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“Mighty offers what the other platforms don’t. It’s not just delivering content, it fosters community.”

Adam Walker

Founder

Famously difficult, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” time-travels through the physical and divine throughout four poems, each divided into five sections, some relating to each other. Dr. Adam Walker decided to read it with the members of his burgeoning online literature community, Versed, hoping he could help them appreciate its complex beauty. To do that, he tried a different approach than the one he’s accustomed to as an instructor at Harvard University.

“I said, ‘I'm not going to lecture. I'll guide the discussion, but I want you all to talk to each other,’” Adam recalls. “This was the first time we did that. When I stepped back from the lecture model and gave them free range to pose their own questions and answer them together, I realized this has the potential for a community.”

That was a year ago when Adam hosted Versed on another platform. Since then, he’s moved to Mighty Networks, and his community has grown to 270 members ranging from high schoolers to retirees, all from different reading backgrounds. Some are accomplished poets and others are just discovering their love for it, but they’ve all come to Versed to find the support they need to dive deeper.

Rewriting The Goal

Originally, Versed lived on Patreon, but when Adam started to see people magic sparking with his members, he knew he needed to find a new platform that put community first instead of content. After some professorial research, he landed on Mighty Networks.

“You can watch lectures, you can read alone, but there's really something that happens in conversation that's really amazing,” Adam says. “Mighty allowed for this layered interaction. So I've got live events, discussion threads, community spaces, and chat rooms — even a place where people share their own resources — all within this ad-free environment, which was also a big thing for me. It perfectly supports the pedagogical values of this whole endeavor.”

Adam told his original Patreon members about the impending switch and offered them a $10 per month founding rate that would never increase, since they had been paying $10 previously. Almost every member made the move, and he more than made up for the ones he lost within the first three weeks of relaunching. With a new toolbox of features to facilitate more member-to-member conversations and relationship building, Adam sees meaningful connections and transformations happening every day in his community — the kind that’s much more difficult to create in the classroom

“I found that I'm less of a sage on stage and more of a host of a house party of readers,” he says. “In some ways, the ideals of the great university are living more successfully here.”

Poetry in Motion

For Adam, Mighty Networks’ privacy and features have inspired his members to contribute more and seek knowledge from each other, not just him. Because of that people magic, he’s been able to let go of the burden of facilitating every interaction. Now he can spend that time thinking of more creative ways to share the work of The English Romantics and other writers.

“With the file sharing features in the chat of this course, I sent out a couple of paragraphs saying, ‘Okay, here's what this critic says about this poet's work.’ And it was a very bad review of the poet,” Adam explains. “He didn't like the poet, and we all love the poet. So we came ready to. To say, ‘Okay, what do we think about this?’ And that was one of those breakthrough moments.”

With his increased retention rate, Adam hopes to add enough members to have 500, a number that would give him the ability to make Versed his professional focus. That many more members would also spark just as many insights and connections in the community’s conversations.

“Personally, Mighty Networks has changed me by teaching me that hospitality is a scholarly virtue,” he says. “Poetry invites participation and conversation. It’s the perfect thing for this platform. We can come at it from different angles, from different backgrounds, from different identities. People aren’t just talking about poetry, they’re also talking about their lives.”