Sign in or Join the community to continue
Event Replay: Gradual 2024 Q4 and 2025 Kick off Product Update
Posted Jan 23, 2025 | Views 9
# About Gradual
# Gradual: Product Updates
Share
Speaker
Kyle Sutton
Head of Strategy & Operations @ Gradual
I am an avid learner and driven to help others succeed.
I pride myself on being able to pick things up quickly and translate between the technical and the high level.
I love any outdoor activity that involves learning something to be successful!
+ Read More
SUMMARY
Replay of the product update wrapping up 2024, and kicking off 2025. Features discussed that are available today included the new reward and contributions module to provide gamification to your community, updates to events and the hosted chat and Q&A, small updates to the Forum feature and the new Salesforce integration.
Big features from the 2025 roadmap discussed included an email customization and workflow tool to send automated emails to your members, the ability to customize your homepage, and a new courses module.
+ Read More
CONTENT & TRANSCRIPT
Welcome, everyone, to our, combo call. It's a Q for product update. But we are we are well we are into 2025. So this is also going to be our 2025 kick off. And we're going to talk a little bit about some of the features that were introduced at the end of last year.
And what's on the roadmap for 2025. If if you don't know, I'm sure you do. I'm Kyle, I'm the head of strategy and operations here at gradual and excited to to share a lot of new updates with you. Before we jump in, a couple housekeeping reminders and things you all have already found in the chat, which is great.
Continue to throw your questions in there. Say hello! Reactions. Feedback. You also found the emojis button, which I love. We have a lot of new ones that we've added. If you haven't been in a gradual event in a while, so feel free to use those and as we go, you can do some exploring too. On the right hand side of your screen, you can see the other participants and attendees in this call, and you can send them a message, say hi, reach out to them and connect.
You'll also see on the right hand side next to the chat tab is our Q&A. And this is where you can drop your questions as we go. We'll have a dedicated time at the end and I'll do some some Q&A. And if you want, you'll even have the opportunity to raise your hand with that button at the bottom.
And I can bring you on screen to ask your questions. And last but not least, we will record this and send it out so you can revisit this and you can all, always find all of our features summarized and all the things I don't have time to cover in the content section of our gradual community. Hendrik and Laura are here to answer questions and.
Well, and a special thanks to them who make sure our documentation and those product updates, are up to date. So you all know what's going on. All right, without further ado, today we have five agenda items and things to to cover before I highlight the categories, that we're going to to go through, I want to say we have a lot of things that we want to showcase, and we've got some big stuff and we got some small stuff, but things that are important.
So I'm going to try and go quickly and cram in just about, just about as much as I can. So the first thing we're going to cover are rewards and contributions. Many of you have seen these updates, but we'll walk through those. We're going to talk about updates to events and the chat experience and gradual a couple updates to forum as well as some brand, brand new integrations.
And then our last thing we'll do is talk about our 2025, roadmap. So without further ado, let's let's dig right in. And we're going to start with rewards and contributions. The biggest update I think that we have to share today is, is our brand new, what we're calling our advanced gamification module. This was born out of the needs of our customers, many of whom are on this call with us today.
So thank you. Running communities where you need to be able to recognize different activities, reward points, award points, and reward members for activity and engagement. So I want to walk you through this feature completely because it is really powerful. And I'll share some of the different ways customers have already started to use this, and how you might leverage it in the future.
Before I jump in, I do want to note that for most of our customers, the Advanced Gamification module is an add on module for gradual. So if you're interested in learning more, feel free to let us know. I also realize I'm going really fast, so if you need me to slow down or revisit something, make sure you drop it in the chat and put your Q&A in that Q&A tab.
So let me get my screen share going here and we will be looking at our contributions. So this is our demo community here. And this is our contributions. And one of the biggest differences to contributions in this module is the addition of points and rewards. Now each of the activities that I want to recognize can carry a point value in gradually.
For example, writing a blog, maybe a thousand points. Completing onboarding may be 50, and you can set up what activities you want to recognize and how many points you want to give for each one. And this is where I can display to our community members. What am I going to receive? Points for and what badges might I get for those on my profile as an individual, I can also see what I've done and where that's logged, and we'll jump into that in a second.
But let's take a look at the dashboard where I build all these things out. If we're not familiar. So on the left hand side, for those with the advanced contribution module, you'll see some additional, menu items here. If I go to contributions, I can see all of the different contribution offered options. This is where I can toggle on and off whether or not they're available.
You'll also notice that you have all of these standard contributions. And then down here at the bottom I can add custom contributions as as well. For each of these things you can turn them on and off. And you can also add badges to to most of them. So for you've got all the standard ones that you're familiar with, like event organizer speakers and things like that.
But down here we also added ones which are more community engagement or community member focused things like daily active use, profile completion, reading content and forum engagement. Each one of these can be set up to have customized set of points and even add a badge, to the award. All of the contributions from community that are not custom contributions, are tabulated automatically.
So as soon as someone does those, they're going to show up here and I'll be able to see what I've done as a member. You can also see that in the dashboard. If I jump back in the contributions logs, what each person has done and the contribution that has been assigned to them. You also have the ability to, create contributions in that custom contributions module for things that are outside of the gradual platform.
So, for example, we many of our customers have customers do reference calls or record testimonials or something that doesn't take place inside of the gradual platform. And they can do this to assign those contributions. And you can do this a number of ways. You could simply go into the contribution log, and I could manually log a contribution for a member, but I also can import them.
So if I have a bunch of people attend an event somewhere else, then I can have that list bulk uploaded and they all get the, event attendee contribution. You also can do this automatically with our API. You can have your, something else trigger gradual to award that contribution. And we can talk about that a little bit more in a second.
For each of the different contributions that you have, you can set up contributor boards or leaderboards, including custom contributions on the front end. It gives you the opportunity to recognize, certain featured contributors that you can kind of pin here to the top and also have boards for each one. If you want a list of all of your ambassadors, speakers, organizers, forum engagement, really whatever you want, including those custom contributions, is.
One of the main components of this module then is okay, we have all these points. Now we have a reward center where those points can be redeemed. If I go to rewards, this is where you have a storefront where you can create rewards and members can redeem them, redeem their points to to achieve them. You can have them be all different types.
They can be physical swag. They can be digital. If it's something physical, you can capture shipping address. And these are all going to support, all going to show up in your dashboard where you can process them. One call out here is we don't currently support kind of skew management. So we discourage you from having things that have a bunch of different colors or sizes if you can avoid it.
If you do need to include those things, that's okay. But just include them as individual items. Or make sure to note in the notes that they need to note the size or color in that note section. Back in the dashboard, I can build out these rewards here, and I have a couple options that I can set for each of them.
So for each one, I can have it be listed or unlisted. If it's a timely thing, I can add my description, I can require the address, and I can even set the redemption limit per member. So if I have something that I only want people to be able to, grab once, then I can do that in here.
Once a reward redemption has been processed, I can update that in my redemption orders. I can see what's been added, the notes and update the status I can market is refund in or give them the points back. I can process it. These reward redemption will trigger an email to the user saying hey, you redeemed this many points for this item.
We don't yet support any integrations to services like Postal or Tango Card, but those are on our roadmap. If you have a familiar fulfillment or swag service, that you do want integrated, please let our team know so we can keep track and prioritize those integrations appropriately. Some of the things that are going to be added to this are the ability to have a quantity limit for each of the rewards, outside of just the limit per person.
So if I have, you know, ten water bottles left, I can make sure that I only only give out ten. And I don't oversell those. As well as the ability to space restrict certain rewards. Meaning I can have, certain items that are only available to certain members of my community if I've got, you know, a t shirt for my cap members, I can I can restrict that to them.
Back on the integration side, I can also trigger all of these things on the contributions via external sources. So the gradual API supports triggering contribution assignment within gradual. I mentioned how customers are currently doing this with external platforms. For things like reference, call or advocacy type activities. But another really compelling use case here is to trigger contributions based on your own product or usage.
For those of you that, that are or have a community of your own users for your product. So for example, if someone does something in your app and you want to be able to trigger a badge or give them points and gradual, you can do that using that, that API, I think it's a really powerful opportunity to combine and recognize actions in your product or behaviors elsewhere, or within the interaction in the community.
As I mentioned at the start of this section, this is an additional module, which means it's going to carry an additional cost for those that want to use it. But if you're interested in learning more, about advanced gamification, please do not hesitate to to reach out. We'd love to, to chat about it and, tell you more as a reminder as you have questions, please, please, please don't hesitate to drop those in the chat or in that Q&A tab and we can answer them as we go.
Also have some Q&A time, there at the end, and I also see some more people have joined. Welcome, welcome. Thank you so much for for jumping in with us here. All right. So let's talk about some of the significant updates to events in gradual now. And reminder don't forget to drop those questions in the chat. Speaking of questions, you may have already noticed that as you drop questions in the Q&A, we now support the ability to, as a for a chat moderator to respond in line or directly to a specific question or chat power users and those doing larger events with Q&A have already found this feature valuable, because it means that
you can have multiple team members engaging in the event and provide context as you as you answer questions. So I'm inside of an event here. This is a meeting event, but it applies to webinars and live streams as well. But if I as a moderator, if I go to the Q&A tab where I hover over and where I would mark it as answered, or unpin it or delete or do any of the moderation activities, I'll have a new option, which is, type an answer so I can type my answer and I can respond to that question in line.
It'll show up in the chat for everyone else, as well as in chat exports for large events with lots of lots of questions. This is so valuable because it means that responses to questions don't get lost, in the stream of the chat, or if I see a Q&A way later and answer it, I can answer it in in context, which is really helpful.
It also means that I can have team members doing it async. So Laura posted a question and she answered that if somebody is like, hey, you can remind me what that person said, where's the link to the resource? If I'm the host on a webinar or meeting, I can have another team member answering questions. We think this is going to be really powerful for for all of our event types.
It's turned on pretty easily. Is as long as you have Q&A turned on, it will support answers. There's no, no additional toggle or anything that you need to need to show up. The other thing is, when I answer it, it's automatically going to mark that question as as I answered. And they will also show up. The answers will show up in the exports of the chat and Q&A as well.
One of the other chat updates applies to our live stream event chat, and we added the ability to restrict URLs in the live stream event trap. This is a popular request for many of our larger communities doing lots of live stream events. This is helpful if you find that, your events people are spamming profiles or information, or they're just dropping irrelevant links, or it's a risk and you need to restrict it, you can do that.
So once the live stream is live here, I can click on this little moderation settings icon in the bottom right. And I have the ability to ban or allow hyperlinks. As a reminder, I also have this slow mode, which we talked about in our last product update, but that, restricts how frequently people can send out messages, during the event.
A reminder all of our moderation features are going to skip moderators interacting with the chat. So those profanity filters or, the URL hyperlinks won't apply to moderators. So if you're running an event, you don't want attendees to put hyperlinks, but moderators need to, you can still still do that. Seeing some thumbs up and reactions in the chat, I love it.
We're very excited about these. These new chat features. Don't forget you can ask your questions, we can answer them as we go or during our Q&A section at the end. One of the other event related updates that came came rather quietly because we had so many other exciting things get launched. But it's significant is the ability to attach slides to a, to a specific event or agenda item.
I can do this by attaching a PDF. We're looking at what that looks like in the dashboard now. So if I'm on an event I'll see the slides option. And this is where I can add new slides. I can do it a couple of different ways. I can just add it to the event itself or like this one, I can assign it to specific agenda items.
So if a speaker has their slides, they want to share it ahead of time. I can add that here. Then on the front end we can see the event slides here. If they're linked to the event as a whole as well as in this section on the event detail page. And then if there were slides associated with the specific agenda item, this particular example, the slides are all the same, but you can have different ones for each of these, these agenda items.
This is tremendous. You can also update other materials if you have other PDFs or info, whitepapers or things like that. We called it slides. But it doesn't have to just be slides. It could really be any document or, resource that you want to, want to share. One of the other, big updates to our event structure is the ability to let me find a dashboard page here.
Is the ability to have an event be unlisted. Previously, if I had an event that I wanted to allow certain people to register for. But I didn't want it visible to the community. Our advice was to keep that event unpublished. And this. This worked well. However, there were some challenges when it came to automations and triggers that need to fire for those events.
So we introduced an unlisted event status. And what this means is it's going to behave exactly as if that event were published. It just doesn't show up on the front end, on the, event page or on the home page. People can still access the event if they have the URL, and all of the emails and automations get triggered, it's just not visible.
This is done in the dashboard under the event General Info. So down here under Event page privacy, I can check this box, that this is an unlisted event. I'll still need to publish the event in order to have the things fire and have it be, have all the automations take place, but unlisted. It means that it will be published, but hidden.
Essentially.
While we're here, Caitlin asked a great question. What's the use case for unlisted events versus space restricted? So an unlisted event would be where I, want anyone who has the link to be able to land on the page. Maybe it's an invite only event for VIPs. I don't want them now. Have to log in or be part of a space in order to see it, but I don't really want it to show up in the main list.
Only if they've received the link directly is how I want them to ask it, or how I want them to to access it. So that would be the use case for unlisted. If I had an event where I wanted to make sure only this group of people should even be able to see that event page, then I'd use space restrict in restriction to to have it narrowed to that specific audience.
Great. Great question. One of the other updates that you'll see inside of the dashboard, and something we employed today, so I didn't have to remember to do it, is autumn, auto recording for events, for meetings and webinars. It's going to show up here under the automatic recording. And I can turn, turn this on. That means that it's automatically going to start recording whenever a host joins the event.
Even if you were joining, if you were to join early, it'll start the recording. If I leave, it'll stop. And if I come back, it'll start again. It does it automatically. And we'll just keep doing that, that recording as needed. This is great if you're the one setting up the event and somebody else is going to host it, so they don't have to remember to to hit record.
You also see some other small updates here, like sound notifications when someone joins, meeting room or webinar event as well as a lobby, for meeting events, which would allow the hosts or staff to control who can join and when they can join. This is great if you're doing a tech check right before the event, I can turn on the waiting room, let the people in.
Once the host there, and then let everyone else in. Once we're ready. Last, but certainly not least, when it comes to event updates, I promise I'm going to get to the roadmap soon. Last but certainly not least with event updates is we're excited. Announce that now all one on one match roundtables, pretty much any meeting room environment and gradual is supported on mobile.
We've supported meeting rooms, for a while now, and some of our other event meeting room experiences. But now any meeting room environment, one on one match roundtables, meeting rooms in events are more mobile friendly, for both participants and for the most part, for all of the host controls as well. There are some small exceptions to that, and that feature is still under, review.
So if you see any bugs or anything, please report those. But it's been, leveraged by our customers and internal team for a while now, and it's it's stable. Really exciting milestone and hopefully increases participation and engagement from your community. Because no matter where someone is, they're going to be able to, to join, whether they're on a tablet or mobile, they'll be able to join all of your events.
Awesome. That is it. For event updates, we're going to talk about forum integrations real quick, and then we're going to get into our updates for the 2025, roadmap. Let's chat about the forum. So we have some updates to the forum experience. These are pretty simple when it comes to what the features do, but significant when it comes to how your community might interact and leverage the forum.
And it relates to restricting who can post or do what within a particular post or within a board. So you have the ability now as a community admin and as a forum moderator to do two things within the forum. One is you can lock a board so that only moderators are able to post to that board and independently.
You can lock up post as well, prohibiting future comments. So let's talk about how these might be used and how I do this. So one of the ways with the lock board is that so moderators can post only would be if you have a board for like announcements or community updates where you only want community leaders, to be able to post in there, but you still want individual members of the community to be able to respond and interact with those posts inside of the dashboard.
If I go to a particular board, I can just hit edit here and I can decide, I want to restrict posting in this board to just moderators. Super simple. And I can turn that, turn that on. And as I said, even if this posting is restricted to moderators, only individual members can still comment or reply to that post.
If I wanted to restrict that ability to lock a post for further replies or comments, then I can do that here on the front end, I simply can find my post and in the same moderation menu. Here where I would pin it or delete it, I can lock the post prohibiting, more comments. A couple ways people are using this already is, if I have updates where I don't really want to have further discussion on it, I can I can lock that post.
That's the easiest one. The other would be if I have a competition or time based submission, let's say I have a forum which is hey, submit your ideas for 2025. I can leave it open for a certain period of time and then lock the post. So I know that no further replies have come in and I no longer need to check and manage.
Responses to that post. Both the board post restriction and the post locking can be turned on and off at any time, so even if you lock a post, you can unlock it later. Same is true for the board. It's not, once it's done, you can't undo it type thing. So those are the forum updates.
Let's talk about integrations. This is our last related section here. Before we get into the roadmap, the first of the first, someone posts a new forum post. So this is not for all comments, it's just for forum posts that show up. But in the integrations and in my outbound webhooks, I now have this new webhook trigger, which is a new post is created, new forum post is created.
How might you use this? Well, this would allow you to set up workflows that you could trigger, updates or reminders or notifications to certain teams, or to aggregate content. So our idea was that you could let's say I have a customer support board. I could have every new post that sent to that board automatically pushed into slack to notify my customer support team that they need to go check on that board and and respond to a question.
You can do this by, or maybe a particular tag. All of these are included in that webhook payload. You can filter those out and build automations that way. You could set that up using Zapier or other automation tools. If you have questions about how to do that or how to set up Zapier or just how to leverage webhooks from gradual in general, to build automations, please do not hesitate to reach out and let us know.
We'd love to walk you through some of the cool ways that our customers are leveraging this stuff. And the last giant integration, the keynote among you may notice that it's now in the dashboard is our native Salesforce integration. This is it's really huge. It allows you to map, a lot of different activities from gradually into your Salesforce instance.
So, it includes two, two levels of mapping. One is mapping the user info that you have in gradual on to a contact or a lead inside of Salesforce, as well as campaigns related to events. You can choose how you want to map your contact info into Salesforce, whether it goes on to a contact record or on to a lead, depending on your workflows.
And then you can do specific, profile question mapping to those fields inside of Salesforce. The other half of the integration is campaign mapping. So gradual events would map to a campaign in Salesforce. And then any registrants and attendees for your events become campaign members or participants. So someone registers for an event and gradually they would get added to that relevant campaign and Salesforce.
Then when they attend, whether it's a virtual event or whether they use the gradual checking app and they check in, we're going to update that campaign status automatically inside of Salesforce. If for whatever reason, you didn't want to map to, standard Salesforce objects, we do have an alternative where you can map all of the gradual information to a custom object for summer, if for whatever reason you didn't want, contact info, go into a contact or campaign info, event, go info.
Going to a campaign. We think this is going to be a really. I know a lot of our customers have been waiting for this, so if you're you're eager to get started, let us know and we can walk you through how to set up this integration. We'll have some more advanced, tutorials coming soon for how to build out the Salesforce integration as well.
We think this is going to be really significant to ease some workflows and reporting and really connect community interaction and activity to your business logic, business objectives, deal influence, in general general customer metrics. Since all of your data and stuff will be in the same place, the Salesforce integration is available to to all customers today.
No, no additional things needed for that. So if you're you're curious and want to get started to reach out to support, and we're happy to get you, get you set up. All right. We have a couple more things to do. We're going to talk about our roadmap and then would love to answer any of your questions that you have about anything that we've covered.
So far or things that are on the roadmap moving forward. So let's talk about some of the things that are coming up for 2025. 2024. Saw a, ton, a ton of new features, including hybrid events, contributions and badging or webinars, event type clubs, forums and so many, so many different things. And we have no intention of of slowing down.
We expect 2025 to have the same level of excitement and some really significant features to to empower your community to grow and thrive. Before I get into talking about what those features are, I would like to share remind you that I'm sharing, a broad roadmap today. These are things that are priorities for the gradual team based on your feedback and based on where we see the product going.
At this time, we're not able to share any timelines related to these features. And I just ask that you remember that, that this is a roadmap update. We do our very best to deliver features as we commit to them. However, our roadmap is subject to change. But what I'm highlighting here are things that we, our major priorities for us as we strive to deliver in 2025.
But in no way is this an exhaustive list. So if we've talked about something coming or on the roadmap, just because I'm not mentioning it here doesn't mean it's not a not a priority. So let's, let's dig in as I talk about some of these. So the first, big roadmap component is going to be a combination of email customization and workflow building.
We've talked about both of these things before. But more and more, we know customers want the ability to do to do two things. One is to be able to customize your emails that are sent out by the gradual platform to be in your style or your voice to brand, or whatever specific needs that you have on how you want to communicate with your community members.
That work is being done now, and we hope to be able to introduce that soon. To support email, our template email customization. This is going to constitute the first step towards a larger project, which is our Workflow Builder tool. This will give you the ability to do a few things so you can build segments within gradual where you could create lists.
So for example based on profile information, based on event participation, persona, etc., just like you could in an email marketing tool, then I can build those segments and I can build some automation or workflows around them. So it may be something like, I want to send, a simple update for an upcoming event, or I want to invite everyone in a particular club to notify them that a new event or a new piece of content got posted.
Another common use case of this would be post event replays. Once those are live, being able to send from gradually a note to all the attendees to say hey, here's the replay. It's now live within the community, but then the other half of this is more personalized or one off communications. An example might be, when a new member signs up to wait a couple days and then send them a note or a nudge if they haven't completed their profile to say, hey, go, go complete your onboarding, those sorts of things, you'll be able to build out, within within this workflow automation as well as some community management type things.
So if a user completes their profile and they select that they're in a particular city or they're interested in this particular topic, you could then automate adding them to a chapter or to an interest group or to a space based on that interest, also triggering direct messages or things like that would be capable within, within this workflow builder, as we as we continue to build this out, will also support the ability to trigger external application runs and future phases.
So if I wanted a certain, action and gradual to trigger a slack notification or a discord post or, something else in another platform I'd be able to do with do that. We think this is going to be we, we don't think we know this is going to be really powerful and something that customers have have asked for to help uplevel your community, make life easier for you as a community builder so you don't have to, get get deep into email marketing systems to do simple updates.
And yes, it will also include the ability to build and, and send out a newsletter as well. One of the other, features that we're, we're excited to deliver and things that we've, we've been looking forward to do for a long time is an update to the design capabilities on the gradual home page. In some other key pages.
We introduced, the second half of last year, our top navigation and our light mode versions of the gradual template. But we want to put even more design customization in your hands. We want to give you the ability to to have the page be completely modular on the home page or other key pages where you may say, hey, I want to put a forum section in here, or embed something externally, or move events up or down, or have a content hub or split my menu into top and side navigation.
Really, the sky's the limit. This is going to be a huge project, but it's going to allow you to really create and customize what that home page experiences and put what's most important to your community front and center. It's going to be a big project. It's going to take a lot of work, and require input from, from you all as our customers and what you need.
But we're really excited about it, because it's going to continue to help your community feel like home. Another very large feature that works, that we're excited to introduce in 2025 is a courses module. So courses will support the ability for you to have a series of written or video content in an order with knowledge checks in between, package together for members to participate in.
It'll support the ability for you to track, participate patient as people are moving through or completion, as well as award those contributions and badges. At the end upon course completion. Our vision is that this replaces many of our customers need to have a dedicated learning management system or other tools to do courses. It can be used for a course library if you do training in those sorts of things.
But it also could be even a simpler use case where you have an onboarding sequence that you want people to follow to become acquainted with a program or get get to know, the community, you could build that out as a course, really, is that it? It provides a way for you to introduce sequential content to members and track their participation and completion.
The courses module is going to be an add on component for gradual. So if you're interested in this, let us know and happy to put you on the on the waitlist for courses. And happy to keep you updated as it gets developed and delivered.
We have seen a ton of exciting use of the clubs feature and the forum features in gradual, so we are going to, marry those together. That was the plan all along. But this is going to be prioritized for, for 2025, where you have the ability to have forum discussions nested within the club. So this could be whether it's interest groups or global chapters.
You'll be able to have forum, threads or, or boards inside of those clubs. This is going to allow you to have more dedicated conversation spaces, delegate management and discussion of these things and have a more kind of centralized, experience for, for the members of those interest groups and of of those clubs related to that is going to be, chat and messaging upgrade.
Many of you know that that messaging is something that spans the gradual ecosystem. You're if you started a message in the gradual mobile app, it would show up on the web. If you had a one on one match with someone and started communicating there, it would it would show up as well. In this concept that that messaging is is always present and always on is something that we want to, highlight within the product a little bit more.
So what it will allow you to do is rather than it being a menu component, it becomes, almost a utility that's available for for members. But it's going to expand the ability to use this in a couple ways. One is we're going to essentially merge how channels behave now with messages. So if you're not familiar, not many of our customers leverage channels.
But it's like a discussion group little different from the forum, like a group message. We're going to merge that with messages so you can have a group discussion. You can curate these based on those segments. I talked about perhaps everybody in the club or spaces added to add it to a discussion group. It also means that we're going to add quite a few new features to support more enhanced messaging experience, things like the ability to mention someone, the ability to curate who can send or receive messages based on preference, things like having to request the ability to send someone a message, and the ability to create small group message threads
on demand. Perhaps I wanted to send a note to all my volunteers helping on an event. I can do that within the messages within Gradwell. They can respond and interact on the web, but also then in the graduate mobile app, this is there's a lot of things that are packed into this as we continue to deliver. The parts of this feature will keep you updated and expound on all the specific, specific things that we're delivering for for each one.
And then our last, last new wrote, our last roadmap priority, but certainly not the least is, is trust in safety and moderation. This is the number one priority for gradual, and we know for you as your community builders is the trust and safety that you're fostering within your community. In the last year, we've introduced quite a few moderation features, whether it's event chat, moderation like I talked about or, forum moderation and review tools.
And we we always need more when it comes to to moderating and supporting your communities and really supporting customizing how you're doing moderation. So to that end, we're going to introduce an additional set of moderation controls. And what this will allow you to do is find tune your moderation from the, level of sensitivity and profanity filtering or spam filtering to, whether or not you want certain things on or off and unify all of the moderation, capabilities that you have today in one place, the other half of that is customization on what happens when someone gets moderated.
How do I how do I want to behave? Do I want to to block them? Do I want it to send them a warning? Do they lose certain sets of permissions for a period of time? All that stuff you're going to be able to customize, within within our new moderation kind of toolkit. The goal is that you can really curate the experience and put the control in your hands on on how you moderate the community.
As I mentioned, these are just some of the things. There's plenty more on our roadmap. These are just the ones we wanted to highlight and our our front and center for this year. But there's there's tons of other stuff that we've talked about with many of you, that we are going to deliver, over the course of the next year.
And if you have questions about any of the roadmap items, please don't hesitate to, to ask. All right. We are we are right on time because now we're getting into our Q and a portion of our time. Today I'm going to stop sharing my screen here. And I would love to hear from you all. What questions do you have about any of the things that I covered, or maybe things that I didn't?
Whether it's the product feature updates or the roadmap items would love to to hear from you. So here's how this Q&A is going to work. You have two options. You can either drop your question in the Q&A tab in the chat on the right, and I can answer that way. Or if you're you're feeling talkative and want to want to come chat, then simply raise your hand with that, icon down at the bottom.
I'll bring you up and you can ask your question, but please feel free to drop questions in the chat or raise your hands, and I'd love to hear them.
And if there are no questions, then I guess that's fine too. But I'd love to. Love to take the opportunity to answer. Anything. Oh, man. Which feature am I most excited about for this year? Oh. That's a tough. That's a tough one, Jen. It's it's really hard to say because it depends on the use case, I think.
I think the one that will have a really significant impact on, day to day life is going to be that workflow and automation, the ability to, to send emails, to communicate, to drive people back into the community is, is going to be really significant. That's not to undermine the the home page customization or courses. Those are going to be really, really cool.
But I'm, I'm really excited about the the workflow that one has been on on the wishlist for, for a while. So excited we're able to prioritize that.
Lindsey has on the roadmap is adding more reactions to the chat forum threads available? Yep, that is something that is that is on our roadmap. So this is, the context here is within the forum. I can, on posts, I can upvote or down vote or we have a thumbs up option, but then the ability for people to react to comments within that and expanding those, that is something that is on our roadmap.
And will the reactions be customizable? In a sense, I think if you have specific requirements around, hey, we we want these reactions or we don't want these, we'll probably support the ability to, to curate those.
Jen asked about reporting. Are there plans to upgrade, update or reimagine the reporting dashboard? Would love to be able to quickly understand which, members are most engaged or active on a regular basis. Yes, the reporting and gradual is definitely something that we want to expand. And this is going to come in a couple different ways. One is we've been exploring how do we how do we make it easy for you to measure engagement by having even potentially a unified engagement score that you could curate how you want to, how you want to curate that.
And then another way would be leveraging our AI tools to be able to get to answers quickly. So you could ask the question rather than having to build a bunch of reports, you could say, hey, who were the ten most engaged members in the last 30 days? And it can spit out an answer based on that is, April asked, is attaching images in the chat or channel conversation part of the roadmap?
Yes it is. That one actually is going to come a little bit sooner than some of the others. So we'll support adding images and things inside of forum responses. And then, yes, the ability to add images to to chat or messaging conversations is is on the roadmap as well. Keep the questions coming I love it Lindsay asks will forums linked within clubs be available on the forum as well, or would this be space limited to clubs that are nested in, I you know, I don't know the exact answer to that, but it is going to depend on how you have it controlled.
So within gradually we kind of have two parameters. There's the is something visible or accessible to someone. And then where does it where does it live. So I could see us having a linkage between the forum page and forums within the club so people don't get lost. But if a club is secret, for example, then the forum nested within that would not be be visible to to those users the way clubs and interest groups or clubs work is it's kind of like a Venn diagram with spaces.
They're independent. So if I have something in a club and there's also space restricted, then only members of that club who are in that space would would see it. They combine in that way. Just get our self-serve reporting coming anytime soon. We we do. I think it depends on on what it is you'd like to report on.
You can always export your members from the dashboard. But we introduced last year a, CDP project where we are storing for your use way more data than we have in the past. So things like page views and who is viewing what video, that data is there now. It's a matter of prioritizing how that becomes visualized or accessible to you as as customers.
So, candidly, the way we drive our reporting and prioritization like that is based on demand, based on what people are asking for of like, hey, you know, everybody needs to know, needs to know how to how to export chat and things like that. So we, we added those sorts of those sorts of reports. But if there's anything missing that you're like, hey, I, I run this report every day or I have to ask for it all the time.
We'd really like it to be automated or self-service. Let us know and we can get that. That pushed into the roadmap. Jen has any plans to host community events? For us to dig into how we all use gradual and active engage members? Yes there are. We did this today as a bit of, webinar just to show off this feature.
But typically when we do these, we have a meeting room, and I like to preserve the second, a little bit of it, those last 15 minutes for discussion. But there are more community events coming up. Community.gradual.com. You can see all of all of our upcoming events. And there are there are more. Lindsay asked you and that we'll ever have the same level reactions for content as we have in events referencing emoji reactions.
Potentially. I think the way, as you see throughout our product, we try and be a little bit consistent in what reactions are supported. So those same emoji components would likely be repurposed in in how we do forum and content reactions. That that would be my guess. That's that's Kyle's opinion, not the official opinion. So but I think that that would make sense.
So I will share that. Thank you. Thank you for the laughing, laughing smiley face. I always have to put that disclaimer in there. And then our product team can, can yell at me later for, for promising things. These are great questions. I'm really appreciating them. Please. We've got about ten minutes left, so please continue to ask.
Or again, you can raise your hand if you really want to. And we can bring you up, but happy to answer answer whatever questions. I'm going to do a quick scroll to make sure I didn't miss anything. And don't forget you've got you've got two abilities. And this is a roadmap item actually. So you've got your chat where you can just type your message and then if you in that same kind of window, you've got your Q&A and that's where you can ask a question and it'll have that green box to say ask a question.
And that's why, if you're noticing some people's questions look different, that's why it works that way. But the feature that we are adding is for a moderator to easily migrate a question that's been asked in the chat over to Q&A, just to keep things nice and organized. So that's actually going to be introduced here. Pretty soon, I believe.
Lindsay has another question around auto record feature. Will it also auto upload to gradual, or would it just send the downloadable file to an admin. Then have to create a post recapping. So right now the way it works is those recordings are in the gradual dashboard, but there's not a native workflow where that, recording goes from being a gradual to, content post without it leaving gradual at some point.
That is something that we are working on, talking to a couple of different partners and providers to facilitate, a lightweight editing and publishing workflow to get something from a gradual recording out to, out to being hosted on on the front end and content. So the way the auto recording works is really just, that feature just triggers the recording versus you having to manually hit the record button.
That's that's all that all that feature does. And the second half of that is we were also looking at how you would, you could take that recording and then build content based on that. So if you take a transcript and have it author a blog or, create a series of posts in the forum or something like that, that's where where we want to be able to facilitate that kind of experience natively within the product.
We do have a couple customers, or recognize OpenAI. They do a great job of this by taking their transcripts, using their own tools, and creating blog or other content, based on those recordings. And it it works really well. So we'd like that to be something you could do natively within within gradual. Great questions. Keep coming.
And if there aren't any more questions, that is quite, That's quite all right. You know how to reach us, and we'll we'll close out. We'll close out things here, with a thank you for an incredible 2024. We are just so grateful for all of our tremendous customers, your, insights, your passion for community, helping to elevate the gradual platform is is just amazing.
And we couldn't couldn't do it without you. Literally. And hopefully, we're we are excited to to really I think all of our customers, we hope you feel the same way. We're we're partners in building community with you, as always, we will share a recording of this event afterwards. It'll be posted in the community as well as send out an email or with the other channels in which we communicate.
If you have any questions at all about things we covered today, the roadmap or or anything else that came to mind, please don't hesitate to reach out. Support a gradual.com or support.gradual.com if you want to chat with us and we're happy to help. Thank you again for coming. It was great seeing you all and, we'll see you again soon.
Thanks everybody.
+ Read More
Like
Comments (0)
Popular
Watch More
Event Replay: October 2025 Product Update
Posted Oct 08, 2025 | Views 101
# About Gradual
# Gradual: Product Updates
Event Replay: July 2025 Product Update
Posted Jul 08, 2025 | Views 54
# About Gradual
# Gradual: Product Updates
Event Replay: Gradual 2024 Q2 Product Update
Posted Jul 12, 2024 | Views 28
# About Gradual
# Gradual: Product Updates