Case Study: Smartsheet achieves increased member engagement and cost-effective community management with Higher Logic Vanilla

Smartsheet's Community Increased Member Engagement & Cost Effectiveness

Smartsheet, a collaborative work management platform, had run its user community on an in‑house, open‑source build since 2015 but found the approach increasingly costly and time‑consuming. Facing poor analytics, limited self‑service, and high development overhead, Smartsheet evaluated vendors and chose the Higher Logic Vanilla community platform for its out‑of‑the‑box capabilities and migration support.

Higher Logic Vanilla led the migration and launch with dedicated customer success support and delivered moderation tools, gamification, analytics, and API extensibility that let Smartsheet refocus on member engagement instead of platform development. The move produced clear gains: average response time fell to 12 hours, 80% of answers now come from members (20% from moderators), active membership surpassed 10,000, and the solution proved more customizable and cost‑effective than the prior in‑house system.

Smartsheet

Gwyenth Casazza

Senior Manager of Support