((toc))

“99% of our members come from word-of-mouth referral. We couldn't ask for anything better than that.”

Dr. Jody Britten

Head of Research and Innovation

When Dr. Jody Britten started Team4Tech’s Community of Practice on Mighty Networks in July 2022, they had a five-year goal for 180 organizations to join their mission to improve education around the world. Just two and a half years later, they have over 980. It’s an achievement that Jody, Team4Tech’s Head of Research and Innovation, doesn’t take for granted, but she’s also not surprised. After decades as an EdTech consultant and researcher — also one of the first teachers with a digital-driven classroom in the ’90s — Jody was already aware of what other training and knowledge-sharing platforms were missing: connection.
“Our educators need a space to be together where they can learn, grow, access, and share without interruption, and Mighty Networks makes that possible,” she says.
Jody had seen other platforms tag community spaces on the end of their services, but after managing and participating in several other Mighty Networks, she knew its community-first design would serve Team4Tech’s ambitious goals.

Building Bridges

In a short amount of time, Jody and her team have built a library’s worth of resources plus geographically focused hubs for their member organizations spread across 98 different countries, all working on complex education challenges in unique settings and circumstances. But because of their network’s people magic, members often find that the solutions they’ve found for their specific dilemmas transcend borders. Jody credits that regional-global connection to Mighty Networks’ features that easily let her team link and layer content and conversations.

“In our Mighty Network, the pull is so tight,” says Jody. “Our courses link to our resources, our resources link to our events, our events link to courses. Everything has been very carefully mapped so it's all connecting.”

That constellation of content keeps members highly engaged and the numbers are astronomical. Team4Tech’s network sees on average 22,000 active log-ins and 3,500 contributions per month.

Measuring Up

Jody has another powerful example of how Mighty Networks helps her team deliver deep knowledge that’s exciting rather than exhausting. Team4Tech’s Digital Citizenship toolkit would stack up to 300 pages as a PDF print-out. Instead, with Mighty’s gamification and design capabilities, they can section it out, create pre-test and post-test quizzes plus glossaries, and add objectives lists. With data that measures their members' understanding, they can curate better toolkits and courses in the future.

“I think that's the coolest thing for me to see. We're creating the skeleton for these toolkits so they can drive amazing implementation work,” Jody says. “With our courses, we track everything. We're going from about 43 percent pre-test knowledge and understanding to 98 percent, which is amazing. But more important than that growth, we're seeing implementation planning happen.”

Jody and her team also love the customization control from Mighty Networks because they can break dense topics into short digestible sections that work even in low-resource environments.

“So many of our members do not have reliable access to the Internet, power, anything. So if they can log in, download something, and open it up in Mighty, they always have it,” she says. “Even if they lose Internet, they don't have to click around. They can read something for 15 minutes.”

People Magic in Play

Jody says she and her team are often shocked when they look back and see how they built everything they envisioned thanks to their shared community mindset with Mighty Networks. Team4Tech’s ecosystem is teeming with vibrant interactions—56 percent of their content is member-generated and they rarely recruit new organizations to join. Though, Jody is still looking for that Antarctica teacher to cover all her continents.

“About 99 percent of our members come from word-of-mouth referral,” she says. “We couldn't ask for anything better than that.”

When those new members join, they’re equally shocked at how easy it is to navigate the space and access everything the network offers. Once they open their welcome checklist, one of their action items is a conversation with Jody or one of her team members, and that human connection plays out in every interaction they have afterwards.

“Our Chief Program Officer just had a conversation this week with one of our strategic nonprofit partners who said, ‘Every time I need something, I look at the community first because I know that you have vetted the content. It's not a Google search,’” she says “That's the footprint we want for our Community of Practice.”