Best Of
Welcome Nicole Saunders, Our New Customer Experience Leader
We’re excited to welcome Nicole Saunders to Higher Logic, where she’ll be leading our customer experience strategy efforts across the organization.
Nicole will be focused on helping customers get even more value from their communities. With more than a decade of experience in community and customer marketing, she brings a thoughtful, cross-functional perspective to the work of building strong, sustainable programs.
I’ll let Nicole introduce herself below. She’s already jumping in and is looking forward to connecting with many of you soon.
pschneider
🌟 Exciting News: Higher Logic Vanilla is Upgrading to AWS Hosting! 🌟
Hello Vanilla Community!
We're thrilled to announce that Higher Logic Vanilla is embarking on an exciting journey to enhance our hosting infrastructure by migrating to AWS, a cutting-edge cloud platform. This move represents a significant upgrade from our previous provider, Vexxhost, allowing us to deliver an even better experience for all our users.
This project has been in the works for over a year and our beta customers have been successfully using the platform for over 6 months so we believe now is the time to bring this improvement to the rest of the community!
Key Benefits of AWS Hosting:
🚀 Enhanced Performance: AWS offers faster and more reliable infrastructure, ensuring a more responsive experience across our community platforms.
🔧 Improved Scalability: With AWS, we can scale resources seamlessly to accommodate community growth and handle seasonal traffic spikes effectively.
💪 Greater Reliability: AWS provides high availability, robust disaster recovery capabilities, and superior uptime guarantees, minimizing disruptions and ensuring a resilient infrastructure.
🔒 Modern Security: Rest assured, our migration process maintains existing SOC 2 and ISO compliance standards, incorporating up-to-date security controls to protect your data.
Here is a link to our Trust Center
No Additional Cost to You:
We're excited to share that this upgrade comes at no additional cost to our valued Vanilla customers. You'll enjoy enhanced performance, reliability, and security—all without any extra expense.
Minimal Disruption:
We understand the importance of seamless transitions. Our migration process is designed to be minimally disruptive:
- Expected downtime for affected sites will be less than 10 minutes. In most situations the end user will not notice any changes at all.
- Your site's operation and functionality will remain unchanged; your users will notice faster page load times without any other noticeable differences.
- DNS updates will smoothly redirect users to the new AWS infrastructure.
Migration Schedule:
- Vanilla Development Sites: Already migrated.
- Beta Test Customers: Successfully moved.
- All Plan (Essential, Corp, Enterprise) Staging Sites: Moving between June 9th - June 13th.
- Corporate Plan Production Sites: Scheduled between June 23rd - July 4th.
- Enterprise Pan Production sites: TBD - After July 4th
For specific migration dates or any inquiries, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager (CSM). Additionally, stay updated by following our status page for real-time updates.
We're committed to ensuring a seamless transition and enhancing your experience on Vanilla. Thank you for being part of our community—we're excited about the future together on AWS!
Warm regards,
Matthew Crouse
Director Of Product Engineering
Higher Logic Vanilla
mcrouse
Tip Tuesday: Don't skip the UTM tag in your URLs. Your future self will thank you.
As a marketer, I rely on UTM parameters all the time. They’re one of the easiest ways to see which emails, social posts, or announcements are sending people to your community and which ones aren’t pulling their weight.
So if you’ve ever looked at your analytics and wondered “How did people end up here?” a missing UTM might be the reason.
Whether you’re promoting a discussion, event, or knowledge base article, a quick UTM tag gives you the visibility you need. And in Vanilla, you can filter and chart this data directly in the Page Views report.
What are UTMs?
UTMs are short tags added to the end of a URL. Super helpful when you're linking to your community from:
- Email newsletters
- LinkedIn posts
- Event follow-ups
- In-app announcements
- Paid ads
Example
Let’s say you’re hosting an upcoming Ask Me Anything (AMA) session in your community, and the event post lives here:
yourcommunity.com/events/ama-with-product-team
You want to promote it:
- In your product newsletter
- On LinkedIn
- Via a homepage banner inside the community
Each version of the link can include a unique UTM string, like this one for the email version:
yourcommunity.com/events/ama-with-product-team?utm_source=productnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ama_promotion
What each UTM parameter means
UTM parameter | What it answers | Example |
|---|---|---|
utm_source | Who is sending traffic (where it’s coming from) | newsletter, linkedin, homepagebanner |
utm_medium | How it’s being sent (the type of channel) | email, social, internalbanner |
utm_campaign | The name of the specific campaign or initiative | amapromotion, q3events |
utm_term (optional) | The keyword or topic driving the click (used in paid or search ads) | community+platform |
utm_content (optional) | To differentiate similar links or CTAs, e.g., you want to know whether people clicked the banner or button in an email | headerbanner, ctabutton |
You can build a link manually or use a free UTM builder like this one from Google Analytics.
Be sure to stick to consistent, human-readable names for each parameter. Your future self will thank you when you’re sorting through analytics.
Where to see UTM performance in Vanilla
In Vanilla’s Analytics, UTM data is available in the Page Views data source. You can:
- Group by UTM values (e.g. by campaign)
- Filter by source or medium
- Compare internal vs. external traffic (Vanilla automatically labels these for you)
This makes it easy to see whether your homepage banner or LinkedIn promo drove more AMA visits and to report on what’s working.
For full implementation details, refer to our documentation on UTM tracking.
EmilyN