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Ten years into her successful ventures with a Facebook group and website devoted to Lakeland moms and family-friendly activities, April Mucci is launching her grandest project yet.
“It feels big,” she says.
It would have to be.
It comes on top of outsized numbers for her private Facebook group that has about 11,000 members, and the website that now has about 1.8 million annual page views.
What: A new website built to connect Polk County women
Local Moms and More is already up and running.
However, Mucci explains, choosing her words carefully, “It is not necessarily a new site.
“It is an online membership community.”
It’s a paid site, with memberships for $4.99 a month.
Mucci won’t take conventional advertising on it.
Memberships are for individual women only. They don’t have to be moms, though — that, Mucci says, is “my way of trying to be as inclusive as possible.”
It has between 45 and 50 members already, days after she soft-launched it — which is already enough, she says, to cover the cost of “the tech.”
The tech: It’s built on a platform that she licenses from Mighty Networks.
“What’s possible when a paid membership, online courses, challenges, or events are powered by AI?” Mighty Networks asks.
“Your community essentially runs itself.”
Mucci is very much guiding this community.
Now she’s looking for new member feedback to help shape its evolution.
Meanwhile, the calendar and other popular content will remain on her free site and she will continue her Facebook group, at least for now.
But along the way she’s realized that Facebook wasn’t good at building the kind of community she imagined.
What she imagines: Local Moms and More, Mucci says, is “for moms who want to join and meet other moms outside social media. For years I’ve heard women talk about how challenging it is to meet friends as an adult…
“In my mind, it’s for people who are newer to the area and looking for friends and connection and maybe aren’t on Facebook, and other people who maybe aren’t new to town but don’t feel connected.”
Mucci, who is 45, began this online mom journey when her sons were 4 and 6 years old.
Now they’re teenagers, 14 and 16.
That’s not the only evolution.
The ways that people look for content and information also have changed over the last decade, she’s observed, so much “that community is becoming more valuable as the internet becomes less useful.”
What’s inside: Local Moms and More has topical sub-groups arranged by interests, such as a book club, tv and movies, travel, meal-planning and recipes, and parenting and motherhood.
Will it work?
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”
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