Don’t Fear the Move—Grow Your Community with a Smart Migration

A migration is not something to be afraid of. It is not something that is going to crater your business if you make really good choices about how you are reimagining the offer, the value, really the experience for your members and breaking out something new for you to launch and validate on that new platform that you want to move to.

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Hey, I'm Gina Bianchini and this is People Magic, where I am going to cover everything you need to create a $1 million community. Let's dive in.

Hi Gina. I've been running an online course through a course platform and a Facebook group, but I know it's time to move. What should I know or avoid in making the move? I'm nervous about creating a nightmare for myself or my members.

So first of all, you are not alone the entire online course industry. The promise of online courses was that you could create content, set it up, charge people money for it. Maybe you'd have a community that would be like a bonus feature that you would add to it so you could make your offer a little bit sweeter. That is how a lot of people built absolutely decent to incredible businesses, sort of the spectrum of like solid all the way through to some pretty spectacular success stories in online courses. The reality is though that with an infinite amount of content and chat, GPT and other AI chatbots being able to provide such a more compelling experience, your online course and Facebook group, it's more and more challenging to stay current and offer people something that can be truly valuable. So what we're seeing at Mighty Networks is that we got a lot of people who are like, okay, I got to do something different. So it sounds like you might be in that world of okay, I got to do something different here. I got to actually move to a modern community platform that can support my courses, but really is about how I move from one time course fees to potentially recurring or an ongoing membership and really create something that is how my members are meeting each other and applying my ideas in their lives where the relationships that you're making and building with other members is the true value of what someone is buying month after month. So just want to like level set on why this is a important migration or transition that is happening in this industry because a lot of course platforms and Facebook groups worked for a very long time and now there's just a new breed of more sophisticated AI enabled platforms that are allowing your members to meet and build amazing relationships with people that you've introduced them to how to take advantage of that. So number one, doing a Audit of what is real is super important. So you know, looking at your course content for, hey, if, if I am serving somebody who's overwhelmed, has lots of other options, it's not about the volume of what I offer, it's about getting people the ability to apply my ideas as quickly as possible in community with other people. So that's one thing that we have seen people do really effectively and they are typically very happy after they have made the move from that legacy world of a course platform and a Facebook group to a modern platform like Mighty is. They're starting with a more edited down experience and we help a lot of people with this on multiple of our different plans and different levels of creators and entrepreneurs and brands. So first thing, just kind of reimagine what you are offering for this new world where you are going to be able to do a lot more things in connecting your members to each other in ways that are dynamic and don't require a lot of work. So between automations and AI, you can really set up your community for the most relevant people to find each other for you then to be able to drop into those groups of people that have found each other, things for them to do, quests for them to go on. So sort of reimagining what you're doing is step one. Step two is don't try to be in all places, meaning don't try to keep your old course platform and your Facebook group going. You want to make sure that you have built a plan that gets everybody to the new world. And why is that? Because I could imagine somebody saying it's like, well that's easy for you to say, you're probably biased, Gina, you want everybody on your platform. Here's what we've learned after, you know, six years of doing this is that almost to a person, the people who tried to create longer and longer transitions, like I kept my group open, I wanted everybody to like really feel good. They look back and they say, I wish I would have done that in like 30, 45, 60 days, not six months. So knowing what that process is, there are many different ways of that transition process though and I think that's really important. So it's not about just ripping the band aid off and one day you're completely off your course platform in Facebook group. Here's what we've seen work really well. You can launch a new membership or a new course on a new platform. So helping people get comfortable with a new place to go through a new offer that has worked really well. And what we typically then see is that as you've reimagined your business as how are people going to apply your ideas in their lives? What can you kind of carve out as a new offering that you could launch on the platform that you want to be on? What we have found is that very often, when that is a success, of which it is often a success, then it makes sense to start moving your courses over, start moving your members over and ultimately move your payments over. There's a lot of sort of technical details depending on what platform you are on. In general, a new platform you'll go to. Really easy to set up the course content and bring over your, your community content. Pretty easy for your members to claim their accounts on a new platform. They, they got it. It makes sense. You wouldn't want somebody to be like, hey, we moved you and here's your new password. Like, that's kind of creepy. So claiming an account, getting up and running and happens successfully all the time. And then finally with payments, you know, this is really the easiest one to navigate because either you keep your payments on a third party payment engine or you can just move them over depending on where and how you're running your payments and how your old platform works. The point is a migration is not something to be afraid of. It is not something that is going to crater your business if you make really good choices about how you are reimagining the offer the value, really the experience for your members and breaking out something new for you to launch and validate on that new platform that you want to move to. This new breed of platforms, they are pretty different and they're different in experiences. At Mighty, we have really invested in how are members finding each other through the custom fields that you can set up to make those matches, make those connections with each other through what we call Mighty Co Host, which is how we're facilitating and helping your members see similarities with each other. Literally just how to help you run your community so that it runs itself because of the technology that is behind the scenes. That is typically why you can quickly address are members going to understand this? Yes. Are my members going to like it? What we have definitely found, especially coming from Facebook groups, is oh my gosh, we have our own space and in many cases it's oh my gosh, we have our own apps. That is extremely powerful in terms of being able to say that was the old world we were in. Now we are in a new world. And this new world is built for the future of this community, the future of Our relationships as members of this network, that's getting more valuable to each other with each new person who joins. And as we're sharing our stories, our experiences, our ideas. Not advice, because advice shuts the conversation down. And sharing stories, experiences and ideas opens the conversation up, generates energy and new conversations and relationships and trust between your members. Don't try to do it all at one time, but also have an end date and let people know after 30 or 45 or 60 days that the old world is going away. The new world that you gave people a taste of with a new membership or a new course or a new offering is the new world. And those logistical details behind the scenes are being handled very smoothly with minimal interruption pretty much every day at this point. Don't rip the band aid off day one at the same point in time. Don't try to keep four or six different places that you're trying to like make people happy. It's exhausting and there's no amount of money that justifies trying to do that. Sometimes, especially with the community business having that future and where we're going to is actually as powerful, if not more powerful, then we're trying to keep everybody happy all the time. Communities are about growth. Communities are about how new experiences and something that is dynamic and amazing and beautiful that takes advantage of what is now possible with technology that sadly, Facebook groups no longer represent. So that's the future. That's community. This is People Magic. I'm Gina Bianchini. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next time. Thank you for being a part of People Magic. I could not do this show without you. If you want a deeper dive on any of these topics, how to build a community, run a membership, choose your pricing. I have a nine part free People Magic masterclass on our website and the link is in the show notes. This is something that I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to share with you, so hopefully you'll find it valuable. And I can't do this show without some burning questions. So everything that I tackle is something someone just like you has offered their idea or offered their question. We take it and turn it into a show. So in the show notes there is the link to leave me a voice memo and I hope you'll take advantage of it.