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📣 Vanilla Summer Advisor Series 2025!
Looking for ways to get even more out of your Vanilla community? We’re excited to invite you to our brand new Vanilla Advisor Summer Series! This is your chance to sit down (virtually!) with our expert Advisor team for a personalized, 30-minute session focused entirely on your community’s success. 💡 What’s in it for you? ✔…
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Introducing the “Power of Connection” Podcast 🎙️
Hi everyone, I’m excited to share that Higher Logic has launched a new podcast, “Power of Connection,” and I’ll be your host! In each episode, I sit down with business and community leaders who’ve seen firsthand how online communities can create stronger connections with customers. Get practical tips, new ideas, and real…
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Higher Logic Vanilla Community Guidelines
Welcome to the Higher Logic Vanilla Community. This forum has been created so that our customers can converse, get support, exchange ideas and connect with anyone else using a Vanilla powered hosted community. Every community has its own culture and boundaries and we are excited to create this space for you, but we also…
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How are you aligning community with the customer lifecycle?
Aligning your customer journey and your community can be a powerful strategy. One that moves from reactive to proactive engagement planning. Looking at 4 key stages where this alignment has the strongest impact are: Engage (your welcome to the space) Nurture (opportunities that encourage deeper participating) Advocate…
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Mapping Your Community to the Stages of the Engagement Journey
Mapping Vanilla platform suggestions and features to each stage of the engagement journey—Engage, Nurture, Advocate, Feedback & Growth—can be accomplished as follows: Engage Welcoming customers into a space where they see immediate value and connection. Onboarding Automations: Use onboarding messages and automated…
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How I’ve customised our Community without a developer using AI (and a bit of patience)
Hi everyone! I wanted to share a bit about my journey customising our community on Higher Logic Vanilla without developer resources in case it's interesting and why I believe it’s something anyone can try. Some context Over the years, I’ve been part of small community teams that didn’t always have the luxury of in-house…
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Tip Tuesday: How to use Groups effectively for user research
In general, community groups can be invaluable in user research, providing rich insights and facilitating a deeper understanding of user needs and behaviors. They offer access to diverse perspectives, help identify potential issues, and can be used for various research methods such as focus groups, surveys, and…
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How are you helping your customers move into peer leader status?
We all know that communities are primarily made up of Information Consumers (I prefer this to lurkers…creepy!! 🧟) — this isn't a surprise. But have you thought about the fact that every Super User in our community likely started out here? So what made 1 person begin engaging and so many others stay in this unengaged state?…
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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…
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Community by Design: The Essential Foundation Framework [ 🎥 recording ]
Community planning doesn’t start at launch. It starts the moment you define its purpose and role in your customer experience. In this session, Izzy Neis, Head of Digital at ModSquad, and Heather Wendt, Senior Community Strategist at Higher Logic, walk through the full arc of community building, from early structure and…
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Has anyone used their Community (specifically Groups) to host Beta testing feedback?
Hello! We're transitioning to hosting all of our beta testing in our Community using the Groups function so that we can centralize feedback and communications and ensure a repeatable and standardized experience for our beta testers. I'm wondering if anyone else has implemented anything like this and if you have any advice…
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Integrating an LMS into Vanilla
Hi everyone! We are considering integrating an LMS into our community. We would like to be able to easily link to courses, have badges earned in the courses link back to the community, and be able to possibly award "points" for attending/completing courses. Does anyone else currently do this in their community and if so,…
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Private Group vs Restricted Category: your recommendations please
Good day Community, Has anyone utilized a Category for focused, and private conversations instead of a Group? Are there functionalities (or other benefits) of a Category that would make it superior to a Group other than page design? My concern with a Category over a Group is the management of membership: a private Group…
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Tip Tuesday: The Custom Fonts Talk.
You want to funkify your site. You've put your heart into the visual presentation of your Vanilla community. You're comparing it to other communities and you're pretty sure your's is a 10. But then you notice, there are some other 10s out there. You want to go up to 11. You're thinking web fonts! (OK, the real story is…
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How are you ensuring you are meeting actual customer needs?
Hey all! Have been doing some thinking about the importance of understanding your customer journey from both an organizational and community standpoint, and this means first knowing the real needs of your audience. And that starts with talking to them…so here is my question…HOW are you talking to your members? A survey?…
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Can we remove the "Updated [time] by [user]" ?
I love the transparency when someone edits another person's post but I'm wondering if this notification can be restricted by role? There are times when our members post discussions in the wrong places and a simple move to a new category will show up as if the post was updated, potentially creating confusion with our…
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Update on the future of this blog
Hello everyone! We launched this blog back in October of 2023 with the intention of keeping folks "dialed in" to new and updated articles in the Vanilla knowledge base. Over time, we have come to realize this avenue of communication has become redundant and is no longer needed. Here's why: @Val and @Shauna post detailed…
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April Success Community Roundup! 🐰 🐣 🪺 🌷
Hey Success Community! 👋 The Easter Bunny has come and gone, the snow has finally melted and the tulips are starting to blossom. Let's take a look at what's been happening in the Success Community this month: 🧭 Community Strategy 🎯 What has been the biggest impact of having a Super User program? Monthly Metrics: April 2025…
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#TipTuesday : Quick Rank Label Styling for Non-Developers
Hello Success community, Who's ready for another #TipTuesday? As you may know, Ranks are a tool that allow you to either grant or restrict specific community privileges to your users based on their activity on the site. (Need a refresher on Ranks? Check out this article for more info.) Each Ranks has a label that will…
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What are your best Search Metrics?
Hi all! We're looking to swap back to the native Vanilla Search page and are noticing some key metrics that we'd love are not available. Has anyone tried to track the following? Click Event Count - How many overall clicks happened on results from the search page User Query w/Clicks - list of queries (sorted by # of times…
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Will you be at CMX Summit?
CMX Summit, a big community manager conference, is coming up May 1-2 in Redwood City, California. I've been to CMX Summits in the past and have always found them useful, so I am looking forward to attending this year. If you will be going, I would enjoy meeting you to talk about common interests. To sweeten the pot, I will…
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SLAs and Best Practices for Responses
Hello Community, We are looking to establish SLAs for response times to unanswered questions and posts. We would appreciate any best practices and recommendations on how others are managing this, as well as methods for tracking posts that need replies. Thank you!
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What has been the biggest impact of having a Super User program?
Hi all! Super User programs are one of those areas that we should all be looking at, but seem to fall towards the bottom half of our to-do list. For those that have at least started a program, what is the biggest impact you are seeing? For those that haven't, what would you hope to see with a program in place? Would love…
