ARLINGTON, VA (February 29, 2024) – Higher Logic, the industry-leading community engagement company, announced new features in its Higher Logic Vanilla platform, and welcomed Megan Langley to the leadership team as Vice President of Marketing.
The platform’s latest enhancements are designed to simplify community management, increase member engagement, and show the positive impact of community on business. With these updates, Higher Logic Vanilla customers can:
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, 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.
In addition to these recent enhancements, Higher Logic Vanilla is set to introduce new AI and automation capabilities in the coming months.
“We’re not just adopting AI for the sake of being current; it’s a transformative tool that changes how we bring people together, make content more relevant, and solve real-world problems for those who build and grow communities,” said Matt Crouse, director of software development, Higher Logic. “A new era of community management is here, where AI meets human creativity to create deeper connections. We’re integrating AI and machine learning into our platform with a clear purpose: make every conversation and interaction count. That’s the future we’re excited to be a part of.”
With these soon-to-be-released features, Higher Logic Vanilla customers can:
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 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.
Higher Logic Vanilla prepares for next growth phase
Higher Logic Vanilla is poised for its next phase of growth as it strengthens its strategic direction and go-to-market plan. This exciting development is highlighted by the recent appointment of Megan Langley as Vice President of Marketing.
Megan is an accomplished marketing executive with over 15 years of experience in B2B and B2C SaaS organizations. Her background covers a range of industries including customer success, EdTech, and MarTech. She has a proven track record in scaling startups, driving exponential growth, and guiding companies through the challenges of rapid expansion.
Skilled in developing marketing programs and teams from the ground up, Megan’s agile leadership and data-first mentality have driven success at companies including Vocus, StraighterLine, Laureate, and ChurnZero. Her expertise in strategic marketing, demand generation, revenue operations, and analytics enables her to create cohesive marketing strategies that generate measurable increases in revenue and customer retention.
“Since returning to Higher Logic, my priority has been to grow our company in ways that are smart, sustainable, and true to our core values,” said Rob Wenger, CEO, Higher Logic. “Bringing Megan Langley on board as our vice president of marketing is a big part of that plan. She’s proven herself in scaling SaaS companies and integrating a customer-centric approach into every facet of marketing strategy. Her experience is going to be a huge asset for us, and I can’t wait to see how she’s going to help shape the future of our company.”
For more information, visit vanilla.higherlogic.com.
ABOUT HIGHER LOGIC
Higher Logic, the industry-leading, human-focused engagement platform, delivers powerful online communities and communication tools to engage members and customers at every stage of their journey. Higher Logic provides a robust engagement platform and strategic services with over a decade of experience in building personalized and scalable community engagement programs. We serve more than 3,000 customers, representing over 350,000 online communities with greater than 200 million users in more than 40 countries worldwide. For more information, visit higherlogic.com.