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“Mighty Networks checked all the boxes for us and even provided direction and growth for what we might do in the future.”

Andrea Davis-Cetina

Marketing Director

Ranchers aren’t exactly known as chatterboxes. Andrea Davis-Cetina, a farmer herself, knew this when she started Ranching for Profit’s online community with Mighty Networks — a new place for their ranching school alumni to connect and access resources. It was all quiet on the discussion front at first after they launched. Then, slowly but surely, RFP’s members started talking, first by answering questions she posed using Mighty Networks’ Icebreaker Suggestion feature.

“I looked through Mighty Insights and saw that people were utilizing the resource library and there was some private chat going on,” Andrea, RFP’s marketing director, says. “A few months later, I became more active in creating polls and questions Monday through Friday. That started a huge increase in engagement with our members. Especially when I asked, ‘If your livestock could give you a Yelp review, what would they say?’”

That positive people magic was exactly why people were drawn to RFP in the first place. A particularly tough agricultural industry, ranching is rarely associated with making money or work-life balance, but RFP was founded on the idea that ranchers could have healthier land, happier families, and more profitable businesses. Andrea saw that people-first, uplifting ethos in Mighty Networks, too.

“In our larger agricultural community, folks constantly tell us how we stand out because we are all about positive thinking,” Andrea says. “We were very happy to see that Mighty Networks has that similar positivity like we do.”

Negativity Doesn’t Get a Bullhorn

Before they launched their community on Mighty Networks, people who had participated in their management schools could access their resource library on a static, cluttered website and connect with each other in a private Facebook group that wasn’t meeting all their needs. When they decided to make the move to Mighty Networks, Andrea easily rounded up their alumni and moved them from that space to their new one without any big bumps in the road. While Mighty Networks streamlined a switch for their members to a new paid plan, it also presented an opportunity to create a free plan to replace their Facebook group.

“Our customer base is not super tech savvy, and a lot of the time, they have choppy service because they're in remote areas,” Andrea explains. “We wanted to make that transition as smooth as possible.”

Andrea and her team have been excited to have a fresh alternative to traditional social media platforms that have been “band-aided” together with few customization options. They can also see that their members are happy to have a new place to roam.

“Even in a private group on social media on another platform, there's a gate to it, but those gates can be really loose,” Andrea says. “I'm starting to see with the increased interaction in our network that folks are realizing it's a safe space.”

Mighty Networks Has More Cowbell

Because of all the added features she can try with Mighty Networks versus social media, Andrea says she always wants to start her work day with the RFP community before she moves on to managing other platforms. One of the bells and whistles she loves: the AI assistant, which has helped her wrangle some of her time back.

“We had never utilized AI before, and with Mighty Networks, it was really great for dipping our toes in,” she says. “When I write something and I'm like, ‘This sounds too dry. Let’s make it witty.” Or if I’m coming off too frivolous with a serious topic, it helps make it sound more professional. Before that could have taken me all day, and instead, it's seconds.”

Now that Andrea has more responses from their members, other people on RFP’s team can provide better service for the whole organization. When their office manager noticed the answers to a question asking members what accounting software they use, she finally had the right information to tell people over the phone or in person. In the past, they wouldn’t have had the time to survey their members about smaller topics like software. Now, Andrea and anyone on the team can drop new questions they receive elsewhere in the discussion space whenever they want.

“Mighty Networks is helping us get out of our past paradigms in how we interact with our members and change the language we talk to them in,” Andrea says. “I really feel like we've created a community that not only functions, but one that will grow and give us direction as a company.”