Event Replay: April 2025 Product Update

The Gradual team shared an in-depth overview of the new features launched in Q1 2025, with Forum as the headline update—introducing @ mentions, board topics, enhanced permissions, and the ability for Clubs to host forum boards. Club organizers and admins now have elevated controls, and community engagement is easier than ever with the ability to comment on or react to videos and blogs. Additionally, the Contributor system has been upgraded with an advanced level, enabling members to earn points and redeem them for rewards. The event wrapped up with a preview of upcoming releases and a look ahead at the Q2 roadmap.

Welcome, everyone, to our 2025 April product update. I am Kyle Sutton. I'm the head of strategy and operations here at gradual, and I am super excited to share a absolute ton of new features that our team has been working so, so hard on.

Responding to feedback, great ideas and our vision for community. So we're going to dig into these today, many of which, you may have already heard from our conversations, but we're going to dig into these in depth, and I'm going to try and highlight some of the ones that maybe you haven't seen before that can uplevel that community experience.

And one of the other things I'm going to try and do is highlight features that are small or simple, but address specific needs. Maybe we've talked about in the past or or we're interested in, things that can make your life a little bit easier as a community leader and curate the experience. So, we are going to we're going to walk through all of that stuff.

Specifically, we're going to talk about a handful of different areas, and I'm probably going to talk a little bit more than I normally do, only because we have so many new and exciting features. So we're going to first we're going to start talking about the forum. We're going to talk about updates to content publishing, club customization contributions, kind of enhancements and features.

There. As well as some automations, back end, admin kind of stuff and customization for your community. I know it's a lot, but, bear with us because I think it's going to be really valuable for us to highlight all these awesome things that that have been introduced in the first quarter. And we're going to cheat.

We're even going to give you a sneak preview of something, sneak preview of something that, that launched on Monday that some of you may, may have seen already. But we're going to dig into those as we go. You've already found the chat, which is awesome. So please drop any questions or comments that you have there.

Use the emojis. React. I'm watching it as we go. Which is which is awesome for me and Laura from our team, who you all know is here and can answer questions in the chat as well. As we wrap up though, we're going to jump into a meeting room which you can find in the agenda, and there will be a notification that shows up at the top of your screen, and we'll do a live Q&A in there.

Two great reasons to join. First, you, get to ask questions. The second is you get to meet other community, community members, community folks who, who can answer questions and share any, any insights. All right. Plus, we do these each month. We or sorry, we do product updates that we email out every month.

And those can always be found on, community.graduate.com. We'll share the link for those as well. So any of the documentation or resources related to that you can you can find there [email protected], which is our help center. Recently updated. Many of you have have shared a lot of wonderful feedback. So without further ado, we are going to dive right in to our first set of features.

As it relates to the community forums. And I'm going to get a screen share going here, and we're going to talk about some of the the new and noteworthy, new and noteworthy updates here. So, let's let's take a look at the overview, of a couple things as it relates to the forum. What you what we're going to start with is something that I know you all probably already saw because it was in the the teaser for this email, but that is ad mentions are now live on the forum.

Very very exciting stuff. If I come into a forum post here, any comments or posts can include an ad mention. You simply start typing the name of the user that you want to mention. Going to pop up here, we're going to show if they have it, their profile and their title. So you can help, decide who which which Laura, it is that you want to, you want to mention we've already seen this have a tremendous impact on engagements, for community members because it gives another way to drive people back, to interact inside of, inside of the community.

One of the ways that it does that is because we have some notifications that are behind this. So the first thing is there's going to be a platform notification. Those notifications always show up in the top right of your screen in this notification center. And you can see I've got messages, comments, mentions and reactions. So we've got these these mentions here.

And then the other place that this can show up is in my email based notifications. And if you didn't know this exist under the if I click on my profile icon in the top right, any user can go to their notification settings. And depending on what you have enabled, you'll have these different options. So for the forum I can have my notification settings.

So maybe I don't want to get notifications for mention, but I do. So these are going to be on by default. And so that means that you can users would receive an email batched notification for when they get a new app, mentioned comments on their posts and things like that. So those are app mentions. I know, some people are really excited about those.

Jen, thanks for dropping in the chat. Yep, definitely a game changer. Upcoming features related to app mentions. We're going to be able to support group mentions. So by a segment or a space or club perhaps, and say, hey, I want all of my, you know, ad customers to receive something, or kind of a mentioning all somehow those are things our product team is working on implementing.

To be able to have more of a broadcast style approach. And then the other thing is, yes, app mentions will be included in content, comments, messages and event chat in the future. Right now, though, just limited to those forum interactions is awesome. Moving right along as it relates to forum type things, we're going to talk about forum boards because forum boards can now be nested within clubs in the community.

That's right. If I go to a club, I can have a forum board native to this before we were instructing you to say, hey, you know, you can use the custom module to drive people back to the forum community. Kind of means our main community forum. Now they can be nested within bugs in clubs. One of the great things our product team did here is we've made it, very simple to structure this.

And you can have these kind of nested conversations, but it's still very easy to navigate. And I don't get lost, which is one of the challenges is we didn't want to create didn't want to create an area where people could kind of get lost and they're like, wait, which which form? And I mean, so you can access board or club boards in, two different places.

The first is from the main community forum. So I click on forum here. If I click See All, I'll see I have interest group and chapter related boards right here. If the if that club is private or public, the boards will show up. If it's secret and I'm not a member they want I can jump into that board.

And now you'll see I'm within the club. So club health and safety. And I'm inside of the forum section of that club. The other place that you can see this is directly from the club. So I can go to clubs, go to Health and Safety and I see the forum here. This particular community we're in now, just happens to have forum top, front, front and center so you can adjust the order.

Maybe I want leaders first, or a custom module with a welcome video. Which is a great best practice that one of our customers does when I join the club. They've got a custom module with a video there. That's just in gradual. That's a hey, welcome. Here's what you need to know. Really good, really good tip. So that's clubs or that's boards within clubs.

One of the notes here is that I can only have one board per club. So and I can't change the name. So if I create a board in health and safety it's going to be the Health and Safety Board. We did this for simplicity's sake. So you don't get this really crazy, nested folder structure, which is something we wanted to, to optimize for.

However, I still have a way to kind of subdivide the organization within, the boards without creating a ton of complexity. And that's going to be from what we call board topics, which you'll see right here are desk ergonomics, mental health and fire safety, etc.. This this is not really a new construct, right. There's no new, organization.

You have to add all these are are highlighting the tags that were already applied to the specific forum posts. So what I can do, and we'll show you this in the dashboard is for a specific forum board. I can select which topics I want to highlight. And then I can drill in and say, all right, show me all of the content that's tagged as as mental health.

In this case, this is not just true for club specific boards, but can also be done at the, at the community level as well. So I've got different, different, board topics here. This is super simple to set up in the dashboard. I would go to the forum, I'd go to my board and as I edit these I can decide which board topics I want to highlight.

So I can edit this. I can choose, a bunch of different ones. And this isn't going to restrict which board topics. New posters can can pick. It's just featuring these within that board. So for example, if I go back and I create a post here, I should probably be in a board when I do that.

If I create a post, it's going to suggest specific, topics for me to use. It's better to see in the club. So if I go back to health and safety here, let's create a new post. It's going to select specific topics for me to use, but it doesn't preclude me from picking any of the the tags or topics that I have really great feature for kind of creating some some curated organization, especially those of you who the idea here is that this helps your forum scale, right?

Maybe I've got, general, but I've got some, some subcategories within here that I want to create. I can do that with those board topics. It also means you can do time bound conversations. So let's say I've got a in my product feature releases, I've got like a march tag or something like that. I don't want that to be a folder.

Things live in forever, because that doesn't make any sense. But I can use a topic tag to to kind of curate those time bound, type out experiences. Awesome. Love to see in the comments. Yep. The the that organization the board topics are are are super. While we're talking about boards, we're going to talk about board moderators because now I can have, moderators just for a specific board.

Previously, if I wanted to have a forum moderator, they, they got access to everything. But now I can say, hey, maybe my, in my customer advisory board. Board. I could have, just one person to to moderate that. This is great for getting community members to moderate. Relates to the club board moderation. Which we'll talk about in a little bit.

I can do this pretty easily in the dashboard. I'm already in this board. And we see over here on the right hand side, I now have this board moderator selection so I can edit this, add a moderator and they will be able to, to moderate that board they don't need or they don't receive dashboard access because they don't need it.

All of that moderation happens on the front end just as normal. I see here I got my three point menu. I can pin or unpin, lock, delete, mark spam. If I'm within a board, I can move things back and forth between boards as well. Speaking of pinning, while while we're here you're seeing this in action, you can now pin more than one, forum post or discussion.

So, maybe inside of our, general or something. I want to pin a welcome and an update or something simple to do. I can come here, I can pin it to the forum. And now I have three, three pinned posts. They're just another way to organize things and highlight and a great, customer feedback that we implemented.

All right. We are still rocking and rolling a couple more forum related updates and then we will move along. What you're also seeing here that you may not have seen before is enhanced reactions for the forum experience. So if I go into the welcome for the community we can highlight this. So there are two general styles for forum interaction as we say.

So how users can interact without posting one of them is a vote system. So I have kind of an upvote downvote structure. And then the other is likes. Now with likes we've expanded the amount of reactions that you can have. So for example, if I hover over this, I see that I have a basic like but I've got you know, I if I felt very supported by this I'm super excited or congratulating.

Insightful. Thank you. In the dashboard we have a bunch more of these, but the reason that we introduced this is because it is another layer of insight that you can get as it relates to, to the forum in the reactions. Because if I have more reactions and I post a product update or answer a question, people can now choose a different style of reaction that I can report on.

So I can say, hey, this post got a lot of love. People found it insightful or maybe people were confused. I can report on these things to understand. A little more granularity in how people are interacting and understanding the forum posts. This is set up self-service in the dashboard. If I go back to that forum section and I go to forum settings, you've got the, reactions here.

So post reaction mode is in like mode. And then I can have my additional reactions. If I edit this I can choose vote or like I can come in here and I can choose which reactions I want to set. We put a max on this so you don't have too many options. I would think strategically about about how you, how you want to structure this.

We will, in the future support the ability for you to add your own icons and reactions. But for right now, it's structure just based on on these kind of default ones that we've added based on some of our product research. Really great. Great way to expand some of those kind of forum interaction. Possibilities. While we're on this page, I also want to highlight there's a bunch of other settings that I encourage you to play with that we haven't really highlighted in a product update because they're they're relatively small and very specific to your use cases, but you have a ton of options when it comes to customization.

So for example, you can turn on and off editing. I can choose how to display the forum post for logged in or not logged in visitors. Whether or not you want the post date visible or not, lots of things are available. I would encourage you to, to explore, explore the pages, because there's a lot of settings and things that get, get added.

One of the questions that came in as we're going here is Jenna asked, confirming that you can only add topic tags. So talking about the, the topics here within a post or within a board, can only be added to a board. And that's correct. I can only add topic tags to a board, not to the forum as a whole.

Because there's, there's not really a container. The main forum page is just a collection of all of the things. Great. Great question Jen. All right, last but not least, when it comes to forum features, we added a new web outbound webhook and our integrations for new forum posts. And here's a couple of really cool ways that customers have already started to use this.

So what this will do is anytime a new post, not a comment, a reply, but a top level post is created in any board, whether it's a club or in the main community forum. It'll trigger this webhook. It'll contain the post content, the poster, the topic tags as well as the board. This is a super way to, facilitate notifications to external teams who maybe aren't in your community all the time.

So, for example, something that's posted in my customer support board, I can create a workflow with a Zapier or something else to then, notify in a slack channel. Hey, support team, a new post came in to this particular board that's in the Outbound Webhooks, a super great, use case and a helpful tool to facilitate notifications across your community or across your organization for new forum activity.

Last but not least, when it comes to the forum, we'll talk about some of the upcoming features related to this. One of the most notable is we are going to support marking as correct. So for your forum support use cases, users would have the ability to vote on or the original poster would have the ability to mark a particular reply as the correct answer.

There will be some triggers from a contribution perspective assigned to that as well, so you can reward people for providing the most correct answers. And that's going to launch later this, later this quarter. More to come on that once it's live all right. That are those are all of the major forum updates there probably things that I am definitely forgetting.

Like code weed support now, support code snippets and things inside of forum post. But please, please encourage you to check out our product update documentation. As it relates to that, let's talk a little bit about clubs. Since we were already in there, one of the biggest features that we've added is the ability to specifically curate in each club the visibility of the different, different components or different menu items.

To date, you've had to have the same kind of components visible in every single club. So if I wanted members to be visible in one, it had to be visible at all. That is now changed. And you can, you can selectively decide what's visible in each club. In the dashboard. There's two steps to this. The first is in the club settings in my in club features.

I'd need to turn this on. So this means that this is globally available to be used in a club. If it's not enabled here, then regardless, in specific clubs won't be able to turn this on. The next place that I can go is into each of the groups specifically, and I go into general info and I can edit which in club features are available here.

This is something that gives you the ability to say, hey, maybe I don't want members visible, or I don't want the forum as a menu item or visible in the layout of that that club that you can control that there. There's two kind of approaches or use cases to this. One is if you do have a global template then no need to to change it.

You can leave this selection off if you have individual club organizers who are responsible for the interest groups or chapters, you can turn this on to enable them to do that selection. Even if you don't have club organizers and you want to change the features available in each of your clubs, you'll still need to turn this on. Otherwise, it's going to kind of force this global, feature set when it comes to that, that customization.

You now have a lot more capabilities when it comes to delegating, club permissions and settings. So there's two things here. One is I can control whether or not club admins are able to add other club permissions, meaning they can add their own managers or creators. The use case here is let's say I have a local chapter. I've identified someone as an admin and they have people who want to help create content.

I can decide if I want to give that club admin the ability to add other permissions managers, editors, admins and you'll see I have three different options. No. Yes, they can add everybody or this one in the middle is they can add people, but they can't be admins. They have to be managers or editors. And then the last club related update here is related to specific club editor permissions.

So if I go in here and we pick a new user, we'll see. We've added the ability for club editors to create their own events and content. Previously they were just allowed to edit existing ones. This is a really helpful tool. What I've got a club member who I want them to be able to post content or create events within a club, but they shouldn't be able to change the club layout, manage permissions, members, all the things that a manager and admin can do.

I can just create them as a club editor. So let's talk about an awesome use case for this. I've got someone in my community. They are an expert in health and safety. They're willing to create content and kind of facilitate discussions. What I would do is two things. One, I'm going to go into club permissions. I'm going to select them, find them from my list and add them as a club editor and say, hey, I'd love it if you can help create events and content for me.

Then the other thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the forum and I'm going to go to my settings, and I'm going to add them as a board moderator so they can moderate the forum discussion within my Health and safety club. Great, great use case and a perfect combination of these features to enable your community members to be able to to get back in and contribute.

All right. Next up we're going to talk about content management. So we have three specific features that that we're going to walk through here. The first and most notable that I know you are all already aware of because we've talked about it, are comments on content that's right now on pieces of content. I can turn, I can turn on comments so people can interact, they can share reactions, they can, upvote and like things.

And I can get interaction on specific pieces of content. It maybe you don't have the forum experience enabled and you want to facilitate that conversation. You can do. So you can do so here. And you have a lot of controls when it comes to the visibility and enablement of content. Comments. So if I go back into the community, I've got a couple places where I can control this.

The first is I've got this new comments menu and you'll see I got a little red dot there because there are new comments that I have not yet seen or reviewed as an admin. This is also where I would change the global settings for whether or not people can comment or react to content. I've got three three options here.

I can allow people to give a thumbs up, I can allow them to comment, and then I have a secondary option if I want all content comments to require, a manual review by an admin before they're published. If so, I can turn that on. But let's say I have one of two scenarios. One is maybe I have certain pieces of content that I don't want comments on.

I can turn those off selectively, or the inverse is also true. Maybe I don't want all of my content to have comments, only certain pieces. I can do the inverse so I can choose what I want the global default to be here. But then under the content specifically. I can see the specific comments on that particular piece of content here, but when I go into edit, I can also override whatever those global settings are.

Meaning if I've got it on globally, I can turn it off, and if I have it off globally, I can turn it on. Lots of control here. If you have any questions about this and the nuance here, let us know. There's also tons of, information on in our resources on who can turn content comments on and off as it relates to collaborator or club level, permissions sets.

But those are the comment settings. And we saw on the front end as well. I've got notifications as it relates to, content comments that I can I can export. All right. Let's go on to the next content piece, which is going to be scheduled content publishing. This is one we've talked about before. I'm including it as a reminder, because it's so helpful under the inside of the content when I'm on the content page, not in the edit content on this content page, or I have the publish button, I have the publish now, but I also now have the ability to schedule when that gets published.

The time zone is going to be based on your community level settings. Or sorry, going to be based on your user level. So for me it would be eastern time. I'd pick the date, pick the time and schedule it to be be published at that time. Super helpful. And then the last piece as it relates to content, this is under the category of helpful things you may not have noticed is in events and content.

Now I can bookmark specific items. So let's say a really common use cases. You know, we're all doing major events or conferences. We build the landing page for the event, or we build the event page and months in advance, and then we have a lot of events since. So it gets built on and built on and pushed back in the in the list here I can go through, I can hover over my little menu here and I can add this to my bookmarks.

Now I can filter this list to just show my bookmarks. So I can have important pieces of content, maybe ones I'm the host on or something showcased here. And I can I can reset those. The other list view capabilities you have that you may not have noticed is I can filter the view for, what I'm seeing by default.

We're just going to show community level events and content. But if I wanted to see community level and things happening in clubs, I come over to this dropdown here select all. And now I can see everything. Just some helpful tips. As you're interacting with the the gradual dashboard seeing lots of great comments. Thanks, Jessica. Yeah, the comment section on on content is really, really spurring a lot of engagement inside of the the community.

All right. Let's talk about contributions and rewards. As our next topic here. And actually we're not not going to talk about the contributors section yet. We're going to talk about badges on the profile, which we've highlighted in an update before because this was launched earlier this year. But I want to revisit this and kind of do a deep dive.

So we are all familiar, maybe with the typical badges that we see on a profile which are awarded by a contribution. So something someone has done to maybe they receive points for you or something like that. Those are our contribution badges. But now you'll see I have a profile badge as well. The profile badge allows me to denote in my people view inside of a meeting room in the forum, whatever you need, to showcase kind of the the persona is the way I think about it.

So if we look at the difference between a contributor badge and a profile badge, contributor badges show what that person has done inside of the community. The profile badge shows what who that person is in relation to the community. Maybe they're an ambassador, they're an admin. They're, a host, what have you. You can highlight those here.

So let's look at how to set these up in the dashboard. The profile badges live under the members tab because they're related to kind of your members list. You see profile badges here. And I've got three different sets of profile badges that I can choose from. The first one are going to be our default badges. These are related to the administrative roles that you can assign in the community.

Meaning if someone's a community admin, I can give them a badge. If they're a collaborator, I can give them the creator badge. If they're a club.

Excuse me. If they're a club admin, I can give them, that, that community club admin badge. And maybe they're a moderator. I can give them a mod badge. I can also pull from my contributor badges and whether or not I want those to be available as a profile badge. And then lastly, a custom, badge that only relates to the profile.

No contributions, assigned to it. This is a, great way to recognize members of the community. We've seen a lot of success with this, especially with the same construct. Maybe it's a subject matter expert that you want to reward product levels. So, hey, I'm a I'm an event creator, and I want to give them that, recognition that can be here.

This is automatically get a pop up when I give someone a permission inside of gradual. So if I go and I add someone new as a collaborator, it's going to ask me, do you want to give that person, those kind of collab creator, badges when it pops up and I can choose to. Yeah, give them that badge or.

No, just give them the permission only. In the future, we're going to support the ability for the user to choose which badge they want to display based on kind of what what is most important to them to showcase with the community. But you can also do this today from the dashboard. So you'll see in my member list here, I've got my profile badge.

If I click on Linda here, I can see the badge that she has. I can take it away or I can change it to another, badge that that she may have, may have eligible all of this super easy to set up if you do have any sort of, we don't yet support bulk uploading these kinds of badges.

If that's something you have a use case for, you have, you know, 40 or 50 ambassadors that you want to give that badge to reach out to our team, that might be something that we can, we can help you with. Awesome. Let's keep going on contributions and we'll talk about the contributions specifically now. And we're going to take some time to talk about the different some features added as it relates to rewards.

Two quick things here. One, we've added a inventory to, the different reward items. Previously, we had the ability for you to restrict the amount that people can, redeem individually. So like at each end of each user can only redeem this once. But now you have the ability to do actual inventory management and tracking. So inside here I can decide I want to track the quantity.

I've got a committed. So this is based on the to be processed available will remove the two be processed from our total on hand. So this is super simple to manage and set up in here. I can adjust these numbers. I can do it in large quantities if I add, you know, bok bok hundreds or something like that.

And then that same, redemption limit per member is visible here. And then the other thing that I can do related to rewards is I can space restrict the rewards. This allows me to say, hey, maybe I've got a certain class of customer or persona, I've got special swag just for, just for our premium customers. I can restrict that those rewards to that space.

So it's only visible to, to those groups. Very helpful for, for those kind of use cases. Other contributor updates relate to the contributors board. So one of the features that was requested makes a ton of sense is, you know, hey, Kyle's in the community every day, but he's an admin creating events. We don't want him to be at the top of the leaderboard, even though I am very proud of all my points.

We want the ability to remove certain users, because they're team members or admins. And you can do that now with the exceptions. So I add open this, from the dashboard. I'm on the contributor boards page, and I can add a member here and remove them. They won't show up on any of the leaderboards or be included in those rankings.

Note that this is going to be a global exclusion. It's not a per leaderboard exclusion. So, you'll want to just consider that as your as you're adding those exceptions. There's not the ability to say, hey, I don't want that person to be in speaker. But yes, have them show up in in content. Alrighty. I see some questions coming in.

Keep them, keep them coming. And don't forget, you can use that Q&A tab too for for questions. And then we can respond in line or just keep using keep it using the chat. All righty. Let's go on to our our last contribution related update. We may have mentioned this before, but I wanted to remind you that you can trigger gradual contributions via our API, and that includes inside of of Zapier.

The use case for this is let's say I've got product activity or, external stuff that's happening that I want to be able to give people points and gradual or a badge or rewards and gradual based on those external activities. And I can do that with our API. I would encourage you to check our documentation on support that gradual.com on how to do that.

But any of our native, kind of preset contributions or custom contributions can be triggered with that with that API. Great use case there. If I, you know, if I want to feature product adoption and give somebody a badge for that early adopter badge, if they use a new feature within the first 30 days or something, and I can track that, then I can automate that badge assignment inside of gradual, really good kind of advanced contribution use case.

All righty. We are we are getting getting near the end. We have a couple more features, new features to highlight. And then we're going to jump into some of the roadmap items that are that are going to be coming up. All right. So let's talk about some of the community customization that's available in some of these. Some of these features.

One of the big ones that we've talked about before is a significant item for our roadmap is supporting more customization for you inside of of your community. And if you've been using gradual for a while, you may not know some of these features exist. So I want to I want to highlight them. Even though these may not be new or noteworthy.

The new and noteworthy one is this menu customization though. So you've already seen we've got different menu styles. Now you've got a top or a left menu, light and dark mode. If you want to explore those or switch between, let us know and we can help, kind of show you what that would look like. But what you can do self-service in the dashboard is I can decide what menu items I want, visible or not visible.

And strategically, I can do this for what I want to display before someone signs in and after. So, for example, maybe I don't really want people to know that there's a people tab before they log in. I only want to show members after, or the inverse maybe I do, and I want that to be a reason that, people can people can sign in, I can I can set up those structures there.

This is where I control this. I can turn off the visibility before or after sign in, and it's just going to control whether or not that menu item is available up here. So for example, if I turn off the people tab, internally, if somebody has that direct URL, they're still going to be able to get there. It doesn't disable the feature completely.

It just controls the menu visibility. Some of the other customization items are related to the the different components and and display options. So one of the most popular ones that is kind of hidden here is I've got this home page before sign in. So when I go to a new, when I go to the gradual home page for your community, this controls what do I want to show?

Do I want to use, custom background with, like, an image or a video, a gradient, a custom sticker. I can upload that image here. I can move, move and change things around. But then I also have this footer area on the home page, too. So if I open up a new window, we'll go to our community page.

I can control the visibility of what shows up here. I can control the visibility of that menu item. And this is that footer section down here at the bottom. So I can rename this. I can change the button text. If I stay on this page long enough, we're going to get the sign in prompt nudge that's going to show up in the top right of the screen.

And I can customize what that says here right. So log in or sign up or maybe apply if I've got an application based community, all of these sorts of things are going to start. More and more of these customization features are going to start popping up in your dashboard. And we'll do our best to communicate this with you.

But I always encourage you to to do a little poking around and see what's new, because you have a lot of capabilities when it comes to, curating and customizing this experience. Speaking of curation and customization, you also have settings that we introduced related to messaging. As your community grows, it's often the case that I've got members that, I've got I do members, they're doing great.

And then every once in a while, maybe I have some risk of spam people coming in there that are selling something or reaching out to members, and they they really shouldn't be. In order to help protect the member experience and model this after other platforms like LinkedIn's in mail or other tools, we've added some control for direct messaging.

You've always been able to turn direct messaging on and off, but now you've got some block controls where you can. This is on by default, so it's probably on for your community, but you can block messages from strangers. And what this means is, we're not going to allow a user to send more than one message to another user before they get a reply.

So I can I can send my initial outreach, but they can't can't keep sending messages. You do have a setting to exclude admins for this. So you can as a community admin, you can. You can pester people as much as you'd like. And then we're also, exploring adding some the other direction. So members could message community admins, without having those same kind of rules.

But but that's still still in consideration. Another just another way for you to kind of curate, and protect the community experience. All right. We have talked about a lot of the new features, that are here, and we're going to talk about some of the new brand. Brand new. I'm going to highlight one brand new feature, and then we're going to talk about some of our roadmap items that are coming up, later, later this quarter and later this year.

So if I am looking at, gradual, one of the newest features is in meeting rooms and webinars. I can now share YouTube videos for playback. So we're inside of a meeting room. That's a lot of that's a lot of me. Down here, you'll notice some of you may have already found this, that we have this new activity menu which is combined a couple of things, including breakout rooms.

I can expand this. And now I have the ability to play a YouTube video. I can paste my YouTube video link in here. It's going to show me a preview, and then I can play it out to the, the audience. With audio, we've prioritized YouTube first because of the ease of implementation, and it also means you can control playback.

So pause, fast forward, and shuttle through through the video or documentation on this is live as of as of this morning. So feel free to go check that out. But that is a brand new feature available in our native meeting room experiences. So meeting events and webinars on gradual. Some other things that you may not have noticed to that we haven't talked about.

We have a waiting room, available now within meeting rooms that you can turn on and off as a host, as well as some controls, for, different attendee participation, Q&A, typing, answer and all that kind of stuff. Again, go check out all of our, our product documentation to to see those new and noteworthy things. All right.Let's talk about some of the upcoming roadmap items.

So what's what's coming soon in gradual either later this month, later this quarter or later this year. So some of some of the highest priority things are going to be around expanding what you can do natively in gradual without having to get other platforms to, to help you do this.

And there's three features that are going to fall into into this category. The first is one we've talked about before, and that's going to be courses. The ability to leverage gradual to host courses without the need for a separate learning management system. You can put these things directly in gradual. You can feature videos, have knowledge checks, check progress and all these, all this sorts of stuff, all native within the platform.

Without a third party tool. The courses module is going to be an add on module, which means they'll have an additional cost. But that's going to be more info on that. And if you're interested in courses coming up later later this year, let us know. And we're happy to to chat with you about that. One of the other kind of native capability expansions is going to be forms, the ability to take,

basic form responses inside of gradual.

Maybe I want to do, club application. I want to do a survey. I want to capture feedback, something that maybe doesn't make sense to live in a profile question, you'll be able to launch those just within gradual without having to, to push those somewhere else. The other, let me move some things around here. The other features that we have have coming up, related to native capability we've talked about before are kind of workflows and notification.

So the ability to do email updates, a simple newsletter style digest without having to leverage, an email marketing tool, that's another one of those expands in modules that will carry an additional cost, but will give you the ability to create different segments. So maybe all of my customers are in a segment, automate adding them to a club, adding them to a space, inviting them to an event, and or sending updates, via email, things like, hey, a new event was published and I can I can notify members of that.

The idea being that there's more and more tools that you have as a community leader within gradual, which without having to go somewhere else, making it really an all in one kind of experience. Some other, updates coming, that are, related to the platform, as a whole, not necessarily expansions of from an add on module perspective would be, things like SEO improvements.

Our team has been working really, really hard on helping to, prioritizing the search engine optimization for your pages within gradual how fast they load share ability and how they rank in, in index and results. We're going to add later, probably later this month. Clubs, can have spaces within them. So right now it's, spaces don't interact with club content at all.

But we're going to add kind of that Venn diagram. So maybe I've got a, a good use case that this is one of our customers has a new new customer club, a group just for their new customers, and they don't want to pull people out of that, but then they have cohorts subdivided within. So I can create cohort one, cohort two, cohort three.

Have those nested within that club experience. And then further fine tune the experience within the clubs. More details on that as it gets launched. But that's going to be yet another way to to curate that community experience.

The next update is, related to accessibility on the platform, gradually striving to be a fully accessible platform. And that's going to come with with quite a few updates to help, support you providing an accessible speaker experience to your customers, community members, and anyone else.

Some of the most, urgent or one of the highest priority ones is going to be live captioning and live stream events. That's something that we've piloted already, and should be available soon. So in an event like this will do auto generated live captions that you can toggle on or off as needed. That'll be English lives, captions and more details on that.

And then we'll follow that up with live captioning and transcription for meetings and webinar events. But that'll be a little bit later this year, as well as some other, accessibility enhancements as it relates to page contrast, alt text, keyboard navigation and things like that. And then last but not least, and this is actually launching, within the next couple weeks, is going to be supporting a session check in within the gradual check in app.

That's right. You'll be able to track session, check in and participation, for your in-person events using that same check in app. It also means that the checking app is going to be available on iOS mobile, not just on iPad. So that means you can have, you can have your team members, you can have your team members, at the door with their phones, checking people into to specific sessions within an event.

All of this is, we'll communicate this to you as these features get introduced, and we'll continue to provide more updates related to our roadmap. But thank you. Thank you so much for for joining in and listening to me talk for the for almost an hour about our new features. We're really excited about all the hard work our team has done to bring these things to life.

If you have questions, we are going to jump into a live meeting room right now. Laura and I will be in there to answer questions, come say hi, chat with other community members. Or just just pop in to say hello. We're excited to to chat with you and answer any questions related to these features. If you do have questions and you can't join, we'll share a recording of this.

You can always find our product updates, on the community page. And then all of our documentation is constantly [email protected]. And we encourage you to go check things out there. Thank you all so much for joining us and we will see you next time. Thanks so much.