Our product teams have had a busy quarter as they’ve focused on giving you more flexibility and customization options for your site while reducing barriers to participation for your community. We’ve summarized these new features here and how you can put these updates to work for you in your engagement programs.
APPEARANCE EDITOR
With over 350 clients now using the new Appearance Editor, we’ve seen some really great examples of new homepage designs across the globe. Not only does EngagementHQ’s Appearance editor provide you with new flexibility to design and create a custom branded homepage, we’ve added a few new enhancements to support project design, visibility, and multilingual sites. While one of the biggest changes with the new editor is you are no longer constrained to a single template style, you will find an expanded library of homepage templates to help you get started. See 8 steps to a well-designed site.
If you’re ready to start using the new Appearance Editor, contact support@bangthetable.com to enable your account.
ROYALTY-FREE UNSPLASH STOCK IMAGE LIBRARY
We’re really excited to support your customization and branding efforts with a new, royalty-free stock image library from Unsplash. When choosing to upload an image within the new Appearance Editor interface, you will see the option to import or choose from the Unsplash library. Search for and add images directly to your homepage, projects, and supporting content from EngagementHQ. This feature is now available in any account with the new Appearance Editor enabled.
PROJECT SHOWCASE
Project Showcase is a new content section designed to present a dynamic list of engagement projects for your visitors to filter and search through on your homepage. This new section helps keep your homepage clean and uncluttered while allowing visitors to get a full picture of past and present engagement efforts. Adding the Project Showcase section to your homepage takes only a minute to achieve and offers customization options that can display or hide project filters of your choosing. Learn more about Project Showcase.
NEW GOOGLE TRANSLATE OPTION
While there are multiple strategies for multilingual sites, one approach is to offer participants the Google Translate function. While translations are not always perfect, Google translate provides a fast and easy way to acknowledge diversity in your community and be inclusive of all non-native language speaking members. The new Google Translate option provides a simple language selection dropdown at the top of your site, allowing participants to change the preferred language across your whole site. You have controls over which languages you want to show and how the language selector is positioned in your header. This feature works with the new Appearance Editor and you can enable it in your account at any time from the Marketplace.
PROJECT PAGE THEMES
To give your project pages a refreshed look, we’ve introduced two new design themes to the current classic look. Within the new Appearance Editor, you’ll find a section for Project Themes, with the option to update your project pages to the new BOLD or FRESH look and feel. You can easily apply these new themes to refresh the look of project pages across your site.
NEWSFEED PUBLISHED DATE OPTIONS
We’re giving you new control over the publishing date of your newsfeed articles, allowing you to set a custom published date or simply hide the date altogether. This update won’t affect any of your previously published news articles, but you can choose to set your own dates on any new articles you publish. This feature will be live in your account at the end of this week.
AUTO-HIDE PAST DATES IN THE KEY DATES TOOL
The Key Dates tool is often used to inform participants about upcoming events, meetings, and critical dates around a given project. To help you keep dates updated automatically, we’ve introduced the option to hide any events with a past date from showing on your project. This feature helps you keep your project calendar focused on future events, without requiring project administrators to continuously update and remove past events. This feature is currently in open beta and will be released next week.
SIMPLIFIED PARTICIPANT REGISTRATION
We know that registration is important in validating who your participants are while also building your database so you can invite participants back for future consultations. To help you increase registered participants on your site, we’ve simplified the registration and verification process, reducing the number of steps to sign-up while making it easy for participants to register and engage immediately. In this new registration process, a simple modal will pop-up from any page on your site when a participant hits the register button. The new modal offers real-time validation for all fields, reducing common errors around login names and passwords. Immediately after the form is submitted, participants will receive a 4-digit verification code via the email provided and can input that code. Once verified, participants will be left on the original page and are now ready to contribute feedback for any of your projects. This feature is currently in beta. If you would like to test this feature on your site, you can find the project tile on our beta roadmap and submit a comment of interest.
@MENTIONS IN PARTICIPANT COMMENTS
We know that ongoing conversations happen organically when participants engage with community leaders as well as other stakeholders and community members. This first improvement focuses on comment formatting as well as the ability to @mention another participant directly within comments. When you mention another registered participant in your comment, such as @nathan, that participant will receive an automated email notification, bringing them back into the conversation to participate. This feature is currently in open beta and will begin roll-out in the last half of September.
If you would like to sign-up for any of these beta features, visit our EngagementHQ Product Roadmap for details on planned projects, beta projects, and recently released features.