We’re excited to announce that Donut has acquired Gatheround, an interactive live video platform that makes it easy to create dynamic event agendas and boost session participation.

This is a big next step in our vision for what employee programs can and should be. 

We pride ourselves on delivering exceptional outcomes to the 20,000+ teams that use Donut today to automate key workflows throughout the employee lifecycle. We’ve made over 16 million connections and enrolled more than 400,000 employees in onboarding, mentorship, and learning Journeys at companies like Okta, Slack, and Axios. And we’ve saved teams countless hours by automating over 4 million employee communications and tasks. 

But there’s an opportunity to do even more. Most Donut customers run live sessions as part of their employee experience programs, which are closely linked to critical business outcomes like retention and employee collaboration. 

Done well, live sessions like onboarding events and learning workshops have a huge impact.  New hires who have a well-designed onboarding experience are 62% more productive and retain long-term at far higher levels than those who don’t — a huge savings to the business when the cost of a single churned employee is roughly one-third of their equivalent annual salary. 

But it is time-consuming and complicated to design, facilitate, and produce an engaging live session — and poorly structured sessions (of any kind) have been found to be the single greatest barrier to workplace productivity today. 

 

Enter Gatheround — A Structured Tool for Creating Engaging Live Sessions

Gatheround makes it easy to create structured live events and sessions, combining a state-of-the-art agenda builder, a deep library of pre-built content, and an interactive video interface to provide an industry-leading live experience. Gatheround has a verbal participation rate of over 80% — nearly 2.5x higher than in other video conferencing platforms — and a proven track record of delivering impressive employee program outcomes through hundreds of thousands of live sessions for companies like Calendly, Gusto, Google, and more.

“Gatheround is a natural expansion of the value Donut already offers to our customers,” says Dan Manian, our CEO and co-founder, adding, “It will be an important part of our strategic roadmap as we serve the rapidly evolving needs of the modern workplace. As more teams become hybrid, retaining some elements of a distributed model, it’s more important than ever for employee experience programs to be equally dynamic — moving seamlessly across asynchronous communication tools like Slack, live virtual interactions, and live in-person collaboration.” 

Many teams today are fluid and may span multiple office locations, while combining remote and hybrid modes of working. To meet these shifting needs, Donut flexes across collaboration and working modalities, helping fully remote teams like Huntress develop high-scoring onboarding experiences and boost eNPS, while working just as effectively to scale a global, hybrid onboarding program for Flatiron Health. 

Billy McMillan, Director of Learning and Development at Huntress, says he looks forward to building on the success of his team’s partnership with Donut by adding live sessions hosted through Gatheround.

“Donut Journeys already play a vital part in Huntress’ L&LD programs like manager training and new hire onboarding by allowing us to prep learners, reinforce takeaways, and collect feedback. We’re excited about leveraging Gatheround to host more engaging live sessions for our fully remote team. The flexibility of the agenda builder and interactive activities we can include will make for more impactful experiences and will help us continue to achieve excellent eNPS scores.”

 

A Warm Welcome to Gatheround’s Customers and Community

We’re equally excited to welcome Gatheround’s passionate community of customers and users, who today turn to Gatheround to design engaging sessions for their high-performing teams. They call Gatheround “essential,” “inclusive, “a game-changer,” and “the breakthrough in culture they’ve spent years searching for.” 

We’ll continue to support this thoughtful and dedicated user base, and look forward to helping Gatheround’s customers drive even greater impact for their organizations as we build on Gatheround’s core experience as part of Donut. 

“For six years, Gatheround has pioneered new ways to make virtual workplace gatherings interactive and outcomes-driven, while raising the bar on how teams use their time,” says Lisa Conn, CEO and co-founder of Gatheround, who has moved into an advisory role to support the continued success of Gatheround. “I’m incredibly proud of how we have served our community and customers, and look forward to seeing Gatheround grow even more and deliver expanded functionality to customers as part of Donut.” 

Welcome Gatheround! We can’t wait to start building new employee experiences together. 

Learn more about Gatheround — and watch this space for ongoing updates as Gatheround becomes part of Donut.