10 Tips on How to Organize Slack Channels

Organize your Slack channels with a clear naming system and the right defaults, so your workspace stays tidy and scannable as your team grows. Channels are Slack’s way of bringing order to team communication, and how you organize them decides how easily teammates find the information they need and how distraction-free their day is.

What Slack channels should I create?

When your team first launches Slack, there are two default channels: #general and #random. #general is a good place for company-wide, business-related information, and #random can be used for non-work chit-chat.

1. Organize Slack channels by teams, projects and functions

Beyond the two default channels, start with channels based on teams, projects and functions. For example:

• A channel that involves a whole functional team for more high level discussion and updates (#team-marketing, #team-sales, #team-cs)
• A channel for discussion on more specific functions in the team (#cs-tickets, #cs-implementation, #cs-churns)
• A channel to group projects that involves a cross-team squad(#proj-blog-redesign, #proj-referral-program)
  

We recommend deciding how a channel ends when you create it. Project channels (#proj-…) lose their purpose when the project does, and a long tail of dead channels clutters the channel browser. Archive them instead of deleting them: archived channels are closed to new activity, but their history is retained and searchable on paid plans, and unarchiving restores the channel and its members. Deleting removes the history for good, and on Free, Pro and Business+ only owners and admins can do it. By default members of a channel, other than guests, can archive it, so make “archive when done” part of closing a project.

2. Create Slack channels for good-reads / knowledge sharing

Besides channels for focused work, create a few good-reads or knowledge-sharing channels where teammates share industry best practices and anything inspiring they read. For example:

• Divide the channels by topics so people can subscribe to channels they are interested in learning more (#learn-sales, #learn-marketing)
• At Kipwise, we also have a company wide channel #company-competitors to share market intelligence when we spot any interesting move from our competitors

3. Create Slack channels for social or fun purposes

Add some informal or social channels too, so teammates build stronger bonds. For example:

• Create some channels based on hobbies so teammates can plan some off-work activities together (#fun-foodie, #fun-sports, #fun-music)

4. Create separate channels for bots / automation

Many teams set up bots or automations that post updates to Slack automatically. If a bot is busy, give it its own channel, or its messages will bury what real teammates write. For example,

• At Kipwise, we are using Intercom as our customer support tool and we have a channel called #cs-tickets where Intercom will send us a Slack message when there is new tickets or replies received.

Use naming conventions to keep your Slack channels organized

Good channel names also keep things organized and help teammates find the channels that need their attention.

1. Use prefixes to group similar channels

One tactic I regularly see teams use is creating prefixes for channels that should be grouped together. For example,

• Use the prefixes #company- for channels that all company members should pay attention to (#company-announcements, #company-competitors)
• Use the prefixes #team- for channels that are for each internal functional team (#team-marketing, #team-sales, #team-cs)
• Use the predefined team prefix to group all channels related to the same team (#sales-leads, #sales-wins)
• Use the prefix #proj to group projects that involves a cross-team squad (#proj-blog-redesign, #proj-referral-program)
• Use the prefix #fun- to group all channels that are for fun or social purposes (#fun-foodie, #fun-sports, #fun-music)

2. Use the channel description to state purposes clearly

Also add a clear channel description whenever you create a channel, for example what should and shouldn’t be posted in it.

How to make sure teammates join the right channels?

1. Set default channels that all new members will automatically be added to

You can set default channels that all new members will automatically be added to when they join the workspace. This way, you can welcome and direct new team members to the right channels and help new teammates access important information that they should know right away.

We recommend keeping default channels to the few every employee must read, usually #general plus an announcements channel. A default channel adds every new member automatically, so a long default list turns into noise for new hires, and existing members are not added when you set it, so current staff have to be added to a new default channel separately (see below).

2. Share the link to a company wide channel when a new channel is created

You can add up to 1,000 people to a channel at once by pasting a list of names or email addresses, and on paid plans you can add a whole user group. For an optional channel, share a link to it in a company-wide channel instead, so teammates can visit the new channel and join if they want.

More productivity tips

You may have to join quite a few channels to stay in the loop. These tips cut the noise.

1. Pin important Slack channels in your own personal sidebar

You can star important channels so they will appear in the Starred section at the top of the channel list.

2. Create custom notifications for channels

To reduce noise and distraction, you can mute channels that you only need to check occasionally or mute channels that have lots of updates from bots.

A muted channel stops sending notifications. Muted conversations are typically hidden from your sidebar, and you can choose in your preferences whether to show or hide them, but a numbered badge still appears next to a muted conversation if you’re mentioned or receive a DM. For a short break, the Notifications icon at the top of a channel has a Temporarily mute… option for one hour or until tomorrow.

An AI agent that works inside your Slack threads

Organising channels stops questions landing in the wrong place. It does not stop them being asked twice. Kipwise Agent answers in the thread, as you, so the answer stays where the question was.

• “Do we have a doc about this?”: it searches your knowledge base, reads the page, and answers with the relevant part and a link to the source
• “Can someone write this up?”: it drafts a page from the thread, files it in the folder you name, publishes it and posts the link
• “Post this to the channel”: it shares a page into a Slack channel you name
• “Every week, summarise…”: it runs a request on a schedule and posts the result where the team will see it

It only ever sees the pages you can see, and everything it writes in Kipwise is attributed to you.

👉 See what Kipwise Agent does

More tips on using Slack

Explore the tag Slack tips on our blog for more ways to get the most out of Slack.