Event Replay: Gradual Live Demo: How Teams Launch and Run Customer Communities

00:00:00:04 - 00:00:22:12 Joshua Zerkel Well, hello, welcome and thanks for joining. I'm Josh Zerkel from gradual. Today's session is a live demo of gradual, focused on teams and how they're using it to launch and run their own communities. This session will be product focused. I'll show you how gradual works. I'll show you an action with some of our real life customers and of course, how teams are using it in practice.

00:00:22:13 - 00:00:54:08 Joshua Zerkel I will keep this session tight and if there's any live questions, I'll leave time at the end for those as well. All right, so most community teams building a community, whether new from scratch or rebuilding an older one, end up with what I think of as a patchwork quilt of tools. They may have lots and lots of different tools that they're using to keep things in their community feeling alive, to keep them organized, to keep them exciting.

00:00:54:08 - 00:01:17:25 Joshua Zerkel And that's great. But what that means is you end up with one tool for discussions, another for events, one for content. Keeping things across all of these different tools makes it really, really tough to actually keep things organized for yourself. Keep the data connected on the back end, and then for your members, it makes things feel extremely disjointed.

00:01:17:25 - 00:01:42:21 Joshua Zerkel And the more of these things that you have, the more it becomes a challenge to manage. This was my life before I joined. Gradually, I was running community programs myself at places like Evernote, asana, and and I was dealing exactly with this very problem where if I wanted to create an expansive community program for my members, it meant having lots of different tools that I then had to stitch together, both on the front end and the back end.

00:01:42:24 - 00:02:05:21 Joshua Zerkel And so when I changed organizations. I wanted to completely simplify that tech stack without losing the experiences our members needed. And that's what led me to gradual. I was actually a customer before joining the team here. So what gradual does is bring those experiences together into a single platform. But more importantly, it creates what we think of here at gradualist customer context.

00:02:05:21 - 00:02:32:27 Joshua Zerkel Instead of interactions being spread across many different tools, everything including content, discussions, events, courses, lives in one place. So that means every team on your side, whether that's the community, team, customer marketing, success, etc. can understand how customers are engaging and what they're doing. Many of our customers start with one use case, like community or customer marketing, and then they expand from there.

00:02:33:00 - 00:02:54:28 Joshua Zerkel As more teams plug into the same system. Maybe your demand gen runs their events on gradual as well, and your customer education team builds courses directly in gradual. That creates a unified place for your customers to go, but also for you and your teams. It means all of that. Customer data from across all these different touchpoints lives in a single spot, which makes it a lot easier to generate the context.

00:02:55:00 - 00:03:13:07 Joshua Zerkel You need to understand what's going on with your customers and for your teams to pull the data out that's relevant specifically to each of their domains. So it makes the process from running the program to experiencing it as a member, to getting the data out of it to understand the results and the impacts. Much more effective when everything is in one spot.

00:03:13:09 - 00:03:21:15 Joshua Zerkel So let me show you what this actually looks like in practice. I'm going to share my screen.

00:03:21:18 - 00:03:47:25 Joshua Zerkel All right so let me switch over to that window. Here we are inside of gradual. This is one of our customers. And I'll walk you through a few different examples. So what you're looking here at here is a community powered by gradual from OpenAI. Perhaps you've heard of them. You can think of this example as a really good front door for your customers, your members, to experience everything that's in the community.

00:03:47:25 - 00:04:22:00 Joshua Zerkel So, for example, OpenAI uses gradual to showcase to their members all the different ways that they can interact. So everything from content that they've decided to feature here. Through collections and so on. Here in the homepage, they've actually customized the design so that they're showcasing exactly what they want people to focus on. So specific courses that are available to them, upcoming events that they've selected, that they want people to be able to join and make them aware of past events that people can watch the replays for.

00:04:22:00 - 00:04:49:00 Joshua Zerkel All of this is built into gradual. So OpenAI is using this as the central place where the users to go learn about, engage with other people and connect across all of their different programs. Again, this is all in one spot inside of gradual. One of the first things that many communities need is a place to store resources for their members, for their customers, and so on.

00:04:49:00 - 00:05:16:19 Joshua Zerkel And this could include all sorts of different surfaces, could be guides or articles or resources, playbooks, videos, blog posts, you name it. If it's written or has something static, that's the type of thing that people in communities typically want, need, and expect. The good news here is that you can have all of that inside of gradual. So here inside of content, this is the content repository inside of gradual.

00:05:16:19 - 00:05:46:10 Joshua Zerkel And this can feature many different types of content. As I mentioned, everything from blog posts and resource guides through recorded videos and much, much more. So here in OpenAI's community, they have leveraged collections to group content in a way that makes it easier for people to understand where they should go to read about what they need. So here inside of collections, they build out a resource hub where you can see they've organized their content into these broad areas.

00:05:46:10 - 00:06:18:01 Joshua Zerkel So if we hop into the collection for small business, you'll see it's a combination of things like blog posts and resources and so on, where people can learn more about using ChatGPT and other OpenAI products for their small business. Likewise, if we hop into stories, there's more resources here that are about more varied types of customers who are using OpenAI's products to manifest in their work, in their lives, and so on.

00:06:18:01 - 00:06:47:16 Joshua Zerkel So this is a very robust way to get all of this content together in a way that is really easy for people to navigate. When we hop in, you can see that there's a very robust set of content in here. Additionally, what you see here on the side, this is called an ad in gradual. As a community builder myself, one of the things I'm constantly looking to do is direct people who are experiencing a part of the community program to other things that might be of value to them.

00:06:47:19 - 00:07:09:04 Joshua Zerkel Using this, we're really easily able to do that. So this is an ad in gradual. This can be a static image or a rotating carousel that you select. You choose it. And then when people see it, they can easily click on it to learn more. And this can either point them to a different part of the community experience, or it can point them to a place outside of the community.

00:07:09:04 - 00:07:26:20 Joshua Zerkel So it could be a help doc that lives in your help center. Or it could be a video that's on your corporate website. This is a really easy way for people to navigate to those things that they might not otherwise discover. So this is a great example of content connection in action. So you see this ad just rotated to another one.

00:07:26:20 - 00:07:56:21 Joshua Zerkel So this is a great way to surface these things in a way that makes it easy for members to find things that might be of use to them. Now, inside of Fiverr, their community is a little bit different. They both create content for their members, and they also have content that they've created with their members in partnership. So if you go into the content area inside of fiber, you'll see there's a lot of different names here of people who have authored this content.

00:07:56:22 - 00:08:27:03 Joshua Zerkel Each one of these is authored by someone different. That's because Fiverr has actually deputized members of their community to co-create content with them. And so they have identified members who are really active. They've invited them to contribute content, and then each of them has an opportunity to create content right here inside of the community. So this is a really, really great way to engage members in a way that makes it feel like they're not just recipients of the experience, but they're also participants in it.

00:08:27:04 - 00:08:52:00 Joshua Zerkel And of course, you have the ability in gradual to gate who gets to post what and whether you need to have someone on your internal team review something before it gets posted. All of those controls are completely available and up to you for how you decide to use them. What's right for your community is completely up to you, but it's already built in this ability to have people coauthor and contribute content user generated content directly in your platform.

00:08:52:00 - 00:09:16:18 Joshua Zerkel You'll see Fiverr here is making very good use of ads and gradual for this rotating carousel to direct people towards different types of content. So as an example, this is a link out to another article that was written by someone else. And so this is this is again a really, really rich way to build that community experience.

00:09:16:20 - 00:09:42:00 Joshua Zerkel So many communities in addition to having content that they want available for their members, also have a place where people can have conversations. And this is where the community experience becomes especially interactive. So when you have this sort of experience, people can ask questions, share how they're using your product, ask questions of other members and help each other do the community thing.

00:09:42:02 - 00:10:11:18 Joshua Zerkel The OpenAI forum has a very robust set of conversations, and when you hop into the discussion or forum area inside of gradual, you'll see that content is organized into different threads or boards, and you can also showcase content, whether it's hot topics or the latest conversations that are happening. This is a really great way for members to connect with one another, connect with your team internally, and have really robust, rich discussions.

00:10:11:18 - 00:10:38:07 Joshua Zerkel So this is a member who wants to have a meetup in Chicago, and they've posted about it here. And then you can see folks are uploading it. They're excited to go. And so this is a really good way to have members engage in conversations with one another. You and your team, of course, can moderate it. There's a lot of automated and manual moderation that you can do on the back end to make sure the conversations stay rich, robust, and on track.

00:10:38:09 - 00:11:00:20 Joshua Zerkel Fiverr again leads very, very heavily into member generated content for their conversations that are happening in their forum. So you'll see the boards that they have here, and you can see how robust the conversations are that are happening. People are curious about how to become a better freelancer. And so there are people here who are having very rich discussions.

00:11:00:21 - 00:11:27:16 Joshua Zerkel This one, for instance, has, I think, 32 people who've commented on it. This is all happening directly inside of the discussion area, inside of gradual. So instead of everything coming from your team or from your company having these conversations, the value is actually coming from community members themselves. And that is really what makes a community feel alive is those those conversations, those connections.

00:11:27:19 - 00:12:06:15 Joshua Zerkel Now, in most community programs, events are a core part of the program. Of course, this is a very visceral way for members to build that member to member and member to company. Connection and events are one of the places where gravel becomes especially powerful in gradual. You can host many different types of events, everything from one to ones that you can match members to each other all the way through to webinars, meetings, events like the one that you're on right now, this webinar recording all the way through to multi-day, multi-track, in-person, large scale conferences, including hybrid and everything in between.

00:12:06:15 - 00:12:28:26 Joshua Zerkel And so when you run your events in gradual, you can manage everything from the event landing page to the registration and the ticketing, the hosting of an event. If you're doing a webinar or other online meeting, all of that can be managed directly inside of gradual without you needing to go out to another tool. And of course, the event replays from those also live in gradual.

00:12:28:28 - 00:12:55:21 Joshua Zerkel If you're doing in-person, you can manage the in-person event experience, including the registration and the ticketing, the event check in the badge, printing both the sticky badge that you stick on your chest, or the hard badge like you would get at a full scale conference. All of those can be managed and printed from within gradual. And then also, if you're in person, you have a gradual mobile app where you can review the event agenda and schedule.

00:12:55:21 - 00:13:21:26 Joshua Zerkel You can select sessions you want to go to. You can actually connect with other people who are participating in the event instead of meetings with them. So it's a very robust in-person and online experience, regardless of the type of event that you're hosting. Gradual. And then, of course, all of the follow up engagement can happen in gradual also, so members don't have to leave a single experience and you don't lose them along the way in the process, which I think is really great.

00:13:21:28 - 00:13:49:25 Joshua Zerkel So many of our customers run their entire webinar and events programs directly in gradual, not just the community programs, but also things like demand gen or lead gen events, webinars that are broadly for awareness building. They'll manage those in gradual also. So this is just a really elegant way. And I can say from my experience, having run many, many events in the past, having everything live in one place makes things just a lot easier.

00:13:49:28 - 00:14:15:14 Joshua Zerkel So this is an example of our customer, Pendo. They host many different types of events, both in-person and online all around the world using gradual. And so you can see for instance here, this is an example of an event that's coming up. This is a member hosted event. So you can deputize your members to leverage your own platform if they want to host their own events.

00:14:15:14 - 00:14:37:02 Joshua Zerkel So that way you get some brand control. They have the ability to use your platform. It just makes things a lot easier. And you can see in here there's a full landing page. You can see who all the attendees are. You can register directly from here. So this just makes the event experience feel really alive. And this is again just a really easy way to manage this.

00:14:37:04 - 00:14:57:22 Joshua Zerkel Also here's a webinar that's coming up. So this is one that's specific to an AI user group. For Pendo. There's someone from Pendo here along with a customer. And this is a really great way to again build that connection with members, but in a broader way online. And with the event being held in gradual, it just makes things a lot easier.

00:14:57:22 - 00:15:26:08 Joshua Zerkel So here you can see there's the speakers full agenda. Who's attending. If you wanted to add in any sort of slides or resources before or after an event, you can also do that here as well. One thing that I really like is how events are not living in their own silo, in their own tool, because it's all part of the experience in gradual, as you're thinking about building and growing your community, you want to connect the dots between events and other experiences that community members might have.

00:15:26:09 - 00:15:47:07 Joshua Zerkel So, for example, Customer Perplexity held an online event, a webinar with a guest speaker, Robert. And there was a lot of really rich, valuable conversation that happened during the event. But you can see here that it was only 45 minutes. So if you weren't able to make that session, then you missed out and be able to ask this person questions.

00:15:47:08 - 00:16:18:09 Joshua Zerkel But what perplexity did is, since they have both their events and their conversation form happening inside of gradual, they created a thread directly connected to this event where Roy Budget, the speaker, did an online AMA that happened after the event, so people asked questions after the event. I think this particular thread had over 127 people asking and answering questions with the speaker directly here after the event.

00:16:18:09 - 00:16:42:22 Joshua Zerkel So it really extends the life of the event and the value that's being created for perplexity, but also for the people who are participating, because it's not just the point in time event, it's actually this evergreen conversation that can continue after the event is over directly here in the forum. And since the event and the forum third are all hosted in gradual, members didn't need to go to another website.

00:16:42:22 - 00:17:03:19 Joshua Zerkel They didn't need to sign up for something else. They didn't need to log in to a different tool. All of it is just a seamless experience directly here. And so when I'm thinking about as a community builder. I'm going to be creating events. Events are a lot of work, and so I want to make sure I'm getting as much juice from the squeeze as possible, and I'm creating as much value for my members as possible.

00:17:03:19 - 00:17:29:18 Joshua Zerkel And this is one way to really extend the life and the value that you create when you're doing an event is have a follow on discussion, connect to it directly in the forum, and let people and the speaker continue the conversation even after the event is over. That way, instead of the event being just that one time moment, it becomes part of an ongoing discussion and conversation and it creates value long after the event is over.

00:17:29:20 - 00:18:00:22 Joshua Zerkel Now, as your community grows, you may want to create more targeted spaces for specific types of people, whether that's local chapters or user groups. Or maybe there's a private space for a particular type of vendor, or invisible groups for specific customers who are VIPs. Each group inside of can have its own content, its own resources, its own events, its own conversations, so that it feels really targeted for the people who are in there.

00:18:00:24 - 00:18:21:02 Joshua Zerkel People can be part of the broader, bigger community, and there might be parts that they want to discuss just with people who understand their challenge or do a similar type of work to them, or who are within the same company as they are. And that's what groups is really meant to do, is both give you that bigger experience, but also create a space for you as a member that's really targeted.

00:18:21:03 - 00:18:43:14 Joshua Zerkel As you're building out your community program, you can think about who these different segments are on the back end. Inside of gradual, you can have people automatically be segmented into these groups that you pre-selected based on their domain or other factors that might live elsewhere, like in your CRM. Or you can make groups so that people can self-select into them and any combination therein.

00:18:43:16 - 00:19:06:00 Joshua Zerkel So, for example, Pendo hosts their user group program inside of gradual. We saw an example earlier where a member of one of these user groups was hosting an event leveraging gradual. That's what groups is really for. And so you'll see there's both topic groups here. So you see all these different topics that people are talking about. And then there's geographic groups as well.

00:19:06:01 - 00:19:24:14 Joshua Zerkel So I think what we looked at before was the Austin User Group where they hosted an event that's coming up, and here it is. So you see, if you hop into this group, they have their own forum discussions. They have their own events. They have members who are part of this group, albums, photos from recent events that they actually held.

00:19:24:15 - 00:19:46:10 Joshua Zerkel All of that is really robust and rich in here, and I can just join the group by clicking on it. And so each of their user groups has a group like this inside of gradual, or they have their own tailored, targeted experience. Another example of this in action is at Hagan again is a generative video platform. And so people use it for lots of different purposes.

00:19:46:12 - 00:20:18:08 Joshua Zerkel Some people use it for marketing, others for learning and development. Others are creators, content creators, and still others are agency users or people within enterprises. And so each of these uses the broad product and the knowledge that's available in the community. But there's also specialized information that they might want to learn about. So if we hop into an for marketing, we can see inside of here there's robust content, there's welcome content events that they have resources that are dedicated just for what these people need.

00:20:18:09 - 00:20:38:15 Joshua Zerkel And so this is a great way to really create that experience that says we understand who you are. We're creating a space just for you, and we're going to fill it with content that makes it extra relevant for you. And so in example, each of these groups is available for me to check out, learn about and then join if I see fit.

00:20:38:16 - 00:21:03:26 Joshua Zerkel But then there's others that might need a little bit more of dedicated recruitment. So for instance also is used by agencies who create content on behalf of their clients. When we look at agency group inside of gradual for we can see that there's a lot of really rich resources here forum conversations, events, who's leading this group, content and so on.

00:21:03:26 - 00:21:29:06 Joshua Zerkel But in order for me to join this group, I actually have to apply because there's no point in me being part of this group if I'm not actually at an agency. And if I am in the group, I don't want people who aren't in agencies to be in here mixing things up, because then it's not as valuable. And so I actually have to apply to join this group, someone on the back end, and has to confirm that I'm actually in an agency before I get access to all of these resources.

00:21:29:06 - 00:21:58:16 Joshua Zerkel So what I just showed you are both public groups that anyone can join, private groups that are visible, but I have to apply to join. And then another category are completely invisible groups. So let's say hey, Jen had a customer at company X and we created a special private group for them. Only people who came from that domain, who were pre-approved on the back end, could actually even see that that group exists, and then they could join it and access the resources that have been created just for that company.

00:21:58:17 - 00:22:33:12 Joshua Zerkel So this is a really great way to both have the big experience, but also create tailored experiences, including invisible ones and completely private ones for the people who can really best make use of them. So one of the things that we see pretty frequently here at gradual is that the experience of building and using the, the array of tools that are in gradual typically starts with the one team, maybe the community team or the customer education team, but it doesn't generally stay there because we're getting your customers into one central spot.

00:22:33:13 - 00:22:54:22 Joshua Zerkel As it turns out, most teams who are customer facing want access to those customers and want to create value for them. And so what we often see is one team will start, like I said, community, customer education, etc. but then other teams, customer marketing, customer success, other teams will start to make use of gradual as well for each of their own programs.

00:22:54:22 - 00:23:26:27 Joshua Zerkel And because everything is happening in one central spot, you're not just running programs, you're building customer context across the entire organization. And that makes everything so much easier for everyone who is participating in the community program, both from the experience of having all the community and customer facing experiences in one spot, but also because all of the context that's being created on the back end, it's all there for your entire team to use.

00:23:26:27 - 00:23:49:21 Joshua Zerkel So when people are starting to understand that, hey, this is where customers are, these are the ways that they're interacting and connecting dots outside of our core product or service. Understanding what's happening with them, their context gives you and your team a lot of data about their intent. If a customer is going into the community introduces themselves in the forum.

00:23:49:22 - 00:24:13:18 Joshua Zerkel Access is five pieces of content about a new feature, watches a tutorial video, and then takes a course about that same feature. That's a lot of intent, and those are the types of things that your product team, your customer success team, all of your customer facing teams probably want to know about before they go into the next sale conversation, or set off a triggered set of emails about, hey, you're using this feature, check out this one.

00:24:13:18 - 00:24:31:04 Joshua Zerkel Also, all of that context lives inside of gradual. So instead of trying to piece together lots of different tools, you can actually understand how customers are engaging across their entire journey directly inside of gradual.

00:24:31:07 - 00:24:51:15 Joshua Zerkel All right. So that was a lot of me talking. This was a very quick look at how teams are using gradual to launch, grow and run their community programs and how that can evolve over time. As your program grows, we'll send out this recording to everyone who registered. She'll have a chance to revisit anything you want a closer look at.

00:24:51:15 - 00:25:18:12 Joshua Zerkel And if you want to explore a bit more in your own, I encourage you to check out community, which is where you can see a live example of all of this in action. Everything from events to content, resources and so on. And if you're thinking about how this could apply to your own community or other customer facing programs, you can learn more or request a demo at and we'd be happy to continue the conversation.

00:25:18:14 - 00:25:26:18 Joshua Zerkel Thank you so much for spending your time with me today, and I am looking forward to seeing you in the community. Take good care.