GroupNews versus Slack

We admit, we here at GroupNews are fans of Slack. Its group chat capabilities are best of breed. Not only that, it’s plain fun to use.

But... because of its conversational approach, it’s far from an ideal platform to share news and events with your company. If you’re looking for a way to share important info with your whole organization in a structured way, GroupNews is your answer. Here’s how GroupNews can work for you where Slack falls short.

A Single Source of Truth

While Slack is excellent for discussions and off-the-cuff chats, it can get cluttered with various threads and conversations. Messages get buried when new ones come in. Updates don’t always reach everyone who need them. Important content ends up getting repeated for different people at different times in different channels.

GroupNews is your company’s single source of truth for important company information that everyone needs to know. With its global feed front and center, the updates from different department or team channels are combined for everyone’s benefit.

Did you know that the name Slack is an acronym meaning Searchable Log of All Company Knowledge? While the acronym may describe Slack technically, the body of content that ends up in most Slack workspaces is unstructured. A seemingly endless backlog of off-the-cuff chats is hardly the best way to make sense of “all company knowledge”.

GroupNews has a post based approach to content. Stories, Events, and Deadlines are all distinct types of posts, making them better suited for archival and later reference. Additionally, GroupNews posts are published in different channels, letting you further organize your content by department, team, project or however you see fit.

Event & Deadline Management

Slack simply lacks any sort of event posting or calendaring functionality.

GroupNews allows each department to publish important events and deadlines in their own channels. And following our “single source of truth” approach, the events get pulled together in everyone’s global feed. This ensures that everyone in your company knows what’s coming up today, tomorrow, next week, and beyond.

Contextual Discussions and Community

While Slack is great at real-time conversations, again, they tend to be unstructured. Plus the expectation of immediate responses that Slack enables can make people anxious. It’s really good at triggering "unread notification anxiety".

GroupNews takes a different approach. By default, each story, event, and deadline has a discussion section which anyone in your entire company can participate in on their own time. This way, discussions are in context and on-topic. Everyone in your company is empowered to engage in meaningful conversations, share insights, and spin off discussion threads using the content at hand as a jumping off point. Later on, because discussions are in context, people can easily find what they need in order to be fully informed.

Ensuring Accountability

Sometimes it's essential to know that critical information is read and understood by everyone on your team or in your company.

With GroupNews, you can request acknowledgement from everyone in your group on any important story, event, or deadline. This way, you know who’s seen it and who hasn’t.

Slack simply doesn’t have anything like this available for you to use.

Keep Your Group In The Loop

As you can see, GroupNews is a great tool to compliment Slack by serving as a dedicated hub for all your organizational updates. You can maintain real-time conversations and quick chats on Slack while utilizing GroupNews for structured, in-depth, and categorized updates.

Level up your company’s communication platform and keep everyone in the loop with GroupNews.