New Home Forums Media & Technology An Update on Mighty Networks

36 replies, 11 voices Last updated by  Laura Koller 5 years, 10 months ago
Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 37 total)
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  • #68341

    Bradley Morris
    Mountain Guide
    @bradleytmorris

    I just got back a few days ago from my time in Palo Alto, California with the Mighty Networks team. We did two full days of mapping out their eCourse platform, how to gamify it and how to create the ultimate course builder based on some of the specific limitations of their platform,  budget and time-line.

    First off, it was awesome. I felt like I was in my element and all of the lessons Andy and I learned while building the GEA paid off valuably for their team.

    I will also say, I am really pumped about the product we’ll all have access to within the next few months. For all of you non-techies (and techies too), this is going to be a SAAS platform unlike any other on the market.

    The short:

    You will be able to build gamified communities, eCourses and membership sites with ease and quite a bit of creative freedom. What you’ll be able to do with Mighty Networks would cost you minimum $10,000+, plus a ton of regular maintenance and a great designer (or, a helluva lot of time).

    Version One:

    None of this is guaranteed to be a part of V1, but this is where we left off. Now it will be a matter of whether or not the engineers can make all these features happen. Regardless, this’ll give you an idea.

    1. The ability to reward students with badges:
    – Manually for completing challenge or specific tasks.
    – Automatically for completing chosen lessons, modules, being super active in community OR completing course

    2. Show badges earned, courses completed and current courses going through in student profile. If someone clicks on any of those badges or icons, then it takes them to that course sales page.

    3. One time payments for networks and courses OR option for paid monthly membership.

    4. Option for free trial OR to make a select group of lessons or modules available for trial before paying

    5. Student will be automatically asked to share a ‘review/testimonial’ after they complete a course.

    6. Basic email notifications.
    – sent 3 hours after going to new lesson.
    – sent 2 and 5 day reminder if they have  not completed lesson.
    – sent 10 days if they have not completed a lesson, it then pushes them to next lesson.

    7. The option to turn off “basic email notifications” and use “advanced notifications” via Zapier. Allowing for you to use your own custom automations via whatever email software you use.

    8. Member analytics so you can track how successful your course is at facilitating results. You will see how one or ALL members are going through your course. Members will be marked with a Green, yellow, Red and Checkered flag, which shows how active students are in the course and community. Green equals active in last 48 hours, yellow means active within last week, red means not active for 10 days or longer.

    9. Ability to build simple, but beautiful course landing or sales page (for each course — free and paid)

    10. Ability to have private, secret or public groups within a community or course (paid or free).

    11. Ability to have “Events” in your group for members, public or VIPs. You can also select who can see these. Events could be in person or webinar style. (eventually, you’ll be able to embed a Livestream Zoom — or other service — right in the event page)

    12. Customizethe name of “sections, lessons, articles, posts, etc” titles. (The more customization, the better)

    13. The ability to embed audio players (such as soundcloud or others)

    14. The ability to embed Wistia videos (right now it’s just Youtube and Vimeo).

    15. “Glow marks” that teach you or new members to use the tools and navigate the platform if its’ your first time. These will be little tiny glowing boxes that if you click on them it’ll tell you how to use a certain feature.

    16. Ability to clone lessons, sections and entire courses, making it super streamlined to keep your brands’ look, vibe and course flow consistent.

    17. Ability to start a course on a specific date OR have a course be on evergreen.

    18. Ability to have a “Template Course” that first time creators can use to follow along and set-up their own course. The template has embedded instructions (video/text) to set up their course.

    19. Easy to use affiliate program to help grow the course creators’ network and sales.

    20. A mark complete button at the end of all lessons, with the option for the course creator to make students “show their work” in a comment feed before moving forward.

    21. Ability to turn a part of your course into a public facing blog to attract more members.

    22. Ability to have multiple course instructors upload their courses to your platform, so you can curate awesome courses of people who are in your niche or offer complimentary skillsets.

    23. Ability to have a public facing online community around your niche/topic (free or paid), with private groups inside of the network AND paid/free eCourses. You can essentially make your Mighty Network your own social media site.

    Again, none of this is guaranteed. BUT, for a version one, this is looking super promising. I love the team at Mighty Networks and feel really good about where this is all going. I for one am sold. This is going to make building gamified courses & communities easier than any other option on the internet than I’ve seen.

    Questions? Comments? What features are missing that you’d LOVE to see? I can pass any ideas along if you can come up with them. 

    #68343

    Bradley Morris
    Mountain Guide
    @bradleytmorris

    @davidj, @chrisg

    #68346

    Chris Gilmour
    Adventurer
    @ChrisG

    Awesome @bradleytmorris  Thanks for forging the way in this new frontier. All those points sound awesome. I think three of the big features that stand out to me and that would be important from the list are

    1. Some degree of creative freedom in designing the course pages and branding
    2. Easy automation with my own email program for custom communication, zapier will likely do the trick though short-term
    3. As I really want to focus more on affiliate sales as a marketing model, the easy ability to set-up and track affiliate codes that automate affiliate payments would be HUGE. I really like how easy this is with my other course in Teachables.

    Cheers,

    Chris G

    #68352

    DavidJ Jurasek
    Adventurer
    @DavidJ

    @bradleytmorris

    It sounds like a mash up of something  like Thinkific (which is what we use) + Learndash (which I tried and found too cumbursome to maintain) and private social media. Wondering about the controls with the social aspects to help with monitoring and privacy, but sounds promising.

    Wondering Bradley if you’ve started a Might y Networks community and if so how you’ve ofund that experience?

    #68391

    Bradley Morris
    Mountain Guide
    @bradleytmorris

    It’s super promising @davidj.

    One of the things I like about their approach is that unlike Facebook, they aren’t going to sell all of yours’ and your students’ information to other companies. The only thing they’ll use that information for is to make the app and platform better for all users and creators.

    I have started building two communities on Mighty Networks (eCourse Adventures + Experience Community). Neither are public yet.

    What I love about it is that it’s easy to make beautiful posts, it’s fun to play with, the course builder that I’ve gotten to peak at is going to look beautiful and be easy to use and get creative with. I love a lot of things about it. As I said, you’ll be able to do a lot of what we’ve done here at GEA (in a more simplified manner) in their version one. It’s super promising.

    Curious if there are any features we missed for V1 that you’d want to see @chrisg or @davidj or anyone else?

    #68396

    Mars
    Adventurer
    @Mars

    That does indeed sound promising @bradleytmorris I do like the thought of being able to have private groups within the community. That would allow me to build a large community but talk specifically to different member groups.

    Other than that.. I need to keep reading and understanding, but if it’s going to be as easy as you say.. I’m sold. (Esp if they guarantee our privacy and that our content remains ours)

    #68400

    Christopher
    Adventurer
    @Stadtspurer

    What looks very promising to me is to get a solution where the different parts work seemlessly together, community, memberships, courses. Aesthetic questions play a very important role since we work in a visual medium and want people to get excited to return to their courses like they do to their games.

    So this would be very important to me: having a focus on beauty, so that we can create for each course a special atmosphere.

    #68490

    Bradley Morris
    Mountain Guide
    @bradleytmorris

    Here is what Mighty Networks said about their Privacy Policy. @Stadspurer

    We don’t sell user information. It is not the ethos of the company to do this. We are a SAAS company. We want our Hosts to win because that is how we win. Your members info isn’t necessary to our success.

    We think out Terms of Service are pretty tight. If you would them out and get feedback that would be great. We know people have been burned by a lot of course software. Curious what they think. https://mightynetworks.com/terms_of_use

    #68496

    xbobby
    Adventurer
    @xbobby

    Hi @bradleytmorris

    I sounds fantastic 🙂

    I have some questions:
    Did it still use WordPress as a CMS?
    If it does, can you use every theme you want or only the theme they have?
    Can you use LearnDash or import your course from LearnDash?
    How did it look and work on smartphones and Ipad?
    What is the price?

    #68524

    Bradley Morris
    Mountain Guide
    @bradleytmorris

    Hey @xbobby,

    No, it’s not on wordpress. Mighty Networks is its’ own SAAS platform (kinda like Teachable, but way better)

    No, you can’t use LearnDash.

    Yes, Mighty networks is made for mobile. It looks amazing. You could have your students go through your courses JUST on a cell phone. This is a huge win, because most courses look terrible on a phone.

    The current price for their business plan is $46/month. I have advised them to keep the price in that range for the launch of the feature, to get everyone in the industry piling on and then they’ll likely increase the price to approx $97/month. (no promises, those are all just guesses)

    #68526

    xbobby
    Adventurer
    @xbobby

    @bradleytmorris

    Thanks for the information – was it two mouth from now – that your new site came made on Mighty networks?
    It will be fantastic to see when it came 🙂

    #68575

    Joey Walters
    Adventurer
    @Joey Walters

    Brilliant news thanks <span class=”handle-sign”>@</span>bradleytmorris,

    Really appreciating you sharing all this. I’m trying to get my head around it to think if there’s anything else. Here are a few thoughts:

    1) One thing I’m wondering is what the purchasing experience will be like for courses and what the business model is for the courses. What happens with the shopping cart side of things? Do we integrate with our own shopping carts and the money come in via PayPal (for example) or does MN take a fee from all purchases? Where does the money go?

    2) I have started a Mighty Network but haven’t set anything up yet. Would it be wiser to wait for the course software before inviting folk in, or will it be fairly easy to build the course/membership platform into an existing MN whilst it is active? What I’m thinking here is that I would start gathering interest and building community then add in courses later on. Not sure how this will work in relation to laying out course site and features initially. Any thoughts?

    3) I love the idea of zoom integration into a forum so a kind of FB live experience is possible. That’s perfect. Can replays also be posted this way and would I still have to host via vimeo for example or does the SAAS platform handle that? Imagining perhaps either are possible?

    4) I’m not sure I understand this part: 21. Ability to turn a part of your course into a public facing blog to attract more members. How does the public facing blog get seen and attract people in?

    5) I wonder if there could be a private ‘Journal’ area where a student could update progress that could be either private with the course tutor or coach, OR private within a small group. I realise I could just use the private message feature, but what if there was an optional ‘journal’ area as part of that person’s course membership. This could be for 1:1 coaching clients who are at the VIP level or small mentoring groups. Maybe this is V2!

    6) An events listing of some kind and possibly a groups/circles listing of some kind.

    The only other question I have is around the realistic time scale on this?? Are we talking May/June?

    That’s all I can think of for now Brad… Look forward to hearing more soon….

    MANY thanks,

    Joey

     

     

     

    #68651

    MoveThinkSmile (Adam & Elea)
    Adventurer
    @MoveThinkSmile

    @bradleytmorris

    Stoked about your progress. We are ready to build our course…now. When do you expect the new Mighty Networks platform V1.0 to be available?

    In the meantime, has anyone ever tried https://www.talentlms.com/ ?

    It looks like a super valid immediate option with gamification, internal video conferencing built in and some other awesome features.

    #68653

    Lorraine Watson
    Adventurer
    @lorrainewatson

    I’m in a network that uses Mighty Networks. Not a bad platform, but does have some shortcomings. Things I would like to see:

    • ability to bookmark / save pages to reference later. Especially important for community areas and being able to come back to posts to give feedback or answer questions
    • multi-person chat
    • I would like to see an image driven feed more like Facebook (as in images are predominant so you connect with them first). MN’s interface is still very much text based which doesn’t enhance the theming aspect of gamification and engagement.  An image driven feed, or much more prominence in the ability to use images to connect and engage would be a super fantabulous enhancement.
    • +1 for livestreaming
    #68682

    Bradley Morris
    Mountain Guide
    @bradleytmorris

    I agree with what you’ve said about the images @lorrainewatson and we discussed that when I was down in California. It’s on their road map to make a more visually rich experience. I’ve passed along your requests.

    @Joey Walters, great questions. I sent them off to the team and will keep you in the loop as I know more. There will definitely be an element of V1 complete by May/June, yes. Fingers crossed that the full thing will be up by then with all the gamification, bells and whistles. As I hear more about dates, I’ll let you know.

    However, now is a great time to map your course, create your curriculum, shoot your videos, create the workbooks, do all of your branding, plan the experience, collect the badge images, write the auto-responders and all that stuff. That all needs to be done anyways and you don’t need a platform  🙂

    As for getting in there, YES, if you’re thinking Mighty is where you wanna build your community, then start now. It’s free to start building it. It’s also a great idea to join their Mighty Hosts community so you can ask lots of questions and get help as you need. They’re great at responding.

    The course features will be seamless, so if you start growing your network there, you’ll be ready for courses when they launch. I also know they’re planning a bunch of mini courses to help people get the most from using Mighty Networks.

    Hope that’s helpful

    @MoveThinkSmile, I checked out TalentLMS and it looks super beefy. You can do a ton with that platform. Reading the website, they languaging is pretty technical, which means my guess is they’re targeting teams with techies. I’m wondering if you’ve tried it out and how “user friendly” it is to access all the gamification features and build your course? It definitely looks promising. I’m curious to hear how you enjoy it. Thanks for sharing!

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