The noticeboard is a great way to ensure conversations that happen in-between meetings are visible and recorded, it's also a great tool for tracking items for addition to future agendas or keeping up with training needs and messages from your local authority or trust.

Our article How do I search for a particular post on our noticeboard shows you how can find a particular conversation using free text. If however you are looking for ways to make your noticeboard generally more streamlined and effective, read on to find out about topics and filters.

Your clerk/admin can create topics and add them to existing posts. This will help them categorise messages for board members to filter the noticeboard on future visits. This is really handy for creating a list of generic filters that your team often comes looking for (Training' or 'Next meeting agenda item' for example).

To add a topic to a message, click on the menu button on the post and choose "Add/remove topic".

Click in the text box, then you can either choose an existing topic from the dropdown or type in the box to create a new topic.

To remove a topic from a post, click on the "x" next to the topic.

To filter noticeboard posts by topic, click on the "Filter posts" button in the upper right corner of the noticeboard.

Click in the box on the right-hand side to open the full list of topics. You can then select a topic from the list or type in the box to search for a specific topic.

The filtered posts will appear on the left-hand side.

To see the full list of topics available for your board, click on the "Manage topics" button.

You can then see all of the available topics, and you can use the buttons to rename or delete a topic. You can also create new topics here using the "Add Topic" button.