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Introducing Public Guru Cards: From Our Team to Your Team and Beyond
The leaves are turning, it’s finally #sweaterweather, and once we’re done getting spooky this Thursday, the winter holiday season will officially be upon us. As we gather with friends and family over the next few months, the spirit of sharing everything from favorite recipes to hotel rooms is unavoidable. Here at Guru, we think that spirit should extend to knowledge, too.
That’s why we’re excited to announce our newest feature: Public Cards. Public cards are here to help you share knowledge with everyone from your entire LinkedIn network to your crazy uncle. For the first time ever, you can share valuable knowledge in Guru with anyone with just a link—no sign-in required.
How Guru’s Public Cards work
- A Guru author creates, verifies, and publishes a new Card
- Once that Card is ready to be shared, authors in that collection can toggle on a new option under the Card’s “Privacy and Sharing” settings
- The Card is now public, and will be accessible via a specific link (this setting can always be turned off to enable team-only access again)
- The Card can now be embedded in blog posts, shared on social media, linked in an email, and more!
How you can use Public Cards
Public Cards provide their audience with a different type of knowledge: trusted and verified by the experts and companies they care about. These Cards are backed by the same verification engine as traditional Guru Cards, meaning that you can see when and by whom a Card was last verified. Think of it as a living “published” date that gives you a view into how recently that content was updated, and lets you know who is putting their name behind it. (Don’t worry, Public Cards display the company which last verified a Card, not the individual’s name).
Why Guru created Public Cards
We’ve seen that our customers use Guru to organize all kinds of valuable knowledge, and in many cases, that knowledge is important for both internal and external audiences. Traditionally, Guru users would copy information from a Card and convert it into another format (email, chat message, etc.) to share with people outside of their team. But our data told us that there was more to the story—people seemed to want to share content directly from the source itself.
What tipped us off was looking at usage of our PDF feature, which allows users to create a PDF out of either a Card or Board they are working with. To date, almost 50% of teams using Guru are using the PDF feature, which made us realize that users wanted to share Guru knowledge outside of their Guru instances. After talking with several customers, we confirmed that they often wanted to share knowledge in Guru with people outside of their immediate team—including channel partners, sister companies, customers, and even more public audiences such as social networks.
After confirming our customers wanted this feature, we started thinking about whether Public Cards made sense for the end-user, aka the reader.
We realized that there were few platforms out there that were designed to share bite-sized, digestible knowledge; even fewer that encouraged that knowledge to be updated and kept fresh consistently; and almost none that provided a verification engine to let readers know that they could trust that what they were reading was current and accurate.
That’s when we started to recognize the plethora of use cases for which Public Cards made sense.
Best uses for Guru Public Cards
We’re finding more and more uses for Public Cards every day, but many of them fall into one of these major categories:
- Best practices lists (ex: Emergence Capital’s Our go-to list: The Top 30 Interview Questions)
- Event details/ logistics (ex: Our Partner Event Template)
- Publication repositories (ex: Rick Nucci—Presentations, Publications, and Press)
These categories are proving such great platforms for Public Cards because they are optimized by the key features of Guru Cards: bite-sized knowledge, consistent updates, and verification.
In short, we’re as stoked for this launch as we are for the return of gingerbread lattes.
