Gradual 2024 Q2 Product Update

Check out the newest features from 2024 Q2 including community clubs, hybrid events, updates to Forum architecture and dashboard improvements.

Well, welcome everyone to our Q2 gradual product update. I am Kyle Sutton, Head of Strategy and Operations here at gradual, and I'm looking forward to sharing a whole boatload of new updates with you. Seriously, so many updates. I couldn't decide what not to cover. So we're going to try we're going to try and do it all.

I'm going to go quickly through some things. so please feel free to to jump into the chat and and ask questions. And on that note, a couple reminders just to orient us to this environment here. If you're if you're new or haven't been in in a while. first say hi in the chat, share where you're joining from, what you're looking to learn about what what prompted you to to jump in today?

I already see some people in there. Hey, Randy. Caitlin. Adrian. Joseph, it's great to have you all here. Also, feel free to message other members explore in the people tab on the left hand side. Who who's there? And if you have a question on, you know, maybe how they're using gradual or you need help in a particular area, maybe it's engagement events using the forum, showing business value, you name it, you we have a whole resource hub here of people that I'm sure would be happy to connect with a fellow community leader.

So please reach out, and send them a message. Second thing, right after we wrap up the presentation and demo part of this, I will. Laura and I are going to jump into a meeting room to answer any questions. so. Or just say hello so you can find that there will be a notification that pops up at the top at the end of our time here today, or you can grab it in the agenda there on the left hand side.

Jump in, say hello and meet some fellow community builders. And last but not least, we. We always record these and we will send them out. for you to revisit. And you can always find all of our features summarized and everything I don't have time to cover in the content section of this community. After we're done, you can click on that little green community button and it'll take you back there.

All right. Without further ado, today we have four big categories to cover. We are going to talk through event updates including hybrid events, ticketing, reporting, meeting room updates, and some new settings, updates to the video content and hosting options that we support, as well as forum boards. And lastly, a review of our much anticipated, very exciting brand new clubs feature as we go.

Drop your questions in the chat. I'll either, I'll answer them as we go, or Laura will jump in and provide some resources and can answer things. So let's go ahead and get started. And we're going to start with hybrid events. Gradual now supports hybrid hybrid events. They're created I like to think of these events as a as a combination of our live stream, a combination of our live stream and in-person events.

We spent a lot of time listening in on observing how customers were beginning to execute hybrid event experiences. and as event professionals ourselves, we tried to take all of these inputs in and inform how we want to support hybrid events to make it as flexible as possible, while still being easy to understand and navigate for your event attendees.

Hybrid events are created just like any other event, from the gradual dashboard. However, the key difference is now I have decisions to make on when it comes to ticket types or the agenda sessions, whether it's going to be virtual, in-person, or hybrid. Then we'll talk. We'll show what that looks like in the dashboard here in a second.

What this does is it gives you the ability to create an agenda in an experience for each of those, those audiences on the front end. As an attendee, I see all the information I need based on my ticket type. When I go to register, I'll select my ticket type and you can even have unique registration questions per type of attendee.

So hey, these questions are for this ticket type which is virtual. Maybe something like a peer group I want to be a part of, as opposed to in-person attendance, which may require different information like am I going to stay at the property? or do I need hotel reservations or accommodations made for me in the agenda? I can also then tag my sessions as such.

So down here, we've got a very robust agenda with lots of things going on. But you can see I have all the information I need related to my ticket type. So I have hybrid. I can see some things are in-person only versus virtual only. And you may recall some changes we made to the agenda builder in our last update where we kind of separated the link between stage and track.

What this does is it allows you to give, a really simplified version or complex version of the agenda to your attendees. So I could say, hey, maybe I want my tracks to rather than be, general or VIP, they could be in-person, hybrid or virtual. You can do that, or you can use it. Use it this way.

All of, and it's easy for me to, to navigate this as, as an end user. And then in the dashboard, I can set this up when I build my agenda, as I add to an agenda, you'll see I can select which attendee experience this agenda item relates to, and that's reflected on the front end. You'll also see that I have the options when I get into stage management up here.

If I go into my stage settings, I can choose not only the name of the stage, but I can assign it in person or hybrid experiences to a stage location, giving me a lot more flexibility. for a more robust event experience here.

And as people registers all the automated messaging, sent to the attendees, matches their ticket type. So if I'm in person, they receive address and on site info with virtual it'll link to. They'll get a link to log in to the event, and the hybrid events work seamlessly with the gradual check in and badge printing app, as well as the attendee mobile app.

And we've already had some several customers host successful hybrid events using this model. so we're ready to support your events even more. Let us know any questions. Or if you're thinking about a hybrid event. We'll be happy to help you design, design that event and that experience using this new new event type. Another event expansion is adding tickets to all event types.

So in the past, only our live stream and in-person events allowed for having ticketing, where I could have different ticket types, maybe I do paid, etc. etc. now our meetings one on one match and hybrid events also support ticket types. This allows you to do a couple things. First, you can control the ticket types, even have multiple types for meeting events.

Maybe I want to do paid ticketing. for something like that, but more often than not it means that you can now set up these events to be invite only, which is controlled at that ticket level. We covered invite only events in a previous update, but this feature allows you to mark certain ticket types as invitation only. That makes it so only certain attendees are able to register based on their email or a code that they may have.

Customers have requested this to be supported for meeting events too, so they could help hold more exclusive or intimate gatherings in that way. So we expanded tickets to apply to all of those event types. This also means that ticketing is where I will now control. it also means that virtual tickets are now supported across all of the event types as well, and you can see examples of that in some of our other example events for meetings.

I want to call out that this is an important change since tickets are now where you can control the quota or the amount of people that can join a meeting room or register for the event. So previously I'd go into events, set up a meeting room, and I'd see number of seats, but I don't see that anymore.

Now it's in ticket set up. I go to my ticket types and this is where I can control my meeting room, meeting room attendance. It doesn't change the capacity limits on our meeting rooms. That's still 125. But this is where I can, oversell that meeting room to include more than 125 participants or more than 125 registrants.

So. Another macro setting for the events experience, can be found on the events page in gradual. And this is to require profile or onboarding completion before a member is permitted to join an event. Previously, we only required profile completion for certain interactive things like, messaging or participating in a one on one match or a meeting event.

Anything kind of highly interactive. However, now you can choose to make a profile completion required before a member is allowed to join the event at all. This won't block registration. However, when the user goes to join that event, they'll be prompted to say, hey, please complete your profile before you're allowed to enter the event environment. Some of our customers are using this to ensure that event participation, event participants have the best experience connecting with one another because they have a complete profile, their profile photos, and their relevant profile information as complete before they even join.

Another reason you might want to do this would be, to ensure that your event reporting is as comprehensive as possible. So if you really need to know industry or, certain segmentation preference is for your event attendees require and those are required on the profile. You could turn this on for your event type. So when people join the event they have to complete that.

This is toggled on and off in the dashboard right here. And you can see you can enable it per event type. So that means that it doesn't have to apply to all your events. Maybe I just wanted to do my my webinars or webcasts that I'm doing via a live stream, but my meeting events may not may not need it.

And a reminder that profile completion is assessed based on, the member onboarding and what's required. So I only have to complete the required questions in order for my profile to be evaluated as complete. What you can control right here on the dashboard. Tons of documentation about this. but feel free to ask any questions if you have them.

And then another big change to the event experience or is reporting inside of the dashboard. So now I have this within an event. I have this reports tab. So this is where I can download all of my self-service reports for my, my major events reports. I can have any that existed previously like session reports or attendees that registered versus logged in.

it also adds some new reports to this list. For example, one on one match history chat exports the scan reports for who scan badges within the gradual go app. All this kind of stuff is now self-service in the dashboard, and you no longer need to rely on our team to pull these. You can pull them instantly once your event, event has ended.

And the last event related update is, about meeting rooms. Two big changes to the meeting rooms experience. First is a heavily requested feature, including for for myself. When you are screen sharing within a gradual meeting room, it will now show the here will share. You can see the behind the scenes every stream. It'll show what you're sharing inside of of the gradual environment in the meeting room.

to the presenter. This helps provide confidence for the presenter makes meeting management engagement even easier, especially if the presenters just working with one screen. They can see what they're sharing as well as the, participants in the room. Second, we added a staff attendee type over here. You can see one on the right hand side to the meeting rooms.

This staff attendee type is intended for behind the scenes meeting hosts, people who won't be on camera or audio during the meeting. but they still need all of the host permissions, like recording and managing breakout rooms and all that kind of stuff. They show up below the hosts and panelists, so they're not taking one of those those prime prime spots.

They're at the top. And, they will not be on camera or audio during the meeting. They'll just be behind the scenes. This role, as for your meeting helpers, is how I think about it. Those spotlighting others, controlling, recording, breakout rooms, etc. so they don't show as a host on the right hand. Side note again, video and audio are disabled for for the staff attendees or the staff hosts.

So, if they need to be on video or need to be on audio, you'll want to go ahead and make them a regular host. This is controlled inside of the dashboard will open up a new link here. If I go into my events and I go into meeting setup like I normally would, here is where I can add my meeting host panelists.

And now I have a staff option as well. Now let's do some quick content and forum updates before we move on to talk about clubs and a reminder if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to drop drop them in the chat or if there's any reactions, anything that you're seeing that you're liking, we'd we'd love to love to know.

And I know I saw some thumbs up on the, on the screen share visibility at least let's talk about content. So we've expanded the types of, videos that you can embed inside of, of gradual. So currently gradual supports, Wistia, YouTube, Vimeo as well as any self-hosted MP4, mux or M3 you a video types.

But now we have added lume and show pad to those that that we support. Same process for adding those I can create a new video and I put the URL for the video right here in the video URL link. Super simple, works like a charm. If you have any questions about that, please let us know. Or if there are video hosting services that you're using that aren't yet supported, let us know.

We'll explore, adding those natively to gradual. So you could host host of those videos in here as well.

Let's talk about forum. Last time in our product update we teased the forum boards were coming soon and they're here in the forum you can organize your content by boards. This could be by topic. This could be by audience. Really, whatever you'd like. Posts belong to a single board for easy navigation. So I can see here my welcome to the community belongs to my general board.

But also remember that your posts still have tags which are shared across boards. So the combination of my board like community cafe along with artificial intelligence, marketing or daily life means that it's really easy for me to organize my content or discussions and promote, discovery throughout throughout the environment. You can also, set boards to be restricted to certain spaces.

So inside of the dashboard here, I can go ahead and admins can create a new board and users cannot. I can create that in the dashboard. And I could set certain boards to be, restricted to certain audiences. So maybe I have a board which is just for my kind of VIP members or community staff or something, and I can set it to a selected space or a region.

So maybe I have, you know, an audience just in a part of the country. I want to have a discussion, a discussion board. I can restrict it to them. I can also move posts between board as a moderator here on the front end, so I can go into a post. I can change the board and move it to to wherever it needs to go.

We are continuing to enhance the forum experience every every single month. Or you know, it often feels like every single week and hopefully you've seen the same coming soon. we are launching notifications for activities, so email notifications for mentions or replies to forum post to help promote, engagement and interactivity and get people coming back to the forum, as well as at mentions inside of the forum experience and some more nuance tools.

if you have kind of a customer support use case. So things like locking posts, marking answers is correct to really fill out the forum experience. So it's a it's a full, a fully functional, tool that, that you can leverage for your community. All right. We are getting to. I'm guessing you all probably have been waiting at is the community club feature inside of of gradual here.

So the clubs are built, to allow you to build relevance in your community as it grows. Clubs give you the ability to segment your community based on interest or into chapters. If you're you're broken up geographically, all in, in one place because I can then delegate management of those groups to others within the community. If I have a local leader.

Clubs are in their first iteration. So this is the first launch of this feature, but we'll continue to add to and and expand in in to later in, in this quarter and beyond as I go and I talk about clubs, please, please drop your questions in the chat and I'll save some time at the end, to try and answer some of those live.

And you can also join our Q&A in the meeting room. but I think it will be helpful if you have, you know, questions about, future functionality and vision around this or how it works today. Happy to answer those. So clubs can be used to create either chapters or interest groups. And I'll switch to a mock of what this looks like.

So we have our our chapters here at the top as well as interest groups. Interest groups are not launched yet, just chapters. But the idea is that the difference is interest groups are our topic or characteristic based, or maybe segments within the community. but the functionality and then and then chapters are for geographic chapters that are location based.

The functionality between the two of them is is identical. However, so today we're going to look at the chapters and how they work and some options within that. But just know that I can extend that to interest groups. And I don't have to have both. I could just have interest groups or just have chapters. Switching back to our environment here.

we're going to look at chapters. Chapters allow me to have an interactive way to, to segment my community based on on Geo. I can create different regions for my chapters. And then within each one I can create location based chapters based on a city, a state, or something like that. I have my map where I can explore and see, oh well, yep, there's a chapter by me here.

in in my part of the country. And then within each of the chapters, I can have its own landing page. That landing page is where I can see the content events or other resources that belong only to that, that chapter. Or I'll use the word club because that applies to both chapters and to interest groups. So only content that belongs to that club, these events and this content doesn't show up in my main content and events list.

And that's intentional to allow you to have your, your kind of macro community be things that are relevant for everyone across your clubs. And then the clubs are where I can have the more specific things, focus to that area of interest or that part of of the world inside here I can also include things like link to help links to helpful resources in an area via customization.

I can have my my photo albums and images in here too, and we'll look at this here in a second in the dashboard. So if I go into the dashboard, I can see on the left hand side if it's turned on, I have my clubs and I have my chapters and club settings. Chapters are where I can create new chapters.

Here I pick a region, a location from Google's location picker to make sure that it's, uniform, add my cover image, and then I can control access. And every club has these access settings. An open club means that anybody, all the contents visible, anybody can go join it and discover a private club means that it is only open to people who have been invited to it.

But I can see that the club exists, and a secret club meaning is that the club doesn't show up unless I'm already added as a member. Examples for use cases for these are private club could be for certain executives where I want to note that it exists, but restrict access or or control. Who can join a secret club?

Maybe something like an internal group or a team where I can jump in and see.

You can also stylize the club page itself under the club settings, so I could change it if I don't want to call it clubs and I want to call it, I don't, I don't know, whatever, whatever you want to call it. I can change that here. I can toggle visibility on and off, as well as control the layouts of these pages.

So, for example, if I didn't want to to have the map or something or wanted to control my region's layout or the order, I can do that right in here. I can also expand and, customize the club's layout on the detail page. So I could say, hey, maybe I want meetups to be above leaders, and I want to add a new bulletin board where it links out to an Add or something else that I have doing.

Or maybe I'm looking for applications for new club leaders. I could say, hey, become a club leader, put a description, a name, and a URL Lincoln URL in there and drive people to to an application form that I'm hosting. One kind of macro commentary on this is you're you're beginning to see a future direction for gradual this environment here.

This page builder in the customizer is, is the direction that we're headed, where we give you the ability to to customize your page layouts inside of the gradual experience to allow you to make it work for for your use case and your your business or your community needs. This is a first example of that, and you'll begin to see this more and more across the gradual ecosystem, even on our parent pages like the home page, or by kind of default event or content pages.

We have, the other component that's coming soon for clubs, that's that's critical, is the ability to manage and delegate permissions to, manage the club's environment. So you'll have the ability to say, hey, club manager, you are going to manage our Atlanta club. And that's the only thing that they can see. They can add content, they can build events within it.

They can add other people to help them, but they don't have to get access to the entire gradual dashboard or community to do that really allows you to to scale the club's experience and scale honestly, the community experience, because you have more people helping to build relevance and and engagement within the community. We have some customers already, leveraging this feature to support their their go based chapters.

Coming soon is going to be that dashboard component where I can delegate that responsibility. There have a dedicated log in as well as those interest groups, and we'll keep you updated as we, as we add those things to to the roadmap. And as we launch them, I'm going to pause here. Since this is a brand new feature, I'm going to jump into the chat and I'm going to look, at any questions that have come in and would, will will help answer those.

So if you have more questions about clubs, please drop them in the chat as we go. Then we'll wrap up and jump into our our live Q&A in that meeting room. Awesome. Seeing some awesome questions here. Thank you for the excitement. Adrian and Brett. All right Caitlin, ask can one member be in multiple clubs or interest groups? Yep.

They can't. You can have members be in every every single one of them. If you want you can you can do that. And then you can use those access permissions per club to decide how people can join. Whether I want a chapter to be, private secret or, or for anyone to join in public.

Randy asks, do chapters impact the home page where users need to navigate to the chapter first? That's a great question. So the default home page of gradual doesn't change my. When I go to the home of the community, I still see the gradual home page on the left hand side. I could navigate to a club and I'd see my my chapters there.

We don't currently integrate any of this club content into the main events or content stream here. However, that's not to say that we won't support that in the future, and we're thinking about how we want to best do that. it may be that we incorporate some things into the events or that's a community level setting, whether you want those to co-mingled.

but that's going to be something that that we're going to explore. over time. I will say, when we get to, our new in the future, new versions of the gradual home page, there will be ways to to feature some of the clubs that I may belong to on the homepage, which could allow a little bit more visibility to those.

And the other, component to that will be you can always direct users to a specific page because everything has that deep URL or excuse me, deep URL or deep link. So I could go to a club page. I could go to my my Atlanta club and I could send people there. They're directly.

Could Brit ask, could the clubs be the new spaces for us in terms of spaces being used for geographic communities, clubs might be better 100%. Brett, there there are still use cases where spaces may be necessary. For example, if I have a customer advisory board, I don't necessarily need, a branded club where that exists with its own homepage.

I would rather maybe have that content co-mingled in what they see here, or have a forum board, which would be the customer advisory board that would be restricted. However, and a little bit of behind the curtains are early project name for clubs was internally referred to as visible spaces. So that same kind of segmentation construct, but with a front end to it, the ability to manage it and delegate permissions.

So absolutely could be used to do that to better segment or organize content within within the experience. That's a that's a great question. If there are any other questions, as we keep going, please drop those in the chat. I'm going to stop rambling in and talking to you, and we're going to wrap this up. I'll talk a little bit about the future of clubs and what you can expect to see.

And then we'll jump into that that meeting room where you can ask, come say hi or ask Laura nine questions. So the idea for clubs is that it allows for you to have have a segmented and relevant experience inside of gradual. My parent community activities are things relevant to everyone, but clubs allow me to have super relevant environments related to a specific topic or part of the world.

Right now it's limited to just content and events, but we're also going to be adding discussions into the clubs experience. So I could have channels or messaging or or even forum type discussions inside of the club experience, as well as other tools for club managers. Things like workflow tools or communication templates, which would allow club leaders to send updates or newsletters or things to club members within the context of the gradual community.

Really, sky's the limit when it comes to to the future for for clubs and how this can interact. But hopefully you see how it can support community growth and engagement by providing a really, really relevant experience. All right. Those are all of the product updates for for today. There's way, way more that I wasn't able to cover. I know Laura has been dropping links in the chat, and you can always go to the content section of the community to explore, all the other updates and documentation.

Also keep an eye out. We're going to start relaunching new release notes, which we're going to cover more of the minute features or changes in the gradual behavior that we may not have the opportunity to cover in our written or these written product updates or in these events. So keep an eye out for for those. Thank you. But thank you so much for for tuning in.

It's always fun for us to showcase these new and exciting parts of graduate and we love being able to connect that this new functionality with how you can enhance and build your community experience. So we will share this recording as always, and please feel free to forward along to others on your team or any who might be interested.

And a last reminder, there's going to be a notification that pops up at the top here in in two seconds. that will be jumping into a meeting room as soon as I sign off. Feel free to pop by, say hi, ask questions, or meet other community leaders. Thanks again, as always for joining us and we will see you again soon.

Take care.