Event Replay: Hosting Successful Events in Gradual

This is a recording from our interactive workshop for Gradual customers who are looking to take their community event planning and execution to the next level. This hands-on session explores practical tips, tactical training, and insights into the most effective ways to leverage Gradual's features for seamless event management.

If you've attended our product updates in the past, then, you know that I just start talking and it's it's fairly, fairly unidirectional. I would like this to not be unidirectional. This is intended to be more interactive and more hands on workshop.

So as we go, feel free to drop a question in the chat, raise your hand down at the bottom and I'll see that. And I'll I'll stop and we can dig into things. Our general format here is we're going to go, through the event life cycle. We're going to do tools for pre events inside of the event and post event we're going to cover things like ticket options and registration and virtual tickets, branding and all that kind of stuff to increase and improve attendance.

In event, we're going to talk about how we foster engagement and interaction, whether that's in, in-person setting or virtual and then post event. How are we reporting, analyzing, and getting insights? I adjusted the agenda a little bit, which I can do on the fly, and I did right before this event, and I earmarked 15 minutes at the end for a roundtable discussion.

I one of the greatest benefits of a format like this is the ability for us to to share. So, if you have best practices, things you've tried, questions or anything like that, I would love for you to, to share those. And we actually we even have people, people here. Welcome, Michelle. Great to see you. They just wrapped up an event that 31,000 people registered for.

So I think I think we've got some great, great insights that, that they could share. But without without further ado, we're going to go we're going to go through all of the different, some of the different functionality. I've got three outcomes for us before we get started. One is I want everyone to leave with an understanding of all of the available features for building events.

And gradually my hope to to simplify that is that you each learner, discover at least one thing that will help you improve your events. The second, I want you to make sure you understand how to match the tools that we have in gradual to your stated goals based on when you register for this event, you filled out some additional registration questions to give us some insight.

That's a great best practice, and we'll look at how to do that in a second. But that allows me to understand is the person putting on this event, what do I what should I talk about? What should I hit on? And the two big ones that people shared? We're fostering connection, within the events and then increasing registration and attendance.

So we'll we'll make sure we hit on both of those and some other things. And then the last objective is that you get some best practices from others and their successful events. So, again, going through the event, start to finish event in the event and post event and we're going to start with pre event, I am going to share my screen and we are going to make sure I'm sharing the correct screen.

I am. I need to close that tab before I do okay. We're going to share and we are looking at the gradual dashboard I would certainly hope everyone is familiar with with the gradual dashboard inside of here. We're going to use this gradual hybrid event as our our kind of prototype. And this is what this event looks like on the, on the front end.

We've got a lot of really cool things built out for this. And so we're going to walk through how to build, how to build an event like this and all of the different tools and resources that that we can use. And we're going to start from the building the event and then work through the registration flow and, and those sorts of things.

So as I build this event, you see, I've got my my event detail page here. That's what we call it, our landing page. And we're using a new feature that we have, which is this banner image here at the top. And we're actually embedding a video that allows you to have a lot more customization and, and really upscale the the look and feel of these event pages.

I can set that up in the gradual dashboard inside of my event, set up in my general info, or now see the option over here to use a full width banner or a video. If I toggle that on and off, I can put in my URL and I can even add an image. This is a great way to differentiate, events that are maybe more marquee than others.

The other thing that's special about this event is our registration flow. One of the things that people asked about was how we want to highlight. I want to highlight two things here one or different ticket types and registration questions. And then the other is our invite only ticket type, which we may or may not be familiar with. So the different ticket types I have here are mapped out.

This is a hybrid event. So I can assign whether they're virtual or in-person. That's the most complicated. But you can have different ticket types for even a meeting event like this. Within each of these ticket types I can also have specific registration questions. So when we talk about hosting a hybrid event like this where I've got a broad audience, maybe I have certain people that are going to attend in person.

I need info from them. I have others who are going to attend virtually, and I don't need that same information. I can use ticket types to set these up. For example, my in-person attendees. I'll ask, you know, dietary restrictions or if they need, lodging and things like that. Pretty, pretty straightforward. The last ticket type here is my VIP in-person attendee ticket type.

And this one is an invite only ticket. What that means is, unless a person has a specific code or email associated with this, they're not going to be able to register for that event type. You'll also note this one's a paid ticket type. If you were not aware, graduate. What does support, paid ticketing? So let's look at how we set all these things up in the dashboard.

And again a reminder if you have questions or clarifications or I'm going to fast or I skip over something, please raise your hand. Drop it in the chat. So inside of our event set up here I'm going to do the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to tickets set up. I'm going to go to my ticket types and I'm going to build my different ticket types here.

So we'll just go in and we'll edit this one so we can see what it looks like for of hybrid event. I can say it's hybrid where people could have participated both in-person or virtual. Only I can assign my name, my ticket price, my quota. Let's say I only have 100 seats in person that people can register for.

I can put that ticket in here in the description. Then I can map this ticket type to a particular form. So if I had, you know, 17 different ticket types but only three forms, I don't have to create 17 different forms for each ticket type. I can map those. I can determine whether it's invitation only, as well as whether or not that ticket is is on or off.

Same thing is true for these other ticket types. I've got my ticket IDs. I can even use external registration methods if you're using a HubSpot form or something else to map to specific ticket selections. And I know some of our our customers do that already today. So inside of the ticket types, I can also assign promo codes for certain, certain amounts.

If I'm using a paid ticket, whether that's a, you know, different discount levels and things like that. Let's talk about invite only, tickets. So within a specific ticket, I can set it up to be invite only. And I have two methods for facilitating invites. One is I can use invitation codes or I can upload a list of invitees or add them one by one.

An invitation code. Pretty straightforward. I'll select the ticket type. We only have one invite only ticket type enabled, so I'll put that here. I can select the attendee type that they'll get assigned and then put in put in a quota or the code. Then the system is going to automatically generate my invite code based on that.

The other way I can do it is I can add an invite list. So I could update, upload a list from, CSV or something and register those people as not register them, but note that they are able to register with for that code. Before I move on from ticket types in, invite only any questions? Raise your hand, drop it in the chat.

Any questions we have about ticket types or invite only registration. And I will cue up my next thing we're going to talk about.

I don't see any hands raised everybody. It's super straightforward. That's great. Wonderful I love it. Insight before I move on, let's talk about why am I why I might use this in some use cases. One would be, I've got a VIP event and maybe it's a dinner and I only want certain people to be able to register for it, but I don't want to,

I don't want to have it. So you have to be logged in. Or maybe I don't want the event to be space restricted in case there's, people I missed that should be able to register. So that would be a case for me to set up a single ticket with an invite only, flag on so anyone can load that image or load that event, but only certain people can register for it.

Another would be, if I'm doing a hybrid event like this where I've got some in person and some virtual, and I want to restrict my in-person attendance to just a specific group of people. That would be a scenario where I'd use multiple ticket types, and I would set up as an invite only for one of them. Caitlin, I ask, how does this differ from the new webinar event type?

I'm guessing you're talking about the hybrid event, so hybrid events are essentially a combination of in-person event type and our, live stream event. So if I'm an in-person event attendee and that's my ticket type, the event will appear to me as in-person. So I have the ability to interact with the graduate mobile app, check in all that sort of stuff, as well as the automated messages will drive me to the in-person experience.

If I'm a virtual ticket holder, then it would be the equivalent of just our live stream event experience. Super. So we've got, we've got our ticket type set up. We're going to jump in, Janelle, great question. I'll jump into that attendee limits for this meeting event. There are so you can have up to 125 concurrent participants within a meeting event in 350 within a webinar.

You can oversell the event though. So in my setup, I can have a quota which is higher than the total number of participants. The live stream event does not have that same limitation. You can have, you know, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people join, join a live stream. So we want to talk about branding and promotion.

How do I increase attendance at my event? One easy way to do this is by using our, virtual ticket option. So I'm going to go ahead and register for this event and confirm. And it's going to automatically generate, this virtual ticket here. If the event was not live, this is the page I would land on. Once I've confirmed my registration and would say, hey, go share your this ticket somewhere.

And what this is going to do is it's going to generate a page for this person. And then let's say, Laura registered for this event from my virtual ticket page. It would actually attribute her registration to me. One of our, customers recently. Really? They have seen really, really good performance for their event attendance and registration from this virtual ticket component.

It's skydio. They're there. They do an awesome event every year, for their, their product launch, and they use this. They'll even go and take a mock of this and send it out in a promo email to say, hey, go claim your virtual ticket. They'll do some giveaways for people who, refer the most amount of attendees and things like that.

This is super easy to set up inside of the dashboard. When I go to the ticket set up virtual ticket, I can upload an image, select my background, build out a little gradient, and I can even customize the the call to action text that will show up here. Really, really easy way to to do that promotion.

The last, last mechanisms that I have from a pre event perspective before we move into the event experience itself would be building out, building out an agenda and adding speakers and really just making this event landing page feel inviting and vibrant. So in here you can see I've got my different speakers loaded. I can view the speaker profiles, their bios and all that sort of stuff.

I have my agenda. I can determine the view that I want users to see when they log in, whether that's by stage. If I want to list view tab, however you want to do it. And then the last is I can even feature partners and other attendees. And if I go into here, I can even turn the attendees off on, on, on the front end so people are able to see who's registered for for this event.

And I can see those attendees there. This is a great way to to promote the event so people can see things to to prompt that engagement. All right. Any questions on the pre event experience. Kind of the registration and ticket flow before I move on to in event interaction. And we'll start with virtual and then we'll talk in person.

Awesome. So we're going to talk about the the virtual event experience here. And I'm going to start with a live stream event. We're going to jump into a different event than the one we've been using only because it's already built out. And we're going to use the the famous gradual mini summit, which if you've watched any demo or update with me, you've seen this event before.

So inside of here, I've got a lot of tools and the theme of this is going to be how am I promoting interaction and engagement within this event? The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure I have the chat and the QA enabled if you're able. We know some some communities don't, don't offer that.

But we have quite a bit of moderation tools today and even more coming, which allows the chat and the Q&A to be, a really reliable method for engagement. I'm a chat moderator, so I'm going to see some more tools inside of here than than you might. But inside of here, I've got my chat and my Q&A kind of intermingled in this feed.

As the moderator, I'm able to go in and I can pin certain messages to the top. This is awesome to notify what's happening or, calls to action or answering the question of yes, this is being recorded and it will be sent out after, which is always something people ask during events. So I go in here, I can choose those messages and I can pit them.

Let's say that I, I've got a, you know, I'm a I'm a one person show. I don't have a ton of chat moderators. And I want to be able to control who is interacting with the chat, but I don't want to lose the visibility. What I can do is I can I have these new moderation settings. So one is slow mode, which allows me to limit the amount, or the frequency that someone can interact with the chat.

So this says attendees, you know, they can only send one message per two seconds, up to five minutes. I can also enable mod only mode, which would mean that only moderators are able to post to the chat. This is really helpful if you've got a multi day event and you don't want to hide the chat when the event's not happening overnight, for example, but you want to limit people's ability to interact so you don't have to have a moderator kind of online keeping an eye on it.

You can pin a message saying, hey, we'll be back, you know, tomorrow at 8 a.m.. And then I pop the chat into mod only mode and only moderators can interact with it. Some of the other subtle things inside of the chat interaction that make it really just easy to to interact are are emojis, which I can launch those here if I want.

As an individual user, I can turn those off if I find them distracting or if you'd like, you can turn them off at a event or community level, as well, so they don't show up at all.

The other major method of of engagement and communication in an event kind of not live on camera is going to be the Q&A. This is a relatively new feature, but what it does is it pulls out questions from the general chat feed and gives me some more moderation capabilities. So, for example, a user can post and ask a question.

As a moderator, I'm going to see all of the ones that come in. Then I have a couple settings that I can choose. If I go back to the gradual dashboard and I go into my chat here, this is not the same one, but it'll, show the same functionality. I can have the chat enabled. This is where I add chat moderators.

It's also where I can enable that Q&A so I can have Q&A turned on. I can have it for moderation and I can ask, allow anonymous questions. If I have Q&A moderation turned on, I, as a host, will see the messages come in and have to approve them before they're visible to others. If I don't have it turned on, anyone would see any question that came in.

I'm going to pause. I would love for all of us to on your right hand side of your screen, we're going to we're going to look at this. You're going to go to the Q&A tab and feel free to ask a question. What's I'm sure I'm sure almost everybody has has a question so far. Click on that Q&A tab on your right hand side.

Allison coming in with a good question. So you all don't know that Allison asked a question, but I do. So I can simply, approve that. We're going to get a little bit of inception here. So I can see now that Allison has asked a question and those sorts of things here.

So we're going to we're going to go ahead and approve these questions. Oh, man. Anonymous asked is a hotdog a sandwich? I don't I don't want to get into a fight. So I'm actually going to I'm going to delete that question. We're not going to answer that one. But we'll will allow Allison to go forward with a does pineapple belong on pizza?

Now that you see those questions on the right hand side, you can, upvote them. So if you were interested in a particular question, I'll drag this back over so we can see it. If you're interested in a particular question, I can go give it a thumbs up and I can say, oh wow, I'm interested in that question.

To.

That's good. Funniest question in an event chat I love it. I love these questions. One of the features that's going to launch here in the next couple of weeks is the ability to reply to those questions in line. What this will allow you to do is, let's say you've got a host like me who has an agenda he's trying to get through, and then people are asking questions and you have someone like a helper inside of the event who can asynchronously answer those questions that they as they come in, you'll have the ability to respond directly to those so you can see them, in, in, in context.

I'm going to run through a couple of these, though, and we're going to approve these so you all can see them. And what I'll do is, as I go through, I don't want this to be two, two chaotic here, but we are I'm going to share this. So all three of these and we can go. We can go one by one.

Or I can say, hey, I want to I want to pin this question. So we're going to answer Jessica's question. Can you run more than one an event at a time on gradual? Yes. That is one of the benefits I can have. Essentially an unlimited number of events happening concurrently. Great. We answered yes. The questions. So I'm going to Mark is answered.

Now I want to go and answer Anita's event. So we're going to pin that one to the top or genius questions. So what's the funniest question you've received in the event chat. I think is a hotdog a sandwich? Definitely definitely the funniest question. And that one came in today. I don't know if from who though, because it was it was anonymous.

So I'm going to mark that one as answer. If you slow the chat down, how does that display to the attendees? I'm going to pin this to the top because we're answering it right now. Great question. So let me show you what that looks like here. If I have my tabs open right. So inside of this event we're going to join us.

Kyle DMO sorry, I have too many, too many times opening at once. So now I'm viewing this attendee, or viewing this event as an attendee. So if I start typing in the chat, I'm going to say hi and it says, hey, chat is in slow mode, it'll be available in 3 to 1 and I can jump in.

So that's how it shows up to the attendee. This is built to, stop spamming. So if somebody is like like, hey, spam three in the chat and people just go crazy, this would slow that down. And you can control we're going to mark that one as answer, and we are going to unpin it from the top.

Caitlin asked is do we have to enable the mark is answered feature or is it new? Default. It's always been there. It's just over on the right hand side. You can mark it as answered. As an attendee, you need to ask, can you pin multiple things to the top of the chat? You cannot. However, you can pin something different to the chat into the Q&A tab so you can have independent ones on on each.

Largest event hosted on gradual. It's probably a two way tie scale. Transform acts at around 30,000 people, 25 to 30,000 people. And then our friends at Fiverr actually just launched, just did an event today and that 30 plus thousand people, register for that one. Alison asks, are chat or Q&A transcripts available to view after events have concluded?

Yes they are. So we'll get into that when we talk about reporting. But you can export those those, the chat exports and Q&A after the event. All right. I'm going to take a minute to scroll through the rest of these is there's tons in here I love it I love the questions. And that's a really good, a really good tactic, honestly, to say, hey, go to the Q&A right now and ask your questions and you can run through it.

Another way to do that is you could launch a notification here at the top and say, hey, go, go ask Q&A questions, because I can drive people to the particular stage. Or do that, I can pin a message. All those other sorts of things. And just to clean it out, Janelle, is there a limit on the number of events that you can, events you can host?

No, there's there's not. In the last question, Joseph came in. Will you be offering polls? Yes. Polls are on our roadmap. They'll sit just like chat and Q&A and pull so you can launch those during the event. For engagement.

And one of the things that's happening, too, is you'll see as I'm going through these, if you have a helper in an event or a staff member or panelist or something like that, they can do a lot of that event, Q&A management, they can mark as answer, they can pin. So as a host, I don't have to be multitasking.

Want someone from your team can be doing that. There's actually a role specific to that. If I go into the events, events set up for a meeting room like this, you can, you can assign, assign a staff role. Awesome. Awesome questions. I love it.

Super. So we're going to keep talking about engagement. So that's the chat. That's a really tremendous way to foster and facilitate engagement. However we also really like face to face. And one of the cool things about gradual is I'm able to do that kind of face to face interaction and engagement within an event. We're going to look at it in the context of a live stream or a hybrid event here.

But the things that I'll talk about are also things that can stand alone as events, for example, one on one match or meeting rooms and then roundtable can also live in the community. And those are the things that I want to highlight. The first is going to be roundtables. So inside of a live stream event here, I can have interactive face to face discussions with other members so I can have them set up by domain, maybe by product line.

It really depends on what my structure and, an approach to my event is. So these are set up as just different topics. I can jump into them. It's not going to work, to jump in right now because it's going to, it they're not live, but it would look just like our meeting room. When I jump into these, I'd see a gallery view and everybody can join.

I can even assign hosts who have the ability to do screen shares and things like that. The other big interaction feature is one on one match. So this uses that same video match or video chat mechanism. But what it does is I'll click get started, it'll put me into a queue. And if someone else is in this event in the match queue, it's going to pair me with that person.

When we get paired, we're going to mutually opt in to start a video call. It's going to last for ten minutes. If we want to, we can extend that call. If not, we just move on and it'll pair me to the next one. I like to just grab this as kind of speed dating, but this is really, really handy for, two.

And in a couple of different use cases, one would be, new communities where we want to foster engagement, networking, give people an excuse to log in. But as community managers and builders, we don't want to have to come up with net new content. We don't want to coordinate with speakers, or something like that because that's too much overhead effort.

We can host a one on one match event and all it is, is people joining. So we just promote it. People jump in, and they can network with one another. Really low lift. But really high impact. Another mechanism that this is used for is within an event like we have here. So inside of a live streamer or hybrid event like this, instead of just a break where nothing's happening, I can have a break for networking or I have that as the end to every event that I do.

It doesn't cost you anything, right? From an effort perspective, you just tag it onto the tag it onto the agenda and say, at the end of all of our events, we're going to jump into a one on one match. That's a great best practice. And I actually know some, some others who are here and can talk about it when we talk about some best practices later, do that with their events.

And it's really, really effective.

Before we move on, we'll talk about some of the one on one match features. Janina Geneva asks, can you set the time limit for the conversations? Can it be less than ten minutes right now? It can't. It's defaulted to ten minutes. That is a customization that will allow in the future. The participants can always choose to move on, though.

They can end the call and be like, great, we're done. After five, we're going to we're going to go ahead and move forward as we go. Please continue to drop your questions, in that in the Q&A or in the chat. Would love to love to answer them as we go. And then the last kind of in event, virtual interaction would be the, the inner agenda meeting rooms.

So it's just like a round table. It just lives inside of the agenda. And I join the meeting room. They're great for Q&A, great for workshops or things like that. All right. Now we're going to switch gears a little bit. And I want to talk about the in-person event experience. Because facilitating that experience and fostering that engagement is not just for virtual events, the gradual supports, we actually support the in-person event experience kind of kind of top to bottom.

And we do that in two ways. So the first is going to be, facilitating connection and conversation through the gradual mobile app. So this is gradual go. It's available in the App Store here. We'll need to enable it for your community to have it, have it show up and have your community be there. But it gives you the ability to facilitate, interaction and engagement during during the event.

And when paired with the gradual badge printing app, takes it a step further. So inside of this app here, I can see my gradual annual meeting I've got I'm way zoomed in, so it's a little bit blurry I apologize. But in here I've got all the things I'd need to facilitate my in-person event experience and and interact.

So I've got my agenda. I've got speakers that I can explore and I can see different attendees. The cool part about this is I'm not building this twice. I build the event once inside of gradual and it automatically is built here in the agenda. I've got my location as well as my tags for what this is. I can store my own agenda and see see those in the My Agenda tab here.

The other thing that I can do when we talk about interaction and engagement is I can facilitate conversations between members. So let's say I want to meet with Laura. This event is in the past, but it would otherwise show up with time slots with you can which you can define. I'd select a time slot and then it would go into kind of a mutual opt in.

Let's see. There we go. There's an example. This mutual opt in flow where somebody says, hey, I'd love to have a conversation. I can approve this. It's going to automatically put us into, a specific place. So there's no available table of because this is a demo event, but that's the that's the flow. And it would automatically sign us to a table.

So let's say you've got a room with, you know, ten, ten high top tables. You can label those. And this is going to do that automatically. I also have the ability once I've connected with someone to I can add notes and say, oh, I met I've had at that in first an event that that we did. I can also message that person, and and start a conversation with them, as you see here.

And then all my messages related to this also show up inside of the, the gradual platform when I go back later. So there's continuity of experience from we've got, you know, the in-person experience. Those people can connect there. And then to continue that conversation even after the event takes place. The way that this integrates with some other tools within gradual is our gradual badge printing application.

Because when we print those badges, we can do it one of two ways. We can either print just a specific little, little name tag there. I know that's really small because we're in in gallery mode here and I'm sharing my screen. Or we can do a fancy what we call a fancy badge, which is, a plastic thermal printed badge.

Both of those styles can have a QR code on it, and that QR code allows me to scan with my phone, and it'll open that person's profile inside of the the gradual mobile app. These are also support print on demand. So I can either use a simple label printer which fits in a backpack that I can take to my events, and, print those off.

Or I can, you can contract gradually. And we have, a fleet of these thermal printers and iPads and kind of the whole check in, checking services. A couple questions that have come in that I'll stop and answer. Do you have to have an account within the community to attend an event? You do so for a virtual event, I have to be a member of the community in order to attend that event.

There is a component or a concept on our roadmap that we will allow for kind of guest attendees in the future, but for now, I do have to be a member. That's not necessarily true for in-person events, because you could use the gradual checking app. And in batch printing, it's kind of a standalone, standalone tool.

And then last question, is the mobile app an additional cost to us? No, it's not. The mobile app in the batch printing app are available to all the gradual customers today. You can go download it, start playing with it and use it for your events. We definitely want to encourage you to to use it. Great questions.

The. Just to finish off this the in app here is this is not something attendees have to download. It's just something that's going to be a kiosk. And the way it works is somebody walks up to an iPad, they start typing in their name.

They're going to select that. I can ask specific things here. So let's say I need to do an NDA or a photo release. I need to capture a signature. I want to ask it their info. I can do that here. And manage all of that inside of Gradwell. If I have a printer connected, it's automatically going to print those badges on demand.

It is a very, very simple flow. But what's so powerful about it as we transition into kind of this post event experience, is it's automatically going to sync to gradual. So if I go to my attendees list here and I go to my checking list, I see that Gerald just checked in. And that's an automatic sync. We have customers that set up some automation using Zapier or other things, where it sends a slack message to a speaker coordinator when a specific person checks in or, they use it to, to notify and do other things that sort of automation is something you'll be able to build natively inside gradual in the future.

But it means that everything's kept in sync. So for our customers, using a CRM connected to gradual, you no longer have to go and see, oh, I got to run a report and then export that list and upload it into HubSpot to show me who attended this event. These things are going to trigger in sync automatically, so I can always, always see who's there.

And if I go into my event overview here, I can even see what's what's going on. So I've got six attendees on my virtual one person watching it right now, my total registrants, I can look at my check in list and I can see who's checked in, who's not checked in. I can do onsite attendee registration. All all here.

We could probably have an entire session dedicated to the in-person event experience, which we may do if there's there's interest in that. It's super powerful. We. I was just on site supporting a customer, with their check in experience for the third time, for one of their major events this last week. We'll be doing it again on on Monday of next week.

And we know some people here have used this as well. If there are any questions around the in-person check in, badge printing, that whole experience or, any of the other components from an engagement perspective, drop those in the chat. Otherwise I'm going to move to the post event experience, and we're going to talk about some of the things you can do to engage customer, engage your attendees after.

And then I want to save time at the end, 10 or 15 minutes for some best practices. So start thinking about the things that you have found successful, whether it's within gradual or not. Maybe it's a different platform. You've used tactics for engagement or successful events, because I'm going to ask for for you all to share those. All right.

So we talked pre-event. We talked during event. Now let's talk post-event. Once an event is over I have a couple very basic things I can do. One is I can upload the content, the replays. If it's a virtual event, I've recorded it to the content section. And then what I'll do is I will link it back to the event for more events in here.

So it shows up as a replay. So the way this works is inside of the dashboard. If I go into my event here, I go to event set up. All I'll do is after the event I'm going to drop a link to the event replay here. Super simple. This means I can link it to a collection or a tag and gradual if I have multiple recordings however you want to do it.

But what it means is that when someone comes back to this event later and says, oh, I want to watch it, there, the roads point to the content section, right? I can, I can find it and I can get to where I need to go. The other thing that's great to do post event is if it's an in-person event, you can add photo albums.

So after you've taken all the photos from your event, you can assign add those to an album and people can explore those. Build a little bit of a little bit of FOMO for your events. And some a way to showcase the vibrance and an excitement and activity within your community. But what everybody is most interested in is analytics and reporting.

And how do I how do I know how my event went after the fact? So we'll look at a couple examples of that. The first is we'll talk about the post event surveys gradual doesn't support the survey natively today, but I, we will automatically send a survey out if you enable it to anyone who attends. I do that inside of the dashboard under my emails.

This is also where I can turn on or off any of my confirmation and registration emails. I can enable this post-event survey and put my survey URL in there. Let's say you're doing an event which you use the same survey for everyone. We even have the ability to append the, event, slug or the unique identifier for that event to the end of that URL.

So you could pre fill that in a survey to make your life a little bit easier for, for your attendees. The other big components after the event are reporting. So under the gradual dashboard actually let me go to a different event type here. So we can see all the different reports available. We use our hybrid event I'll go to my reports.

I have a ton of stuff that I can see. I can answer questions on. You know, who attended, who actually watched a live stream and things like that with these first few reports. So my sessions report is going to give me a list of everyone who attended the event and how long they watched each session mapped against the agenda.

So the way it works is I'll generate this and it'll show me for my particular event, if I can find an example of one for my particular event who watched for, each session. So how long did Kyle watch the Welcome Annual, how long did somebody watch the keynote, etc., etc. if your event gets off on timing, just know that you'll need to modify the agenda.

Otherwise that report is going to be, going to be off registered attendees and logged in attendees. This is who, you know, very, very straightforward. Who registered, who actually logged in. If I have one on one match turned on, I can do a one on one match report so I can see who matched with whom and for how long during the event.

This is great for sales, follow ups or connection making or just insights to say, oh wow, cool. This this person in this person, that's awesome. We asked earlier of can I export the chat and Q&A history? I absolutely can, so I can export that chat history and Q&A that'll come out in an excel sheet or a CSV. So I can take those questions.

I can do follow up later. I can do some, you know, word cloud analysis, whatever you want to do, to get the insights on on the chat engagement because that's going to be that's big. Then I have my checked in attendees and checked in guests, which are really straightforward. That's for your in-person events. Who who of the attendees that checked in, who were there and then guest use our guests.

Check out flow. So let's say somebody, didn't register ahead of time and they need to enter their info. I can export those people. And then the last two were specific to in-person events and are really, really important from a sponsors or conversations. Level one is going to be a scan report. So if I'm using the gradual mobile app and there are QR codes will do a report of all of the badge scans that took place that allow you to filter that by the scanner.

So you could say, okay, show me everyone from with an at gradual email address that scan badges and then I can deliver that to a sponsor to say, hey, here's all your badge scans, as well as an in-person meeting report similar to one on one match, where you'd see an export of of all the meetings that got scheduled or took place, you could do that for in-person events as well.

All right. Those are all the reporting and analytics and things that I have on the overview page of the event. I can see in real time, you know, my registration and my attendees in this kind of heat map graph here. This is brand new. It's not enabled for everyone yet. But if you're interested in that, we can get that turned on.

Allison had a question. Is it possible to see what events a user is attended on the profile level? You can. So if I go into my events here, and fair warning, mine may have an error in it because I have a lot of very old events. I can go to registrations, I can see all the events that that person, registered for, along with their, their ticket type.

Other questions that have have come in are things I'm looking by latest. I don't see any yet. Please feel free to drop those, drop your questions in chat. Questions, comments, whatever in the chat. We've got a little under 15 minutes left. I'm going to stop screen sharing and we are at the part of this session where I would like you all to, to kind of share with one another.

You can do it in the chat, or you can raise your hand and we can we can spotlight you or just feel free to, you know, come off mute and and go right into it. But what are some of your event best practices when it comes to increasing engagement, registration, connecting other members? Would would love to hear what's worked for you.

Go for Caitlin. Thanks, Kyle. Hi, everyone. I'm a community coordinator. Open. I just for a brief introduction. We do in-person events and virtual events, and I've done one hybrid event this year, and I honestly just learned for the first time what the virtual ticket type was. And I feel like that could be really helpful in increasing more organic engagement and growth for our community as we continue to scale.

So I was just curious to hear from everyone else on this call if they've had any success with using the virtual ticket types and how they've kind of coached community members, how to use it, or how to promote the event or post like the virtual ticket on their like LinkedIn or social media to try and get those referrals flowing in for the community.

I'm just that got me really excited. So I just wanted to hear how other people are doing that, or if anyone has any advice. I am looking through the attendees list, and I don't know that anybody on here has used that virtual ticket yet. Our, our most prolific user is definitely, there's a couple skydio, is one they've they found it very successful the, the social sharing in that you, you know social peer encouragement is is really, really valuable.

They combine it a little bit to sometimes with promo codes for invite only events. So especially if you've got kind of a gated community structure where you're like, I kind of want to use that to refer other people in that could be that could be a good option. Do you mean that they encourage because like, I'm just worried about, you know, someone posting their virtual ticket type on their LinkedIn and then their LinkedIn community being like, I don't have the code I'd like.

Yeah, it's really it's an either. Yeah, it's an either or. So it would be like a hey, if you want to join this event, send me a message and I'll give you a code. It's kind of a, a kind of a behind the scenes promotion as opposed to the virtual ticket, which is really meant to be. Let's get as many people as possible in the room.

Got it. Okay. I like the the code. So it's just more about like how to code community members on like how to share. Yep. Okay. Yep. Cool I like that. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Kaitlyn.

Allison has another question. I'll jump in in that follow up to my previous one. Is it possible we'll see on a profile level attended versus registered? You know, it's not right now. I think that that is something that we could probably add to that list. So that's a great, great piece of feedback. If you do need any custom reports like that, like, hey, I want to see over the last year, you know, show me all the people who attended more than one event or something like that.

That's something we can help build for you. That's something we run for other customers who just not built it into the dashboard yet, because everybody has kind of a different tweak or perspective on how they want to run it. Who else has an event, best practice or insight or question?

Again, you can raise your hand or I will. There you go. Awesome. Allison, feel free to come off mute and, and ask your question. Hey, everyone. I'm Allison. I look after customer and community education here at. Hey, Jen. Yeah. So I haven't had a chance to do this necessarily at hey, Jen, some other new here.

But in past events, I think one of the things that I have put a lot of emphasis around is actually post event promotion recaps, especially around any kind of events that are going to have some sort of regular cadence, whether it's weekly or monthly. You want to create FOMO, you want that recap to be your marketing for your next event and everything.

And I've found and this is going to sound really old school, but if you remember the era in which party photos were posted to Facebook and people were tagged in them, see if you have some kind of in-person component or people actually appear in the event, recap their likelihood to share it and encourage others to come along if they enjoy.

The event is just about a million times higher. So playing a little bit to, to that too can be helpful. Sometimes. That's awesome. I love I love that idea. Unabashedly connecting it to you can share and give community members to be able to share those albums. So it's like, hey, go, you know, go check out this album and don't forget to share it on on social.

But that's awesome. Thanks, Alison. That's great. You're welcome. I will remove the spotlight there so you don't have to be up here with me.

Other best practices or questions?

All right. Anita, what you what you got? So I think, best part, I like that what you just said about FOMO, building that FOMO with the invite. Sometimes we say it's very limited seating available, so I think that creates anxiety. I also sometimes I will invite, say like, if you can't make it, let us know so we can pass this on to somebody else.

So that makes them feel like they need to let me know ahead of time. I think sometimes we have a tendency to want bigger events, but sometimes even those smaller events where they know it's going to be smaller is good because there's more accountability. I'm super excited about the match feature I used to my prior role paid, a third party company, for that feature at events.

So I know that that's really popular, smaller breakouts, and I'm excited for being able to turn it down just a little bit from ten to like, maybe five, because I find that that's kind of the sweet spot. Can get a little bit awkward after a few minutes if people aren't as chatty as you like them to be.

But this is great. Thanks. Thanks, Janine. Those are. Those are great. Yeah. The scarcity. Reinforcing that. So people are like, oh man, I can't miss it. And ELC the answering leadership community is one of our longest standing communities on gradual. And a lot of the features and functions were built out of that. And we found that there was the small, intimate events were honestly maybe even more high leverage.

And that's kind of how we even think about building big events is, yeah, I may have a large audience, but how can I create smaller pockets within that for people to connect and interact? Those are awesome. Thanks. All right, before we wrap up any, I would love to hear 1 or 2 more best practices, insights, questions, takeaways, what order?

Some things that are top of mind for your.

Janelle I love it. How do you get Allison big like you on the screen? We're going to go into a little bit of, an endless, endless zoom here if I can. So, let me start sharing my screen again.

So as I as I'm inside of this event, Oh, it's not going to let me do it because I am. I'm in a screen share, but we'll get the idea. So when someone raises their hand, they're they're going to show up here, and then I can hover over them. So great. Lower. Raise your hand for me. So she shows up here I can see Lori's hand raised in this list.

I can also see Lori's Andres in this list over here. And if I click on this little three point menu, I can add spotlight. And that's just going to bring Laura up on on screen with me. When I'm in a screen share like this I can't modify those spotlights, but that's a good way. Good way to do it.

And I can lower Laura's hand and stop screen sharing. Yeah. Of course, the. That's a great question. There's a lot of little nuance, stuff like that. And that was kind of the the purpose of, of this event was to try and get into the nitty gritty details, maybe something that you didn't know before, that, that you learned learned today.

I would love in the chat. What is one thing that you did not know? A specific feature functionality component. Best practice that you did not know before that you took away today? Please drop that in in the chat.

What is one thing you did not know before? Whether it's a best practice, a tip trick, functionality that you're walking away with? Awesome. Audrey, all the tequila options. Yeah. That one's that one's a big one. There's there's a ton in there. Do you need an in-person connection? Connection? Yeah, that one that one is big. Very popular match events chat moderation tools.

Love the match mobile app. Yep. Definitely. Definitely. No, I don't want to say a blind spot. It's an unknown. We've we've got so many exciting things at Grand River. Promote. We we run out of time.

Super. Well, thank you all so much for devoting an hour of your time to to jump in and learn more about events on on gradual. This is recorded, so we'll publish this and share it out. Feel free to share it with others on your team. We're also going to do a little bit of a synopsis, using some some of our skunkworks projects around AI summarization and generation, which keep an eye out for that.

But thank you all so much for being here today. If you have questions, you know how to get Ahold of us. But if you don't support a gradual.com, or if you're on slack with us, let us know. And thanks again for being here. Take care everybody.