Gradual 2024 Q3 Product Update

Check out the newest features in Gradual including webinar events, light theme, design element updates and improvements to the Gradual Go event mobile app.

Welcome everyone to our Q3 Gradual product update I am Kyle Sutton. I am the head of strategy and operations here at Gradual, and we are super excited to showcase a bunch of a bunch like a bunch of new features with you, some of which have been a long time in the making.

And I know some of the the folks joining us today are going to be excited to hear about them. But overall, they're they're all super exciting. And I think mark a milestone in Gradual's evolution as a team and as a platform. Before we jump into the meat of things, I would love to provide a couple couple reminders.

First, say hi in the chat, share where you're joining from, what you're excited to learn about. I see some people jumping in. Randy always great to see you, Laura saying hi from our team. And I know there's some other people behind the scenes there. If you haven't yet, you can click the icon to update your profile in the top right hand corner there, and that'll allow you to, to chat.

The other, thing is feel free to message other members. You can click on the people tab. And again, if your profile is complete, you can you can message others who are here with us. Explore who's here. You can filter and say, hey, I need somebody who can really help me with live streaming or other things, and you can find those in the people tab.

You can also do that in the community itself. And second, after we wrap up our demo portion of today where we'll cover the the updates and things, we will jump into a meeting room in the agenda to answer any questions or just say hello. That'll be live and and we'll be able to jump in. Feel free to swing by, say hello, meet some fellow community builders.

And last but not least, we always record these and we'll send them out and you can revisit and you can always find all of our features summarized and everything I do not have time to cover in the content section of the gravel community. We'll drop a link for that later. I see some other people saying hello. Amazing. Hey, Joseph.

Hey, Audrey, great to see you both and glad you can kin to join in today. All right, without further ado, we have four big categories that we are going to cover today. We are going to talk about some exciting design updates to Gradual updates to our clubs module, our new webinar event type. Yes, you heard that right. Webinars live and major updates to the Gradual go event app as we go.

Drop your questions in the chat and and we'll jump in. Whether it's me live or a member of our team, you can see Hendrik and and Laura from our team are already here answering questions. And we'd love to love to answer those for you. All right, let's jump into things. The first thing we're going to talk about are some of our our design updates here.

And the biggest of those has been, been our, our, our light mode. That's right. The last quarter has been absolutely jam packed with updates to the design and customization inside of Gradual. We'll go through some of those, a little bit today. There are a ton more, though small things, customizations that you can do to really fine tune, the look and feel of your community.

But but definitely the most significant of these is Gradual now has a light theme available. That's right. You can choose, for your community to be a light theme versus our dark theme, which is what you're seeing here. This is great if you want it to better align to your brand or maybe, content style or just preference.

So I'm going to share and we're going to take a look at what this looks like. So this is our dark mode today. And I'm going to use a community that we've built out here which is a sub community of our our demo here, which is our light mode community. This one is is very basic, very barebones, but this is is our light mode.

And it's it's pretty straightforward. Instead of a dark background with light text, the light theme has a lighter background, darker text. It does support a little bit higher contrast for readability and accessibility. So that could be a reason you might want to switch to light mode. For some of our more text focused communities where we're reading written content, however, those heavily leveraging maybe the forum or, blogs, this may be a great, great option.

It's across the platform. So as I dig into pieces of content and other things I can, I can see the light mode again, have nice, nice, easy reading and we can even see what it looks like on the non logged in version. And you're noticing a couple other design updates which I will tease here in a second.

This is a change we need to make for you. So it's not something you can you can modify in the dashboard. And it's also community wide. So this is what we would refer to as a tenant level setting, which means that it's not up to user preference. So I can't have users both using light and dark mode.

It'll be community wide. As you consider switching to the light theme, you'll just want to consider your current graphic assets, as those may need to be updated along with your logos and accent color. If you do want to switch to light mode, let us know and we can help facilitate that for you. The other big design update is, top navigation is one of the things you probably noticed.

This is an option which you can see here to put my menu for the community up here at the top of the page. This is appropriate if you're, you want your instance of Gradual on the landing page to align a little bit better with your, your website. Because most of those are going to have a top navigation or could just be a preference.

It does have a little bit less real estate in terms of the volume of menu items that you can display, depending depending on the screen size, but it could be a great option for some communities. Just a note though, as I join events, even in light mode like you're in today with our live stream, that main menu is still going to be.

The event menu is still going to be on the left hand side for for consistency. Speaking of menus, that's something I can control as well. So if I go into the Gradual dashboard there we go. Out of order here. If I go into the Gradual dashboard, I have a lot more control over some of these settings. And you'll notice that some of them may have moved.

So over here on the left hand side I'll go down to settings and I'll go to my customization. And you can see it'll note the menu style as well as my menu order. And I can modify this. Why I might want to do this is let's say I really, you know, I'm using forum a lot. So I want that to be front and center or I want this to be alphabetical or something else.

I can modify these and move them up and down and save them. That is a great way for you to customize. Another way that you can customize is you can change some, not all, just yet. Some of the names of these menu items, some examples would be tools. So a lot of our customers will will modify this. Maybe this is partners, maybe it's resources, maybe it's training.

I can make that change here. And customization. Another common one that you may want to change is the clubs, which I can do from the club settings. And I can display clubs as groups or cohorts or something else. Lots of lots of control and customization when it comes to to the menu items, you're also going to be able to modify those more, in the future.

Lastly, the design assets you can load are now updated. And what I mean by design assets that that I mean, these banner images and graphics on the home page. So you can see here we have this full width gradient background. You can also do if I jump over to to one of our other customers here, they've got this full width image on the homepage which provides a really, really uplevel experience.

I think, a lot more in, enticing and an elegant design. This is something you can customize both before and after login on the community. So if I go, you may have noticed that this move. So if I go into the dashboard and I'm on the home page, I used to do my banner customization here under the community where it was.

Ads and banners now were migrate. As we update these, all of the design customizations into the settings. So under settings I can modify the sign in page graphic the home page before a user signs in, as well as after. And this after sign in is where I will create and upload my my home page banners. So that's where I'll do that.

This isn't just something you can do on the home page either. This is something you can do for event pages, which has been, already really, really, leveraged by our customers that I think enhances the the event landing page. I can do a full width image, but I can also and I'll be strategic here, do a video.

So this is our demo mini summit event which everybody's familiar with because we use it all the time. But I've got this video now in this banner, spot that can play this is this is awesome. I think this is really cool. You can add a full, great use case would be like a highlight reel of last year's event to show off, something or like this one is a virtual tour.

Tour of, Fort Mason Center in San Francisco for for an event we support. Super customizable. Really enhances the event detail page, in our opinion, and is, a cool, cool new capability inside of Gradual. And there's a ton of other customization components coming in the future. So, for example, on Gradual, the ability to customize fonts or these icons in the menu, further customization of the menu items themselves, the ability to rename all of these or swap them out, or even include custom menu items if you wanted to link out to a help center, resources or something else.

I can do that. I can do that here. And then lastly, is is really an overhaul of the homepage itself. The addition of the top navigation, the menu customization in the full width banner are all building blocks. As we get closer to our new homepage, maybe in an upcoming product update will tease what that looks like if you haven't seen it already.

But the idea is to give you much more customization and modularity when it comes to your homepage. Putting the things above the fold, as we'd say, that are most important for your your community. Those are all of our design updates. Well, not all all the ones that I'll cover. There's a ton more. I'd encourage you to go into the dashboard, go into these customization settings and and poke around and explore what you can, what you can do.

Seeing some some awesome comments in the chat. Thank you. We also think it it looks awesome. All right. Next up we are going to talk about clubs. Last quarter we showcased our clubs feature which has already taken off tons of people using this which is super exciting. We're continuing to see some awesome use cases. Some communities are using this to build out geographic chapters.

Others are leveraging interest groups to curate specific audiences based on interest or persona. Perhaps. But regardless of the application the clubs are providing a great way to segment your community and ensure high relevance and end engagement. You'll often hear us refer to this concept of of scaling the intimacy of community. As your community grows. How do we create cohorts?

How do we create smaller groups that allow community members to connect with, with like minded people, with people who share the same interests, or maybe people they they want to learn from? And clubs are a great way to do that. And there are a couple of new club components. That was a mouthful that I don't think we've highlighted in a product update yet.

So I want to walk you, walk you through those today. The first is some new capabilities within the clubs. First and foremost, I don't think we talked about both chapters and clubs interest groups, rather chapters and interest groups being live. They are they are both live now. So I can have essentially two buckets of of my clubs. It doesn't have to just be one chapters or organized geography physically.

So these are by region and they correspond to a geographic location. They have to correspond to a geographic location. But but that is how they are designed. Interest groups are based on the well area of interest. This could be persona. This really could be anything, that you want it to be outside of the distinctions of clubs being geographic or sorry, of chapters being geographic and interest groups just being by interest chapters and interest groups are otherwise identical in terms of functionality.

So all of my clubs can be set to be, private. If I'd like. I can have them be, secret even where I don't see them unless I'm a member. I can have them be application only so somebody could join that way. All of those are our capabilities for both chapters and interest groups. Inside of the clubs, I have some additional capabilities as well.

And first and foremost, I can see the members, if I scroll down here, will show how to make that easier. In a second. The members of the club. This is awesome. If I want to say, hey, I may even want to turn off the members tab at the top level of the community and just have that be visible in the clubs.

A great way to showcase, hey, who's in the same city as me or in the same region, or has the same interest or role. I can I can explore who's who are members of the clubs with me. As we add more of these components, we also added a menu, and this gives you the ability to to do two things.

One, as a member, I can easily navigate the club. So if I want to say, hey, show me, show me all the members, I can click on that and I actually see the full members list like I do in the people tab of the community. I can filter based on those profile questions, bookmark and engage with people here.

It's that same view just filtered to members of the clubs. The other way that I can use this is you'll notice as I switch around, I have a deep link to that particular page in the club. What that means is I can deep link to these things in my promotion. So if I want to say, hey, I want to send an email out to people about what's coming up in Atlanta or for my CTOs, I can do that.

I grab this link. It's going to filter this view to events that belong to that Atlanta club. Really, really powerful. Something simple, but but has a lot of capability behind it. And the last is I can I can customize all of these things. So in in the theme of customization inside of the Gradual dashboard, if I go to my clubs and I go to my club settings, I can curate what I want this club detail page to, to look like I can move things up and down.

Maybe certain clubs. I don't need to show the leader so I can turn that off. Really. The the name of the game is however you want to display it, you can and and it's built to support those they are clubs are a tremendous resource when it comes to curating your community and helping members find relevant events and content.

That it's it's just huge. It provides that scaled intimacy in a really significant way. If you are interested in exploring clubs, let us know. We can walk you through it in more detail. Limited access to clubs is available for all of our existing customers. It is a separate module, but we can we can work with you on your use case and see if it's the right fit.

All right. That is exciting. Updates to clubs. Let's talk about our next product update, which is drumroll please webinars. That's right. Webinar is live. This event type has been a long time coming and we appreciate the patience, to be candid, as we work to make sure that the webinar solution on Gradual was stable, scalable, and and easy to use.

This is the first phase of webinars, which means that there's a lot more to come in the future. But the feature is live and and ready to use today. Webinars on Gradual, look and behave very similar to our meeting rooms behind the scenes. It uses the same engine to run, but webinars have some distinct and critical features that that we hope will meet your needs as we've worked with customers over the last, you know, how many years on on their events, webinars are built inside a Gradual like any other event.

I build it out, assign my hosts and panelists, set my agenda, is configure my settings like Q&A, chat, all that stuff I do inside the dashboard. Just like just like anything else. The big difference though, with webinar compared to our other event types, is the capacity you can have inside the event, as well as the ease of what we'll call going live.

Our meeting room events inside of Gradual have every participant on camera. Right? So it's just like, just like a, we'll say a zoom or a team's a video call where everybody's going to be on camera and potentially audio if you have that settings. However, during the webinar, it behaves a little bit differently, where only hosts and panelists are on camera and audio.

However, I can promote someone to be a panelist inside the webinar, and we're going to look at that. We're going to look at that live. So I'm going to jump over to this webinar here that I have open. This one's already live because the start time, it started and I am a host and I have a friend of mine here, Kyle Kyle DMO, who is is going to raise his hand.

And he would like to he'd like to come on. He has a question maybe he submitted in the Q&A or the chat. I can come over here. I can promote Kyle to a panelist. I'm going to send him an invitation. I'm going to make sure Kyle is muted so we don't run into an issue. And and he can join lots of lots of Kyle's Kyle session.

Anyway, we can see that. Okay, I can I can be here. I can ask my question as I'm live and then once I'm done, I can simply, demote Kyle from being a panelist. And he goes back and he's watching the rest of the webinar, behind the scenes there. And I can go through and I can lower his hand and I can do that promotion you saw from the attendee list here.

But I can also do it from this raise hand. So this is great if you have a large volume of people inside your event, they can they can raise their hands. And I can easily, easily work through. This is this is really powerful. We think this is gives you the flexibility to do this dynamically. You can have more people.

So whereas meetings support only up to 125 concurrent participants, webinars support up to 350 participants as we compare webinars to live stream events. Webinars are are candidly just simpler and easier to launch since it all happens within Gradually. You don't need to use, a third party streaming service like we are for this product update. We use Restream for these, you can you can do it all within Gradual.

There are some trade offs, right? You aren't able to I can't today playback a video. So if I have prerecorded content that I want to play back, I'm not able to do that inside the webinar yet. I also can't adjust the layout. I can't do, you know, a two up or three up or have one person big and other people small.

I can do that a little bit, as I get for with spotlighting and pinning and things like that, but not in the same way as I can with a live stream inside of webinars, though, I have all the other tools that I would expect, right? I can record these, I can launch breakout rooms, I can do screen shares.

I have the ability to do chat, Q&A, moderated or unmoderated. All of those things that you can do in meeting rooms inside of Gradual or, inside of our live stream events. There are a couple things that I can't do inside of webinars yet. One would be the video or the content sharing locally. The other would be a one on one matching or roundtables aren't aren't available in webinar like they are in, in a live stream.

And the agenda isn't baked into the the event. This is a brand new feature. I'm going to pause real quick, and I'm going to take a look at the chat to answer answer any questions that have come in. Joseph asked, can more than 300 people, 350 people register? Yes, absolutely. They can, they can you can register, I believe, up to 600 people.

And I can have different ticket types. So if I go into my webinar set up, I go to ticket set up, I go to ticket types and I edit here. I can set my individual ticket quota. And then we put this little disclaimer down here, 350 people can join. That 350 limit will increase in the future. We're keeping it at 350 for now because it's based on our research, and working with you all that fit most of your needs, where we wouldn't want to kick up to a live stream event.

But as we get more use around this work, through any, any optimizations and enhancements that, that limit will will increase our goal overall with the, with the webinar events is that this fills a gap in the events that you host on graduate. When you have events that maybe are too big for a meeting room, or I want a little bit more control because I don't just want everybody on camera, but I don't need it as heavily produced as a live stream.

The idea is that webinars are a great option. Webinars just launched so it's not turned on by default yet for everyone. We've got a short list of people that we knew are waiting for this. Joseph, you are you are definitely, one. And we'll make sure that it gets turned on for you. And if you're also interested in a webinar, just let us know.

And and we can we can get it turned on a couple other questions that come in, or why are we using Restream for this broadcast, instead of the webinar? One of the reasons is the ease of, screen sharing the logo in the top right, because what we do for our live streams for this portion is we just take this recording, I package it and we post it as quickly as possible, as opposed to to a webinar.

I would expect, though, that webinar will, be a type of event we use for these moving, moving forward. Great question. Randy asks, is there a future where panelists promoted in the event can have microphone access but not camera? Potentially. That could be a setting that I'd see us adding, I understand, your, your use case around that and we can, we can chat chat through that.

All right. That is webinars. Keep the questions coming. A reminder will also do a live meeting right after this. So we'll jump into a meeting room. You can ask these questions. Live rapid fire and and we'll jump in and answer them. Yes. Webinars also can be recorded just like just like meeting rooms. All right. Let's talk about the Gradual go event mobile app.

This is our last, last agenda item for today before we we jump into that meeting room. We've had a ton of fun with, attending some of our customer events and supporting them in person. We've been to to a handful throughout the year, and, been able to leverage both the Gradual check in app and the, Gradual go event app for attendees.

Both of these are available to you. A reminder all Gradual customers have access to the Gradual go mobile app for your community, as well as the check in kiosk app. This means that you can easily deploy Gradual for your in person events and and check in, badge printing. All that stuff is is included next week we are going to do a deep dive into hosting events on Gradual, and we'll go into, detail on all the different features, tips and tricks that will, include in detail how to use both the Gradual go and our check in checking apps.

So make sure you jump into that workshop next Thursday if you want to learn more about that. I do, however, today want to highlight some excuse me some exciting updates to our our mobile app. First, if you are using the Gradual badge printing app, to print, badges and the Gradual go event mobile app you can use, I'll make we'll make myself big here for a second.

We'll step our screen here. You can use our, our mobile app and our badges to, to deep link to, to people's, profiles. So if I open my camera, this is going to be going to be fun to do live. If I open my camera inside of an event, I can simply, you know, use that to, to scan.

And it's going to open Kyle's profile there. Right. Awesome. The other thing that I can do on that page and we're going to I'm going to bring this screen back up is I'm able to take notes inside of of the app. What that means is if I am chatting with someone and will use, let me see if I can find Laura here.

In our events. There we go. So I've got, we're using an event we supported. I'm going to grab Laura here. I can bookmark her if I want to come back, but I can also add notes. And this is super helpful for, for a couple of use cases. One would be just personal notes like, oh, hey, where did I meet this person?

Why why do I I know them, where where did I know them from? I can add those notes here. If you're using the app and you have sponsors at your event, you can also have sponsors take notes here. And then in our exports in and updates after the event. We can include those notes in those badge scan exports.

And then lastly, as an event organizer I can also push notifications from the garage or dashboard into an in-person event. So the same way that I build notifications for a, a virtual event, I can do for for an in person. So if I go back here and we'll use our annual meeting and I go into event set up notifications, I can create a new notification.

And that announcement will will push into the the mobile app for attendees. We're continuing to add a ton of functionality and and iterate on the app and the check and experience. So stay tuned for more updates on this. We also a, a plug for, a plug for our event services. We have a fleet of thermal printers that can print badges like these really high quality ones with, with custom info, that QR code and all that stuff, at at the ready, as well as, a team of people who can manage your registration process for your in-person events.

If you have an in-person event coming up and you want our help with registration and check in, please reach out to to me or anyone on the Gradual, Gradual team. And we can we can help you out with that. All right. I've been talking for a while, and I know you have questions. I see them jumping into the chat.

Please continue to put them there. But a couple things as we wrap up that was just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other updates that we didn't have time to cover today. Things that maybe simple or small, but really elevate the experience. Your members have a Gradual and make sure that Gradual can be customized to meet your needs and that custom.

That is really the theme as we look at our roadmap for the end of this year in the in the Q one of next year, we'll be launching features that allow for greater customization, more automation with workflows, automated email communications, and making sure that each feature on Gradual has the tools and functionalities to really, really benefit your community.

We are we are wrapping up. I'm going to stop, but do not leave yet. We have a couple couple updates and we're going to drop some some helpful links in the chat to these. If you want to explore all of the new features and things we've delivered over the past few months, you can you can do so [email protected] in the content section where you'll see a brand new collection called Recent Releases.

That collection has all the all of our most recent product updates. And you can explore. We've got links to all the help documentation and stuff included in that collection next Thursday, second update next Thursday, October 17th, we are hosting a workshop here on Gradual on how to build great events. This is going to be a meeting event so very interactive.

Since we're in the thick of event season. We wanted to do a hands on deep dive, a lot of buzzwords into all of the different options and capabilities. We have when it comes to events, because there's lots of stuff way under the hood that maybe if you're new to Gradual or just aren't as familiar with these new nuanced features or just want to hear from others, that we want to explore.

So join us next Thursday. We'll showcase some features, but also provide some cool use cases and examples, for these different capabilities and how customers have have used those. There's a link to register for that event in the chat as well. And then last but not least, immediately after I stop talking, we're going to jump into a meeting room and we'll answer any questions or is an opportunity to just say hi.

You'll see a notification pop up at the top of your page to join, and you can join via clicking the join button there. Or you can jump over to the agenda on the left hand side and join the meeting room that way. Either way, you get there doesn't matter, but come ask questions about anything we covered. Maybe something we didn't that you were hoping we'd cover.

Regardless, we would just love to see you. And and finally, thank you so much for joining us today and being on this journey with us. We are super excited for all the new and exciting ways our customers are building their communities with Gradual, and we are always here to help. Until next time, thank you so much for joining and we will see you soon.