5 Free Sites for Knowledge Brokers

By Carly Leggett

Knowledge brokers face an ever-changing adventure with no two days the same. Monday may bring a social media campaign, Tuesday a stakeholder meeting, Wednesday a client needing an evaluation survey. In a world of new technologies and ideas, it’s hard to keep up with the changing landscape of products and even harder to assess the quality of available options.

My philosophy for managing this is simple: keep it free and stick with what works. Yes, you can always pay more for the bells and whistles. But if you’re using something that works for you, produces good results and (you guessed it), is FREE, why go down that rabbit hole? Until that paywall goes up or the quality and usability go down, stick with what you know.

As such, here are five free sites for the modern-day knowledge broker:

#1: Tweetdeck

Chances are, at some point, you’ll need to manage at least two Twitter accounts at the same time. In addition to your personal account, maybe you’re responsible for your organization’s account, as well as a project-specific one. Whatever the makeup of your Twitter life, you need a way to juggle all the pieces and for this, I use TweetDeck. This web-based application allows you to stay logged in from a variety of devices — a must if you live at multiple workspaces or are often on the go. TweetDeck uses columns to organize Twitter activity and allows you to view multiple profiles, Tweet from multiple accounts, and schedule future Tweets.

#2: Survey Monkey

Communication and evaluation are the cornerstones of a knowledge brokers’ world. What’s working? Who’s engaged in the project? What should our priorities be? Enter Survey Monkey, a quick and easy online survey tool. Create, distribute and analyze surveys via email to measure satisfaction, evaluate tools and products, or assess priorities. Of note — many health researchers have previously used the Canada-based, Fluid Survey. However, though Fluid Survey stopped accepting new registrations in late 2016, they’ve joined the Survey Monkey family.

#3: Tagul

Word clouds are a fun and engaging tool to use in presentations, summary reports or even live group discussions to highlight commonly used words. Tagul is free for non-commercial use, easy to use and offers a variety of templates, colours and designs.

#4: Powtoon

If you’re looking to add excitement to a presentation, share results in a creative way, or tell a story aimed at a particular audience, whiteboard videos are a unique animation tool that can be used to add a visual element to your work. Powtoon offers a suite of 11 templates and 38 tunes that you can use to create videos less than five minutes in length, free of charge.

#5: Trello

We already featured Trello during a past High Five series but I was away at the time and I’m an impressed Trello newbie, so it gets a repeat high-five!

For any knowledge broker working with diverse teams spanning disciplines, organizations, cities or even countries, this project management tool is a great way to stay on task. Organized in a column format similar to TweetDeck, Trello boards feature lists filled with tasks (called cards) that are easily edited, moved between columns or expanded to include notes, checklists, due dates or attachments. We’ve even used it to manage the editorial calendar for this blog. The free version allows for an unlimited number of boards, integration with programs such as Dropbox and attachments up to 10 MB.

Your Turn

What free tools for knowledge brokers would you recommend? Let us know via the comments section below.

About the Author

Carly Leggett is the Knowledge Translation Practice Lead with the George and Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation and the Knowledge Broker for Translating Emergency Knowledge for Kids (TREKK), a national knowledge mobilization network for pediatric emergency medicine.