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“We have more quality engagement with 325 paid members than 560,000 followers on Facebook.”

Mike Wendlend

Founder and Publisher

Mike Wendland thought he had retired when he bought his first RV. Instead, he accidentally started a wildly successful business. An Emmy Award-winning journalist in his previous career, Mike started blogging about life on the road with his wife, Jen, in 2008. Their storytelling drew thousands of followers, and soon Mike had an online empire dedicated to RVing. Since his first post, he has never stopped adopting new mediums from a YouTube channel to a podcast. So when he started to grow frustrated with his Facebook group and Google search traffic, Mike naturally started investigating new ways to manage his massive community.

“We were really at the start of the van life movement,” Mike recalls. “We had sponsors coming in, and the blog went well. Between our podcast, special media, and YouTube channel, we had about a million followers on all our platforms. Then Google did this content update, and I watched our traffic plummet almost overnight. Silly stuff from Reddit was taking precedence. It just hit me that we are so dependent on all these platforms and their arbitrary whims. They really own our subscribers.”

Then, Mike found Mighty Networks, a solution that would allow him to own the community he had worked hard to build for close to two decades.

“The one thing that those algorithms can't account for or screw up are the relationships that people build,” he says.

Deciding To Take A New Route

With so many followers spread across social media in addition to their web traffic and podcast listeners, deciding to move their audience to a new platform was a hard decision. But for Mike, it was easy to see that the road would be less rocky by making the move with Mighty Networks.

“We have a slogan for RV Lifestyle: Have fun. Make friends. Find adventure. All of our platforms funnel to that and the community. I was absolutely convinced we needed to move to Mighty,” Mike says. “This will be our 15th year in business. Of all the tech platforms I've dealt with — and I've dealt with pretty much all of them — Mighty Networks is the best I’ve ever seen.”

Even though they would still maintain a presence in the expected social media spaces, Mike knew part of his community would be hesitant to make the switch to a new gathering place, but he decided to position their new platform as a positive space where members would be able to take advantage of everything RV Lifestyle had to offer in a much more organized, constructive way. His big line: “Are you sick of the snarkiness on Facebook?” It turns out, quite a few people were. Around 16,000 people joined RV Lifestyle’s community on Mighty Networks in just the first year.

Moving From a Free to Paid Membership

Initially, Mike thought offering a free membership would be the best path forward for RV Lifestyle’s audience, but with the help of Mighty Networks’ experts, he saw that a paid membership model would sustain their growth. He recently introduced their new three-tiered membership plan, which ranges from $4.95 to $19.95 a month, and slowly but surely, members have joined because they see the value in owning their community.

“The tech team we have at Mighty Networks, Murphy and his crew, they’re so responsive and really helpful. They helped us straighten out our offer,” Mike says. “We have more quality engagement with 325 paid members than 560,000 followers on Facebook. We are just really geeked on this. These are our people, our names. They're here with us. We’re not dependent on Google or YouTube.”

Even though Mike wishes he had tried a paid membership from the start, he’s not nervous about course correcting because he is on a first-name basis with his support team. Now, he’s excited about offering more to his audience and making the most of Mighty Networks' features.

“Jane at Mighty is just amazing. She did a modification of our platform this week,” Mike says. “Her automations are great. Now, when somebody posts a comment, there’s a response like: ‘Hey John, I just saw you posted a great answer to a question. Thank you so much for sharing.’ And it gives them a badge for that, and they love that.”

They also host three large in-person rallies a year. They just finished one in Nashville with 80 members (they all went to the Grand Ole Opry together, and they’ll host two more in Michigan and Texas, along with a series of mini meet-ups across the country.

Like many of its members, RV Lifestyle is entering a new, but exciting chapter. The destination might not look like what Mike imagined when he first started back in 2008, but that doesn’t change how meaningful the journey there has been.

“We have turned an online business into a true community where people hurt with each other and celebrate with each other and joke with each other,” Mike says. “Buying an RV is the second most important or costly thing anybody will purchase other than buying a house. Many people have worked their whole lives for it. To watch us be able to enrich that experience has been the most rewarding to me.”