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Hi all,

tldr: moving away from HigherLogic and looking for tips and tricks to ensure the onboarding of CC is effective.

We are currently about to kickoff our onboarding of the Gainsight Customer Communities (CC) and will be stopping our service with HigherLogic (HL). We have had HL since 2015 and have outgrown it. We also are in the final stages of onboarding Gainsights Customer Education (CE) and have been using their Customer Success (CS) service for a while. 

I am seeking to find any tips and tricks from you all who may have migrated from HL to CC in the past to help ensure we don’t miss anything and make the process as seamless as possible. For additional context, we are a B2B SaaS company that provides Grants Management Software to hundreds of foundations across the globe. Our community has always been a place for collaboration between customers, our team, and approved partners. We utilize the Ideation module in HL to have our customers submit ideas for our Product Team to review and decide which ones will be added to our roadmap. The majority of our customers in the community (~1400) are lurkers, i.e. just review the email notifications for the channels they are subscribed to vs. actively posting and replying to threads. However, the ones who are engage, are consistently engaged and active. 

I am a team of one for all things Community and expect that to remain the same for some time. Any lessons learned or “aha” moments you have would be greatly appreciated as we embark on this initiative to improve our customer experience. 

Thanks in advance!

Hi @shawngarrison and welcome to our community!  Bit of a late reply here - as I don’t have personal experience of migrating from HL and am hoping someone in the community might jump in.  What I can share is that you’re in good hands with the CC team as they have done hundreds of migrations from all platforms over the years, so it’s a well oiled machine.  :)

As I have managed a few migrations myself in the past (just not from HL) I will share two small thoughts and suggestions in general:

  • It probably sounds obvious, but change management and communication towards existing members is so important with migrations.  Every platform has its strengths and weaknesses, and folks can be attached to what they’re used to, so it can be helpful to do everything you can to get buy-in from your most loyal members as you go through the process.  Inviting some of your regular members to join you in building and testing the new environment can go a long way.  You can then give them elevated status at launch (badges/ranks).
  • A personal learning from me quite recently is that you can take the opportunity of moving to a new platform to change some fundamental parts of your community experience that you may have been wanting to optimise for some time.  One of the greatest opportunities in my experience is to simplify the overall structure - simply because over-complicating taxonomy and structure is such a common pitfall.  Here on this community we recently completed a migration as we merged two of our CC communities into one.  We took the opportunity to radically simplify the taxonomy for our product discussion areas.  We previously had close to 20 categories (!) for the CS product alone, and now we have just one per product.  It seems to be working well - it is so much simpler and easier to navigate now.  

Just a couple of small thoughts.  Good luck with your migration project and if you have more questions you can always share them here - we have some amazingly experienced folks here!

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