June Product Update

In this video we cover exciting product updates for the month of June. Featuring in-person event features, new content features, and roundtables and meeting rooms on Gradual.

Welcome everybody to our first gradual product update event. Super excited to have you all here. We're especially excited because Gradual is all about providing a home and facilitating the building of communities. And we're excited to have you here because we're hoping to build our own community. We are gathering community leaders in order to share best practices and insights to empower one another as we grow a thriving community. I'm a community builder. Our founders are community builders, pretty much everyone on our team lives and breathes communities on a day to day basis. So we're really excited to share about what we have going on with gradual and connect with you all. We're gonna kick off by sharing a bit more about the product and how we're facilitating an engaging community experience.

I'm Kyle, the head of strategy and operations for gradual, and I'm thrilled to be able to host our first of these events to share updates and insights and best practices. These sessions are designed to be a monthly gathering for us to share best practices, ideas, and really have a space where community leaders can have a group of peers who can help as we all build our own community.

We'll also take these opportunities to keep everyone up to date on new and exciting gradual features. Interesting use cases and cool ideas shared by our own customers and partner. The future ones are gonna have a lot less of me talking and a lot more of you sharing how you're using gradual in the ideas you have to build engaging community.

We'll also have opportunities for training and feedback for you to meet and connect with our team to provide input on gradual as a product and get some know how on how to use. Today, we're excited to just share some new features related to on platform engagement in person events and improvements to the content experience on gradual.

And I wanna start by taking a look at round tables and meeting rooms and how they can be used to add engaging interaction into events or the community as a whole. Actually I have a video which walks through how these features work and how some of our customers have already used them to empower that engagement.

So let's take a look

Round tables, provide a quick and easy way for users to join conversations on different topics. Just set up a round table discussion. Choose if you want to assign a host and users can easily join in.You can also set the room size to keep conversations intimate. Inside a round table, users can chat and view each other's profile so they can easily build new connections and users can see who else is joining so they can jump in before the seats are gone, you can host round tables within events as well.

This is a great way to engage attendees during breaks or conduct breakout sessions within events. You can also add meeting rooms right into the agenda. These have the same functionality as round tables, but live within the event agenda. So they're easy to find a great practice is to host your speaker Q and as, or follow up discussions.

After a session in a meeting room, it provides a great and intimate way for attendees to connect with each other and your content. There are tons of creative ways to provide an engaging and connecting event experience. We'll get a chance to demo the round tables here in a little bit. You'll be able to jump right into a round table with our team and ask any questions or share any input on how you're building community or leveraging gradual.

And in a bit, we'll talk about how other customers have already used these features to really heighten their event experience. Speaking of events, we're all really excited at the return of in-person events and graduals prepared to help you host easy in engaging events of all kinds. We're starting off with simple event management and some updates to all of our event functionality to help boost conversion and registration.

You can create in-person events within gradual. So your attendees will know location and you can manage registration all in the same place as your virtual events, no need for separate registration sites for different event types, you can even manage. In-person check in for these in-person events, right within the dashboard.

You'll see a check-in screen for in person events. And here you can manage check-in conduct onsite registration and export attendees in registrants and all this information flows seamlessly to our existing integrations with HubSpot or web hooks. All of our events also now support multiple ticket types and paid tickets.

You can set up different tip tickets. You can set quotas for those ticket types or generate promo codes to be able to provide discounts or track registration based on certain codes. All the information for check in ticket types and payments comes through those integrations to HubSpot or webhook. So all you can track all the necessary information to ensure strong registration and conversion and market to your attendees.

Speaking of registration and conversion, we've also added a Google calendar integration. What this integration supports is now when a user registers they're automatically sent a calendar invite for that event to ensure they have the time blocked off on their calendar to increase their likelihood of attendance.

They don't have to do a thing as soon as they register for that event. That invite is on their calendar. We've also added a virtual ticket, which you probably saw for this event. The virtual ticket gives every registrant a unique ticket page so they can share on social media to drive others to register.

And when someone else registers through that virtual ticket page, that referral is tracked. So if you use my ticket page to register for this event, we Kah, the organizer can see that. So we can incentivize our registrants to share and refer others. Lastly, you can meet your registrants and attendees, where they are gradual supports putting event registration on your own website.

This is perfect for early registration or major conferences where you wanna share even more information with potential attendees than maybe possible on a gradual page. This registration can be embedded as a popup. On your own website. When the user completes this registration, they're automatically activated into gradual.

So here they're interacting with the gradual event itself, we've removed that activation step that comes with many other event tools where in order to capture registration and then get them to show up, I have to get them to log in. Again. This also means you don't have to wait until your event to get your members started using gradual and building.

Many of us use events as a seed for our communities. And now using this method as soon as a user registers and they land on their registration page, they're inside gradual and ready to engage with the community. The last area that's seen significant update is our content presentation and management.

And there's still a lot more to come here. But one of the biggest changes is content tags before content was organized within its own type. So blogs had tags and categories or videos just had tags. Now all the content organization is shared. So the tags you use for blogs are the same for videos and the same for events.

Why does this matter? Well, this is the groundwork for our ability to present users with related content events and conversations relevant to their interests. So if I say I'm interested in innovation no longer do I have to search separately for blogs or videos related to that? It's shown to me all at once.

Plus, it gives you a more flexible and cleaner way to organize your content. Like I said, there's a lot more to come on the content organization, but we're really working to make sure that content on gradual is engaging and flexible to meet your needs. Another big improvement is helping to drive conversion on content by using content gates.

Like you'll see on many popular content sites. For blogs, videos, resources, and podcasts. You can set a gate where a user has to sign in or sign up to continue consuming that content. Here's an example of a skippable gate where the user can close this to continue reading the blog, or you can enforce it.

So the user has to sign in or sign up in order to continue. We've also added manual control over SEO, meta information to each piece of content or. Here I can control different things like my meta keywords title descriptions, or update that open graph image, which is used for social share and in search results.

This means you can now have separate on page content and content optimized for search engines. Lastly users can now find all of this content events and people easily on the platform using the search in the top right hand corner of gradual users can now search for topic titles, speakers, event titles, and it'll show them all the content related to their search.

And it'll be presented in a relevant way that they can access quickly and discover new things on the platform. This has been a lot of updates on new features and there's still a ton more to come. Our hope is that future conversations will be more about best practice sharing and a lot less of us talking insight, gathering on how you are using these features to build community.

And we'll hear from some current gradual customers on how they're creatively engaging their community on the platform. Many of our customers are already putting these features to use, and I wanted to share just a couple of those examples. I mentioned scale AI. They host their transform X conference on gradual and are using that new virtual ticket feature to drive social signal in sharing for event registrants.

I bet if you go to LinkedIn right now and search for transform X, you'll see that in action. They founded some much more fluid process to get users activated on the platform. Once they register, since they no longer have to activate them a second time to get them to log in for the event, it happens as part of the event registration process.

The AI infrastructure Alliance and engineering leadership community, both featured round tables and meeting rooms in their latest summits, which we saw in that video earlier. ELLC and I both had their sessions, prerecorded, which is pretty common, but they invited speakers to join live in the chat to provide an engaging live experience.

It allowed for POS Polish presentation, but engagement live, and a reason for people to show up. ELLC also won a step further and hosted speaker Q and as following each sessions in meeting rooms, attendees loved the more intimate setting asked questions and speakers really liked being able to engage with attendees directly and see their faces and have a conversation.

Another customer smart bear uses gradual to seamlessly host their virtual and in person events, capture registrations, check in attendees, all within the same platform. Their attendees really loved that they have one place where they could go to register for all their events and they didn't have to send users somewhere else, depending on the event type.

These are just a couple of examples of how customers are leveraging these features to help build community. And there's still a ton more to come. I wanna preview just a couple things coming up in July and August. The focus is gonna be on building our in person and mobile support and even more updates to content.

For our events, we wanna give users and organizers alike, a seamless and really full featured event platform. So we're building out the gradual mobile app to support in-person events as well as check-in kiosks and some other key hybrid and in-person event features. Imagine one-on-one meetings curated in person.

Things like venue maps and schedules and sponsor tools, right? In the Palm of your hand, alongside all of my community tools that I need to engage on a day to day basis. Content's also gonna continue to be updated as well. You'll see podcast management supported in the dashboard, a redesign content homepage, and the ability for organizers to curate collections and editor picks to surface the content that you want to prioritize for your community.

Plus way more than I could talk about, or you wanna listen to here. We're so grateful for your time with us to hear about all the exciting work we've been doing to continue to build out gradual, to power our communities. And I just wanna say thank you, our features and growth wouldn't be possible without the input and feedback from our customers and our partners.

And we're thrilled to be able to continue to support all of your efforts as we build community. Now we're gonna jump into a round table. You can ask us questions, provide feedback, or just say hi, you can access round tables using the menu on the left, or you should see a popup up here at the top of your screen.

That'll take you there as well, which is another new engagement feature. We'll see you there. And thanks so much for joining.