Discover What’s New with Higher Logic Vanilla
Welcome to the latest installment of Higher Logic Vanilla’s feature roundup – your go-to source for all the exciting updates and upcoming enhancements to our platform.
At Higher Logic Vanilla, our goal is to make community management easy and effective. That’s why we’re excited to share our newest features that are designed to drive member engagement, simplify community operations, and show the real impact your community has on your bottom line.
Here’s a look at what we’ve recently rolled out, along with a sneak peek at what’s coming next.
What’s New: Recent Feature Highlights
Keep members coming back to the community with email digests
Send members personalized weekly summaries of the most popular community posts based on their interests. With integrated UTM tracking and an analytics dashboard, customers can monitor engagement and refine their content strategy based on data insights. Additionally, customers can customize the digest to match their company’s brand, ensuring every edition reflects their unique voice and style.
Increase event attendance with Zoom’s one-click registration
Make it easier and more convenient for members to join events promoted within the community using the new Zoom integration. Event organizers can now add their Zoom Meeting IDs or Zoom Webinar IDs directly to an event listing. To register and/or join an event, members simply click a single button or link—and they’re set. No forms, no separate landing pages. Just one click, and registered members will receive an email from Zoom containing the event details, along with an option to add it to their personal calendars.
Create cohesive communities with customizable category and sub-community pages
Category and sub-community pages serve as key organizational tools within communities, guiding members to topics and groups most relevant to them. With Higher Logic Vanilla’s new branding and customization options, customers can now design categories and sub-communities to meet their functional needs while ensuring a cohesive user experience throughout the community.
This development is part of the platform’s ongoing effort to expand its popular custom layout functionality, which is already available for homepages and discussion list pages, across the application.
What’s Ahead: Upcoming AI and Automation Feature Highlights
Tell great community stories with data using AI Live Charting
Say goodbye to mining data out of endless spreadsheets. AI Live Charting acts as a personal analyst, turning community data into clear visual stories. It’s designed for everyone, no matter their technical expertise, enabling easy access to and application of community insights.
Customers can ask Vanilla AI any question about their community data—for example, which 10 members have consistently contributed to the community throughout the past year?—and it will deliver an answer, complete with charts and graphs, within seconds.
Whether presenting to senior leadership, seeking buy-in from other departments, or engaging community members, customers can use Vanilla AI-generated charts to create compelling data stories that communicate the value of their community.
These charts illustrate trends, patterns, and relationships within community data, ensuring stakeholders grasp the significance without getting overwhelmed by detail. By sharing the narrative behind the numbers, customers can emphasize the impact of community on their organization and align to broader business goals.
Additionally, customers have the flexibility to edit charts and integrate them into their personal dashboards for continual tracking.
Keep a real-time pulse on community health and dynamics with sentiment analysis
Get a bird’s eye view of the community’s mood and tone through the platform’s sentiment analysis tool. It works by analyzing comments, posts, and interactions within the community to gauge member opinions and attitudes.
With this insight, customers get a quick sense of what’s trending without reading through dozens or hundreds of comments, ensuring they remain in sync with what matters most to members. They can also identify potential advocates who consistently show enthusiasm for the brand, helping them create engagement strategies to nurture these relationships.
Automate the daily grind of community management
With the platform’s new automation templates, customers can program many of the time-consuming aspects of making a community welcoming, easy to navigate, and rewarding to spend time in. For example, create a sense of belonging among new members by automatically inviting them to join community groups relevant to their profile information. Keep content fresh by automatically archiving posts that haven’t received any new comments after a specified period.
Task automation is just the beginning. Customers will find they can do much more with automation templates beyond streamlining routine operations. With email automations, for instance, customers can send targeted communications to different groups within their community. This means community teams can handle activities like re-engagement campaigns, event updates, or newsletters, without help from marketing or costly marketing automation tools.
Additionally, customers can tap into the power of instant gratification by automatically assigning badges and ranks when members meet specific criteria or take desired actions. This timely recognition—given when members are highly engaged, such as when they post valuable content, assist others, or actively participate—increases their motivation and strengthens their connection to the community. By automating this process, the system stays efficient and scalable, regardless of community size.
Make community the go-to place for everything members need
Streamline the member experience using Higher Logic Vanilla’s latest integrations with leading third-party software. Key integrations include JIRA for automatic ticket escalation, and connectors for Salesforce and Skilljar to simplify their inclusion in federated searches.
The platform’s JIRA integration ensures that whenever a member raises an issue, it is automatically routed to the right team. This not only makes members feel valued but also frees community managers from the task of manually sorting and forwarding issues.
Additionally, customers can use new connectors for Salesforce and Skilljar search to access a broader range of information through a single search, eliminating the need to jump between different apps.
Interested in exploring these features ?
If you’re curious about how these updates can benefit your community—like simplifying data analysis, gauging member sentiment, or automating routine tasks—we’re here to help.