How Elsie Connects Female and Sexual Health Experts Around the World with Mighty

“We had 18 people from six different countries join within 10 minutes of launching.”

Emma Ahlert

Founder

As World War I raged, Scottish suffragette and surgeon Elsie Inglis approached an army official to offer her medical expertise and a plan for ready-made hospital units staffed by women; he replied, “My good lady, go home and sit still.” But Elsie didn’t sit down. She repeated her offer to the French government instead, and pressed on. By the time she passed away in 1917, she had started the first women’s hospital in Scotland and became a hero in women’s rights and medicine. When Emma Ahlert thought about what to name her community connecting female and sexual health freelancers, she knew Elsie’s spirit was just what they needed to guide them.

“Scotland is such a special place in my heart and part of my journey,” Emma says. “It's also a really amazing country in terms of having so much female and sexual healthcare infrastructure — there's free period care everywhere you go, by law. All new parents get baby boxes. Our community’s name, Elsie, also pays homage to Edinburgh, even though we’re super global.”

After studying sexual healthcare in graduate school and attempting an earlier iteration of a network for people in her sector, Emma found out her VISA that let her live and work in Edinburgh would expire. She had one solution: start a business to renew it. So Emma didn’t sit down. She pressed on, and that’s when she found Mighty Networks.

When Emma started looking for a platform to launch Elsie, she looked at Circle and a few other options, but then she remembered something Mighty Networks founder Gina Bianchini said in a 2019 episode of Sophia Amoruso’s Girlboss Radio podcast.

“The way that she explained the difference between an audience and a community made a lot of sense to me,” she says. “There’s an abundance that comes from community, when you connect people who care about the same thing.”

Emma didn’t want to use traditional social media to build Elsie’s community. It didn’t feel aligned with her mission to position herself as an expert influencer on freelancing, nor did she want to deal with the unwarranted censorship from Facebook or Instagram. Instead, she let her founding members inform how she built a safe, private space that made them feel welcome and empowered. It felt a bit like building the plane as she flew it, but the result is exactly what Emma wanted aesthetically and functionally.

“A member in Seville recently posted that she's deleting all of her social media accounts,” she says. “But there were two communities where she was going to take all of her energy and spend more time with because they light her up, and one of them was Elsie.”

When Elsie went live, Emma was nervous about how many people would join her new community. Was it too niche? But within 10 minutes, she had 18 people from six different countries. Those founding members joined for £5 a month, but within months, they were encouraging her to charge more.

“I did a gig match for a member paying £5 a month, and now she's on a £350 day rate," Emma says. “I felt self-conscious to go from £5 to £10, but my members messaged me and said this is worth so much more than that. I’ve even seen a difference in behavior where £10 feels like more skin in the game."

Today, she has more than 140 members from 15 different countries. Some of them even work for huge companies like Canva, Bumble, and Headspace. She credits those founding members for helping her build a space where people have found not just fulfilling work, but also real-world friends.

"A member based in London was going to Australia by herself, and it was her first solo trip ever so she was nervous about it,” Emma says. “Then our member in Australia sent me a selfie of them having a coffee. I got chills even saying that."

In a month, Emma will celebrate Elsie’s first anniversary, a tight-knit community that coalesced from an alienating experience, and surpassed her goals more than she had ever imagined at the beginning.

“I think building opportunities for people to connect is really special,” she says. “Networking can be so anxiety-inducing, so I really like that when people reach out and say, ‘I saw you're an Elsie member. I'm also an Elsie member,’ it cuts through the weeds. You instantly have a bit of credibility. I hope it becomes like a badge of honor to be part of it, and people keep being really proud to be a member.”