“I launched my first course, and I got 60 people in three hours.”

Ian Roberts

Founder

If you ask Ian Roberts to name the most important skill in painting, he’ll tell you it’s understanding composition. He should know — he wrote the book on it. His instructional guide, Mastering Composition, has sold over 60,000 copies since its publication in 2007. Ian, a full-time artist for more than 40 years, had spent most of his career teaching traditional in-person painting workshops. But when his wife pointed out the potential risks for his workshops in the south of France and inability to insure them, he decided to develop online courses to reach more people.

“I spent a year developing the courses and piloting them until we launched the first major course in April 2020, right after Covid happened," Ian recalls. “The timing was incredible. Everyone was baking bread and doing all this stuff they had never done before.”

Ian already had a foundation to build his online presence because of his book, but once he launched his online courses, far more people than he expected flocked to his typically quiet YouTube Channel. Suddenly, he had 210,000 subscribers. But he knew he needed a better platform to host his followers where they could learn together in smaller groups, and he could give more personalized instruction. Mighty Networks was the answer.

When he started to look for a community platform, Ian wanted to find one that would allow him to create multiple small groups for members so they could learn in the same style as his workshops. Mighty Networks’ spaces feature could create up to 30 small groups that could all learn the same material, and Ian could drop into each one. In real life, he could never physically run multiple studios at once. With Mighty he could. But when he opened his course for sign-ups, he faced an unexpected challenge.

“I launched my first course hoping maybe I could get 60 people total,” he says. “I got 60 people in three hours. I had to close registration and reopen it with a second course starting in a couple of months. That one filled up right away, too."

Robin Edmundson was one of those first members who signed up for the group and remembers how lucky she felt nabbing one of the limited spots. In 2021, which Ian jokingly refers to as “the nightmare year,” he opened the course registration again, and 850 students signed up. He felt overwhelmed, and his wife, the painter Anne ward, jumped in to help him. The following year, he decided to enlist more help, and Robin joined him as Mastering Composition’s Director of Operations.

"I really like how flexible Mighty Networks has become,” Robin says. “The structures that Mighty allows you to build are flexible enough to allow you to start something and change direction if you need to. That's huge."

Although Ian was an early adopter of Mighty’s technology (he’s been with the platform for so long, Mastering Composition is on a legacy plan), not all of his members are quite as tech-savvy. He and Robin are grateful that Mighty’s features are powerful but easy enough to learn for their members, who are mostly between the ages of 55 and 80.

“We had a thousand people come in with our last launch,” Robin explains. “We added a welcome checklist and live tech help calls before things started going. With that combination, there were so many fewer questions this time, even though the group was bigger.”

Even though Robin has become an expert at designing and running their community as it's grown, when she needs live tech help herself, she knows Mighty Networks experts are always available.

“As much as I know, there are still things that stymie me,” she says. “I can take it to Mighty’s experts, and I know I'm going to get a polite response back with options. Mighty’s tech support is outstanding.”

The small groups are central to the members’ experience and engagement Each one has a discussion space where they can critique and celebrate each other’s work. The alumni of those courses also have discussion spaces so they can keep the relationships they’ve built in their courses and meet other members, too. Both Ian and Robin have been thrilled to watch how the people magic in these groups sparks on its own, and their members don’t need their supervision to keep the energy going.

“People make art on their own. It's sort of a lonely practice, and yet you need feedback,” Ian says. “Now they have some very sophisticated fellow students who will consider what they're doing, and there's a constant discussion all the time. They just take care of it, and we don't really have to do anything.”

After decades of teaching, Ian recently looked at the bigger picture of his life and decided he wants to refocus on his own painting practice again. He won’t be completely absent, but he feels secure knowing Robin and his members can take his vision forward.

“One of the really gratifying things is that, when Ian said, ‘I'm stepping back from the community,’ and the members realized there were no more monthly calls with him, they said, ‘We can do our own calls,’” Robin says. “And of course, I had already set up a system where they could do that. That's when they started stepping up, and it's completely independent.”

“It's all going to work great with Mighty,” Ian echoes.