This guide will walk through the basic setup steps to get started with your Gradual community. Each step has links to relevant resources to help you get started. All of the steps below will be completed at dashboard.gradual.com.
Every community implementation is different, but the goal of this resource is to share the common and most critical setup steps and decisions to get started. If you want to explore a more comprehensive implementation plan that you can build and customize to suit your needs you can find that here.
Launch Checklist:
Branding
Menu Setup
Email Sender
Community Domain
Sign-up and Visibility
Profile Questions
Available features and content
Branding
Name, description, and slogan
Ensure that the name, description, and subtitle of the community are accurate and complete.
Make changes to the name or add a description and a subtitle in the dashboard, in ‘Customization’
Logos and Branding
Upload all logos to your dashboard and other branding elements like accent color,
Upload logos in ‘Customization’ → ‘Branding’
Menu Setup
Setup your desired menu structure including available features and navigation style in ‘Customization’ → ‘Menu’
Email Sender
Customize the email address from which automated system messages are sent. This is important as it ensures reliable delivery and gives familiarity to your members and your brand. This setup requires a few DNS records to be created to allow Gradual to send on your behalf and may require support from your web and/or IT teams.
Community Domain
Determine and configure your community domain. We recommend hosting your community on a subdomain of your website (e.g. community.gradual.com). This setup requires a DNS records to be created and may require support from your web and/or IT teams. You'll need Gradual's help with this step!
Sign-up and Visibility
Determine how users will join your community and what restrictions you may put in place. You can control the visibility of your community and components separately from the sign-up. Visibility controls what pages are visible to the public vs logged-in users. Sign-up determines who can join your community and create an account.
Visibility
Visibility of the community is controlled in your dashboard under the ‘Settings’ → ‘System Settings’. A quick guide:
Private communities mean users must be logged in to access any page.
Public communities mean that users can land on your homepage, content, events, and other pages that you determine without being logged in.
Remember, just because your community is public doesn’t mean anyone can join; you control this via your sign-up settings.
Sign-up Settings
In addition to visibility, you will need to determine how users will join your community. You may choose to invite users manually, use an application, or keep your community open. You can also choose to only allow certain people to join or restrict certain emails. It’s important to determine your desired flow for users joining to avoid confusion and frustration.
Profile Questions
Profile questions help gain an understanding of your community members and make it easy for members to connect with one another. Determine what questions you’d like to ask members and set them up in the Gradual dashboard.
Available Features and Content
Prior to launching your community it’s important to consider what features and capabilities you want available on day one. Consider your existing content library, event calendar, or discussions and how those can be “seeded” in your community.
Use the menu and visibility tools in Gradual to turn on or off the different features and then add some assets to each module to help things feel active and vibrant.
If you'd like to have some engagement opportunities and assets available for your initial members, add content like videos or blogs for them to read, and upcoming events for them to register for.
If you are utilizing Forum you will want to generate boards and have some initial posts in the Forum to start some conversations.