Member Access Levels

It’s good practice to ensure your members are managed well for your thriving community. Part of member management is making sure members have the correct access to content and to connect with others within the community. Admins have the ability to manage member types and members' access in the Gradual Dashboard.

Unless certain custom rules are in place for your community, when registering new users, members will automatically be Approved and have a Standard member type.

Note: If you want to restrict anyone who isn’t a member from viewing or signing up for your community, you’ll want to make your community private. More about Private Communities can be found here.

Approved, Pending Approval & Unapproved

There are three lists of users in your community dashboard Member List. You can change the users's access level from their profile, or in bulk from the Member List.

Approved

These users can log in and access the platform to see content, events, etc. Unless certain custom rules are in place for your community, when registering new users, members will automatically be Approved and have a Standard member type.

Pending Approval

These users are unable to log in or access the platform as members but can access any public pages.

This list is best used for users who are temporarily suspended, and their access needs to be reviewed by admins - and potentially will be approved and provided access to the community, or unapproved and remain blocked from accessing the community as a member.

User Experience when signing up or logging in: They can enter the sign-up information but will be notified that their account is pending, and will not be able to access any logged-in pages within your community.

Some sign-up rules will mark users as Pending Approval if their domain is on the block list, or not on the allow list. Learn more about sign-up settings here.

Unapproved

These users are also unable to log in or access the platform as members but can access any public pages. This list is best used for users who should be remain suspended or blocked from accessing the community as a member, and do not need to be reviewed.

Users cannot be deleted from your dashboard entirely but can be marked Unapproved to restrict their access and login.

Member Types

Standard

This allows the user to be able to attend and engage in all features. These users will be able to see all content available to all members, other users, and events. If their onboarding is complete, these users can message other members, engage in the chat, and participate in roundtables, matching, and other interactive experiences on the platform.

Note: You can still further restrict content, users, and events even for standard users using access groups or Spaces. These groups allow you to create a subset of users and assign content or events that can only be viewed by that group of users.

Guest

'Guests' have controlled access to member and event engagement across the platform.

Guests are not visible (their profile) to others, so others cannot message them, or see them in the People tab. However, they can see others on the platform and within the event.

Guests cannot message other event attendees, and cannot enter messages in the chat or in Q&A.

If a member is Marked 'Guest' At The Community Level, they will automatically be registered as a Guest in the event.

Limited Approval

These users can join the community, view content, and attend livestream events, but cannot see or interact with anyone else on the platform. They don’t see People, Channels, Messages, Match, Roundtables or any other interactive platform features and cannot register or attend Meetings, Webinars, or In Person events. They also cannot post in the Forum or chat during events.

💡 Pro Tip: Customers will often use the Limited Approval member type for competitors, or a read-only mode for users that should not be permitted to interact or view others on the platform.

Note: If you are looking to give Admin access to a member, this happens in the Permissions tab on the Gradual dashboard menu.

Managing & Changing Member Approval and Member Types

From Gradual dashboard, you can select Members and the Member List. From there, you will see all the Approved members, all Pending users, and all Unapproved users.

You can bulk update member types in the dashboard by following these steps

Using the action buttons in the list or directly from a member’s profile you can approve, unapprove or mark users pending.

Note: If you unapprove or mark a user pending the user will be immediately logged off the platform and be required to log in again for the change to take effect.

You can also manage Member Type within this list or directly from the member’s profile. Once you update the member type, be sure to hit “save” in order to save your change.

💡 Pro Tip: We recommend you check your Member List regularly to ensure no one is stuck in ‘Pending’ status, especially before an event.