Having a well organized agenda allows you to have a dynamic, interpersonal experiences for speakers, sponsors, members and attendees. With the Gradual platform, you can set this up with ease and have multiple different types of agenda sessions to get the most engagement, connection and value out of the user's experience. Whether it’s a one-time meeting or multi-day event, building an agenda is easy and customizable in your dashboard.
Note: Agendas can be added to all events except for 1:1 match events.
Components of an agenda: Stage settings
You can build simple one-day, one-track agendas, or multi-day conference style agendas that include components like roundtables, multiple tracks, and engagement opportunities.
If your agenda is simply one-day and one-track, you can skip down to 'Creating an Agenda' below.
Days
Accommodate multi-day events in the agenda by adding and titling each day where you will host sessions. You can only add multiple days to your agenda if your event dates span more than one day in General Info.
Navigate to the event dashboard, under General Info, into Stage Settings.
Select +Add a Day button in the upper right and title your day, and select the date from the calendar. Save your work.
Once the day is built, it can be selected from the agenda builder when adding sessions to your agenda.
Stages
If you are hosting a multi-track event where you will be streaming video for two or more sessions at the same time, you will need to add stages to accommodate multiple stream feeds. Each stage in Gradual requires it's own RTMP feed.
If you are hosting a hybrid event, you will need to add stages for each in-person location, virtual stage for stream feeds, and any that accommodate both in-person location + virtual stages.
You add a stage by selecting the + Add A Stage button in the upper right. You will need to name each additional stage and the platform will automatically build a Stream Key and Stream RTMP URL for you.
Learn more about streaming to Gradual here.
Tracks
Utilizing Tracks is an optional way to group your agenda items. Tracks can be topics, categories, attendee types, etc. If you are planning to use Tracks to organize your agenda, we recommend creating them before creating your agenda.
Creating and ordering tracks
Navigate to the event dashboard, under General Info, into Stage Settings.
Select + Add Track button in upper right of that block and title your Track. This title will appear to attendees and deciphers one track from another.
You can drag and drop Tracks to change the order in which they display to attendees on the front end.
Once the track is built, it can be selected from the agenda builder when adding sessions to your agenda.
Agenda view
Users in the community and attendees of the event can browse the agenda and navigate to different engagement opportunities from a sleek and organized agenda on the event landing page, and from within the event.
You can select the default view from the event dashboard; decide if you'd like to show the agenda in list or table view, and in stage or track view.
Navigate to the event dashboard, under General Info, into Stage Settings.
Select which view you'd like the users to see on the event landing page and within the event.
Here are examples of what different views look like on the front end:
Stage view: List view
Stage view: Table view
Track view: List view
Track view: Table view
If you'd like to hide the agenda entirely from the community members and event attendees, simply toggle visibility off in the top right-hand side of the Agenda menu.
Session types and formats
When building an agenda in Gradual, there are several session formats and types in the dashboard to select to adjust what the event attendees see on the front end, and how the session behaves in the platform.
Learn all about the different session types and formats here.
Creating an Agenda
On the left hand side menu, select Events, then ‘Create an event’. The event type options will appear for you to select. We will use Livestream for this example. Fill out the required fields and then hit Submit. If you already have an event created, skip down to Step 3.
Select the General Info tab under Events and complete that page with all of your Event's information. Once you hit 'Save', please note your event will still not be published or "live", until you select to do so.
💡 Pro Tip: If you are planning on having speakers at the event, we recommend you go back to the dropdown menu, to Speakers to add your speakers. Click the top right button that says ‘+ New Speaker’ and enter in the required fields of: Name, role, company, headshot picture, etc. and hit Save.
Learn more about adding speakers to your community & events here.
Select Agenda on the left, and then click on the ‘+ Add to agenda’ button. Most events will be Day 1 but the drop-down menu is available for those who are planning multi-day events or summits that require different tracks, multiple stages and days.
Choose your title, meeting type, fill in the description, times and press Submit.
To learn more about session types and formats visit this resource.
You can select your Speaker(s) within the Agenda items as well, or Add a +New Speaker if needed.
Continue adding sessions to your agenda until it is complete!
You can tweak the Agenda as needed until the event starts or hide the agenda entirely by toggling visibility on and off at the top of the Agenda page, in your event dashboard.
