ready to go, this podcast ready to go. This is under review. And call recaps is just in the backlog of something we need to build out. So you can kind of build that process in here by using those icons. It just makes it super easy to know green, yellow, red, what's good, what's not good, and so on and so forth. Okay. In addition, the beauty of this too is now that I have my SOP for my blog post, what I'm able to do is I can take this and I can tie it directly to the tasks that actually need these instructions. So with these, this blog post, I have this unique URL for all of my different documents here. So I can take this and I can copy this URL and. And now if I'm building out a process here, the process library. So if I come down here, let's go into my task templates, let's go into inbound, let's find my blog post like this and say, I have a step here of creating the blog strategy, and this is what is relevant. I can come here and I can paste this directly in here. So I'm going to do a command V just like that. As you'll see, I create a bookmark. I can just leave it like that. What that's going to do is now this is going to live in every single time that this process is deployed. So that makes it super scalable, super easy to kind of have your documents in one place. That way, anytime that this gets deployed, this task is always going to have this in the description. So it makes it easy to edit this in one place. And they can just click on this and they'll be able to go directly to the blog post sop. So, as you can think with different tasks, like onboarding, whatever it may be, if you link it to a document, they can easily go and read it. And as you say, you have a bunch of tasks out there for that onboarding process, and it's all linked to the same thing. You only have to edit one document and makes it super easy, but makes these SOPs and all the documents you have in here super actionable and tied where the process is living, where the work gets done. In addition, another thing that you can do if you want to is maybe there's a specific section in here that I want to call out. So maybe for one of those steps, maybe it's step number one, I can take this and I can also copy this block link and then I can go back down to my inbound list here, the blog post. And instead of posting that whole document, maybe I just post that block link. So let's get rid of that. And now I can paste that in here. As you'll see, it shows up like this. I can't create a bookmark, kind of how I did earlier, where you saw more visual there. And then this is going to link directly to it and open up in a new window. So there are some limitations here, but this is going to open up directly and go right to step one. As you can see here, then it highlights that of okay, you're doing this. So it makes it super actionable, makes it super easy as you get a long SOP of what they actually need to work on, what they need to be looking at that just ties it directly to that one section. So that's another thing that you can do if you build out your knowledge base inside of ClickUp here. So the last thing to highlight is going to be sort of the process for reviewing these, if anyone has any feedback. So as I mentioned earlier, at the bottom of this, we talked about the process development form. I would highly recommend you have something like that. And so I can go to my operations space. You'll see here in my process development list where I'm actually building these out. I also had this internal process feedback form. This is something you can create. So whether this is your processes, whether this is kind of what we were just going over with those documents and SOPs and things like that, you could have this request form where essentially this can just be linked out on those SOP documents. Someone can come here, they can say, hey, we need to make a change of this. This is not necessarily what we do, or have a suggestion how to make this better. So you can build the process behind that to make sure you go through a standard review cycle, make sure people don't just edit these. You can make sure that you sort of go and have a process for things like that. So you can make a form just like this of who's submitting it, issue type any details about it. How can we improve this? There's a screenshot of it. So on and so forth. Make it very process driven for that. But overall that's how you build out a knowledge base inside of ClickUp. Not super difficult. Again, you just want to build it here at the everything level and you want to have a nice structure for it to keep it organized. Build out sort of initial framework on how these documents should be written and just make sure everything is super organized and easy to find and then link that out to sort of the tasks that actually need to read that document to view that document to make it super actionable for your team. So try this out. Start building an internal wiki knowledge base and all of your SOPs inside of ClickUp and make sure they're all tied to your tasks. And if you like this video, please go and hit the like button as well. Subscribe we're going to continue to deliver content specifically for agencies trying to get the most out of ClickUp. Or if you're ready to completely transform your operations with a guidance of ClickUp's first ever and highest rated solutions partner, go to zempilot.com call and book a call with one of our experts at Senpai. We've helped close to 3,000 different agencies build more productive, profitable and healthy teams by streamlining their operations in ClickUp. So whether you're looking to boost productivity, increase profits, get visibility into profitability and utilization for your team, or just build a system that runs without you so that you could finally go on that well deserved vacation, we are here to help transform your operations will seriously change your life and I want you to experience this life changing impact. I can't wait for you to be our next agency success story. I'll see you again next time. Can I make no more I can't replace it Trying hardest not to waste it it's about time it's about time yeah, it's about time.