Our move to Mighty Networks seems to be working. Here’s 12 reasons why…

A month ago I wrote a post to explain why we were moving our community off Facebook and Slack to Mighty Networks got a lot of interest, so I wanted to write a follow-up post to share our learnings so far.

It’s working for us and here’s why I think that is:

1. We made it clear we’re closing our other channels, so the message was if you value what we do and the community we’re building it’s MN or else (or wait for one of our real world events)
2. Crucially we explained the thinking behind the move so people understood the reasons behind it and why it was for the greater good
3. We already had a paid community and a tribe of people that have met in the real world which made the move easier
4. We geeked up on how other Mighty Networks operated and were shown the way by the supportive Mighty Hosts community
5. Good design has always been at the heart of everything we do so we were so excited to stumble upon MN. I could see how we could harness the platform to achieve our goals, and create a great experience for our members. Where possible we add our own photos, videos and great copy to make it fun, simple and welcoming.
6. We’re learning and improving every day, listening to members and responding to what we feel is and isn’t working. We’re learning that small, bitesized bits of content work best — and people love video they can watch now more than live events they have to be available for.
7. Polls and questions work great and help to get those not normally comfortable to engage with us and others (one of the reasons our contribution rate is more than 75%)
8. We created tip videos to help new members get familiar with the platform
9. We have a monthly content calendar with a different theme each month where we plan our content and webinars for the month (our themes are: success, vision, creativity, design, tech, storytelling, branding, marketing, leadership, money, productivity, wellbeing)
10. We seeded content under each theme before we launched — with our best articles, top books, interviews and classes that we already had from our archives (and if we didn’t we created them)
11. Our community is deliberately small and we like it that way. Like our events we believe less is more to build strong connections. We have just under 200 members now and plan to put a limit at 500 members. We’re a paid community ($29–35 a month) and this means those that join are committed.
12. Finally we created a nice landing page sharing our vision using our creative and design chops

I know this all sounds like a lot of work and it is.

But I only discovered Mighty Networks at the turn of 2018 and we did a soft launch just 2 weeks later. So start small, learn and grow from there — as we say making it minimum loveable.

And don’t get too disheartened if you don’t get the results you’d hoped for. Resilience will serve you well as your community / business grows.

Join our community and experience it for yourself