Relaunched Community Increases Member Growth and Engagement

D2L is an integrated learning platform provider focused on reshaping the future of education and work for more than 1,300 customers worldwide. As the company helps to lead the way into the era of personalized learning, its D2L Brightspace Community can support that effort by bringing people together to share and learn.

The D2L Brightspace Community, 50,000+ members strong, also provides invaluable access to the voice of the customer. As members express their challenges and needs, D2L can internalize the feedback into product and community innovation.

Recognizing the potential in their community, D2L migrated to a new platform to help realize the power of this channel. Essential to the platform selection, migration, and leadership in the next evolution of the community was D2L’s Community Manager, Stefanie Baldwin.

Part of D2L’s Community growth journey included globalizing their large community, while improving localization. As a company that supports many different languages and accessibility needs, Stefanie knew D2L’s Community platform needed to be able to provide tools to help reflect that.

At the same time, the community also needed to engage the wide variety of personas that D2L served. They wanted capabilities beyond what the prior community platform could provide to offer a more personalized experience to each member. Stefanie said, “It was important to adopt a new community that could help provide D2L the flexibility to brand and customize the experience to meet the needs of its diverse members.”

The new community platform needed to have the technical chops to support this flexibility. “We wanted a platform that could offer the flexibility to help create unique community experiences and connect members with the content they need,” Stefanie said. “But we also needed to have the technical flexibility to integrate D2L’s community with the rest of the company’s technical infrastructure.”

As they searched, the D2L team also kept this intangible in mind: they were looking for a vendor who could be a true partner. Stefanie explains, “Something critical to D2L’s next phase of community growth was to find a platform and a team with professional expertise rooted in community management and community excellence.”

After a rigorous search, D2L selected Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) as their new community platform, finding it a match for their requirements.

Extensibility via strong integrations

For a global company like D2L with a large tech stack, community integrations were essential. Because Vanilla is an open and extensible platform, D2L has been able to provide a convenient single sign-on solution—linked to an integrated support system—and give access to their professional development learning site (Brightspace Learning Center) directly from the community.

Stefanie adds, “All of this becomes more accessible to D2L’s members with a single login, thanks to the flexibility offered by the Vanilla community platform. It’s a tremendous benefit.”

Segmentation tools

Moving to the Vanilla platform helped pave the way to create new, dedicated community spaces that were entirely localized for different languages. Stefanie described the advantage: “With Vanilla, D2L can now offer a better experience for speakers of multiple languages.”

D2L also hosts approximately 30+ user groups within the community. These groups are active every month and provide early feedback to D2L about Brightspace tools and community features.

In addition, D2L uses group administration to invite its employees to be more engaged in targeted ways with members who can benefit from their expertise. The Brightspace Community team uses gamification to help engage staff further in the community, so they can facilitate more meaningful conversations between members and staff.

Dedicated development

D2L relies on the Vanilla community development site to help provide continuous delivery of new features and functionality. Stefanie appreciates the ability to manage change and maximize adoption of new Vanilla features for Brightspace Community members.

She added that, “Adopting the dev site alongside guidance from our dedicated support and success team can enable us to make well-informed and timely decisions.”

Advanced analytics tools

With advanced analytics tools, Stefanie can track customer insights and turn them into business insights for D2L.

She uses Vanilla’s tagging and analytics to help analyze the questions customers ask each month, which can provide insight into the specific learning tools that interest them. In addition, Vanilla’s broad suite of APIs make it easier for Stefanie to answer questions specific to D2L’s Brightspace Community and its goals.

She explained, “Even though there are a number of dashboards and reports designed to meet the needs of various community moderators, the flexibility of the Vanilla platform to help customize reports and dashboards, along with its user-friendly API interface for deeper data analysis, make it easier for D2L to adapt Community programming to better meet member needs.”

Community moderation improvements

Embedded community moderation tools allow Stefanie and the D2L team to see that the community is more accessible to every member, a mission that is deeply important to D2L. She said, “Vanilla is a partner who treats accessibility with the same degree of sincerity and importance as we do, shown by a number of features built into the community platform.”

Stefanie also appreciates how the community moderation workflows help to safeguard members. “Vanilla’s community moderation features go above and beyond a merely automated approach by ensuring that there are D2L employees behind the scenes looking carefully and critically at the content that is posted,” said Stefanie.

Deep community expertise

Not only did Vanilla meet technical requirements, but the D2L team found Vanilla’s staff and customer community provided the expertise they needed.

Stefanie depends upon the partnership and support of the Vanilla team. In fact, she said, “The Vanilla team’s technical guidance and strategic expertise helped to assure us from our earliest days investigating the migration that we would be supported by a team that viewed our success as their success.”

Stefanie adds, “Vanilla’s extensive customer community helped to connect us with a wide network of community professionals, giving us invaluable insights and support that can help us keep improving our own community efforts.” She appreciated seeing how Vanilla used its own community to help deliver community programming as she planned engagement activities for the Brightspace community.

The launch of D2L’s new, global community has allowed them to listen to even more members and help bring that feedback back into their products and the community itself. And thanks to the new capabilities D2L can tap into via the Vanilla platform, members are getting even more involved.

Since launching on the Vanilla platform, the Brightspace community has seen year-over-year growth, including a:

– 3.4x increase in community sessions.

– 2.7x increase in membership registration.

– 66% faster response time to community questions.

– 51% increase in questions asked in the community.

– 24% increase in user logins.

In the future, Stefanie plans to use the platform’s connected support, custom federated search, and community to report on ticket deflection.