How Duck Creek Reinvigorated Its Community with Higher Logic Vanilla

For Duck Creek Technologies, the user community has become an essential connection point between its clients, partners, and product experts. But as the platform supporting it began to fall behind, the team knew it was time to find something better suited to where the community was headed.

That search led Duck Creek to Higher Logic Vanilla, and to a migration that preserved everything the team had built while also reinvigorating the community in the process.

Building the Pond

Duck Creek Technologies builds the SaaS core systems—policy, billing, claims, and rating—that power some of the world’s largest property and casualty insurance carriers. Behind that platform sits a user community the team affectionately calls “the pond”—a space where Duck Creek’s clients, partners, and product experts ask questions, share best practices, and build a body of knowledge that, in years past, used to disappear in email threads or private conversations that occurred across different communication platforms.

“Before the community, our clients either opened question tickets or ran questions through their CSMs, who would then internally chase down experts to get an answer,” explained Alex Gottman, User Community Manager at Duck Creek. “A lot of that information was ultimately getting lost.  With the community, we now have a space that archives expert guidance that’s been shared over time.  Equally important, clients now have an opportunity to directly engage with other clients, SI partners, and Duck Creek experts on one collaborative platform.”

Alex understands the problem firsthand because, in a way, he used to be the workaround. Before joining the community team, he was a CSM known internally for being unusually good at finding the right expert quickly, and other CSMs began funneling their toughest client questions to him. It was that instinct for knowing where knowledge lived and how to surface it that eventually moved him into community management. When Duck Creek decided to build a real user community, Alex was a natural fit to manage user engagement.

Finding the Right Partner

Duck Creek’s prior community platform had been built with deep customization; almost everything was bespoke, high-code work. As the community’s needs grew, that approach became increasingly hard to sustain.

The vendor relationship began to deteriorate along with it. Support tickets sat unanswered for weeks. Promised product investments turned out to apply only to certain customers, leaving Duck Creek’s instance with no clear path forward.

The team began evaluating alternatives. The shortlist came down to two: Higher Logic Vanilla and another vendor with whom Duck Creek already had an existing relationship across other products. For Alex, the difference was focus.

“I wanted a company that does community and only community,” said Alex. “With Higher Logic Vanilla, you can feel that focus in the product. Everything is built around making it user-friendly, low-code, and easy to manage. With the other platform, community was just one product among many.”

One feature in particular stood out during evaluation: Higher Logic Vanilla’s Widget Builder, which lets teams build, configure, and deploy custom page layouts and widgets directly within the platform. For a team without dedicated developer support, it was a clear signal that managing and growing the platform day-to-day would be feasible.

The Higher Logic Vanilla team also made an impression. “The folks on our demo calls were top-tier but also super personable. We understood the vision, and never got the sense we were being sold to,” Alex said. “They were really thinking about what we needed during the migration and into the future.”

Go-live was non-negotiable. The existing contract had a set end date, and the new community had to be running before then.

“The implementation team was excellent. They knew when to jump in and when to step back,” Alex said. “Our strategy advisor went above and beyond, helping me think through the design. We had a very aggressive timeline, and the Vanilla team made it possible.”

A Better Experience from Day One

After migrating, Alex noticed the differences quickly. It was far easier for someone without deep technical expertise to manage the community.

Setting up categories—what Duck Creek calls boards, organized around its product suite—was one of the clearest before-and-after moments. On the legacy platform, organizing categories had felt like navigating an endless folder tree. “It was a nightmare,” Alex said. “In Vanilla, it is so easy. I’ll be able to roll out new features more easily and far more quickly than I ever could have before. I can’t stress that enough.”

Vanilla’s role-based experiences let Duck Creek serve different views to internal staff, clients, and partners without anyone having to hand-code custom layouts, which Alex described as “pretty amazing.” That same flexibility let Alex lean into Duck Creek’s branding—the duck-and-pond identity its customers know and enjoy—and carry it through the new platform.

Duck Creek also gained better analysis and reporting through Vanilla’s question-and-answer flow, which lets users mark a response as the answer to their question. The old platform had been built around pure discussion threads; Q&A wasn’t part of the experience.

“Now we can start tying pond activity directly back to our company’s effort to reduce ticket intake,” Alex said. “If users are asking questions on the pond and receiving expert guidance there, we can extrapolate that those may have been tickets that didn’t get submitted in our ticketing system because the user got their answer. We’re already offering more on day one than we did before.”

A Reinvigorated Community

The migration to Higher Logic Vanilla did something Alex hadn’t fully anticipated. It generated genuine excitement.

“The migration breathed new life into the user community,” said Alex. “The Pond looks far better, behaves far better, it’s more user-friendly. Activity has picked up dramatically since launch. We’ve had clients who weren’t on the old community express interest in joining, we’ve added new companies, and right now we’re experiencing an explosion of activity.”

The community is now positioned to do more than it ever has, and Duck Creek is already planning what’s next.