Mapping the Journey to a Better Community Experience

After running into the same issues with the past two vendors, the team was cautious moving forward. They knew that they needed a vendor that enabled and empowered their team to customize the community and tinker with the backend on their own. “We wanted to avoid a repeat scenario where we were stuck with templates like we had been in the past, so that was one of the biggest things on our list.”

With customizability at the top of her list, the manager of digital services quickly found themselves considering Vanilla Forums. Unlike the past scenario, however, they found that switching providers wouldn’t mean sacrificing features; on the contrary, Vanilla offered more features than they had ever had at a very reasonable price. “We had Vanilla on our radar for a few years, but once we really dove into what we wanted and what we expected from a community platform, it became apparent that Vanilla was the frontrunner.”

One of the features that the company gained from the Vanilla platform was more flexible gamification—a feature that complimented the drive to customize their community to a tee. “Gamification was something that our previous platform hadn’t offered. Just before we decided to move on from them, they introduced badges, but they had to be assigned manually, which is obviously something that was impossible to keep up with when you have a community the size of ours.”

And so, their team was confident that the third time would be a charm. They had finally found the perfect vendor that could make their community vision a reality.

After the company had signed with Vanilla, they became concerned about the upcoming migration. Migrations are always a stressful time, but with a deadline of just one month to get the new Vanilla community up and running and get all the data, information and members moved over. As the team manager explained, “The deadline was really tight and we had absolutely no room for errors—so we were pretty stressed out.”

To make matters more complicated, the platform that the company was migrating from gave them little leniency to export community data; with just a short window to get all the migration data, they found themselves in a situation where data was still being sent over on the last day before the cut-off. “It was a very stressful situation, but once we were able to actually get the data, moving it into Vanilla was relatively easy. Even though the team at Vanilla was on a different time-zone than us, they stayed up and worked overtime just to make sure that we were able to meet our deadline, which was absolutely amazing and very much appreciated.”

The team found that the migration was smooth once they were able to get all the information they needed from their previous vendor. After a very short, but stressful journey due to such tight deadlines, the new Vanilla community was up and running with the company’s 15 years of community data and nearly half a million members successfully migrated over.

Once the new Vanilla community was live, the team got to work on a major undertaking that they had been really looking forward to: creating a gamification system that would not only reward valued members and encourage engagement, but also complimented the new customized themes of the community. Their first task was to create special badges for their Super Users who had been with them since the beginning.

“We’ve had Super Users that have been with us since the very beginning, but we have never been able to recognize them with any special badges. As soon as the community had been launched, our team got to work on creating special anniversary badges for these long-time members.” In addition to a wide array of new badges that garnered much attention and appreciation from their long term Super Users, a new ranking system and leaderboard also became a priority. “We’re taking it one step at a time with this feature; we are getting great feedback and want to make sure that all our decisions are well informed and support our overall vision. We are really excited to see what this will do for our community!”

One feature they quickly realized was hugely beneficial was the sink feature—a feature that is entirely unique to Vanilla. In short, this feature allows moderators to “sink” comments, which ensures that even if the comment is garnering engagement, it will go down in the queue as new comments are added so that it reduces the inflammatory nature of the comment.

“In the past, it wasn’t uncommon to see people bump up redundant or repetitive comments just to get a reaction—it made conversations less productive for the people that were there seeking help. Being able to sink these comments was a feature that I hadn’t seen before and it has really helped our moderators a lot. We didn’t want to delete or hide these comments, but we didn’t want them getting bumped and dominating the conversation; having the ability to simply sink them is really amazing!”

While the new moderation and gamification features were boosting morale for the team, the moderators and customers alike, this wasn’t the only positives that had come from the switch to Vanilla. The company was also seeing a huge impact on their numbers.

Engagement was steadily increasing, with an average of 94% of questions getting responses. Moreover, 44% of these questions were seeing accepted answers. “The community is still relatively new, but with the results that we are already seeing, I know that our numbers will only continue to grow.”