Over a decade ago, Meagan Mitchell, one-half of Agents of Change, took the ASWB exam to become a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW). At the time, the preparation process was straightforward. “Basically, you had a book that you could get and read. There were a few other materials out there, but they were limited or cost prohibitive”
Her experience with the preparation process for her exam was what fueled the idea for Agents of Change. Meagan saw a need to update and revamp the materials that were out there, so Meagan’s husband, Alex Mitchell, who comes from a business background, began to do some market research about the existing preparation materials.
“[We found] that [the learning materials] were very outdated,” Meagan explains. “Social work is historically a profession that is slower to adopt technology than other areas, and we saw that as an opportunity. What worked 20 years ago is not the same way people learn now with the availability of self-paced coursing. I’d say, we found the right problem at the right time.”
And so, Agents of Change was born in 2020, during the pandemic. At the time, Meagan was doing individual and group tutoring for people about to take their licensing exams. But one day, Alex, who now works behind the scenes on the technical parts of the business, advised her to put her tutoring content up on a course platform so people can work through a self-paced curriculum.
They started with Gumroad, but by 2021, the business had outgrown Gumroad’s features and they wanted more.
“We were looking for more features, a course [builder], quizzes, better payment options, and more. That’s what led us to Thinkific.”
It’s been four years since the inception of Agents of Change, and the Washington DC-based couple has used Thinkific to deliver an all-encompassing licensing exam prep course, build strong communities across several platforms, and 10X their revenue.
Here’s how they did it:
Skip ahead:
- They set out to fix a problem
- They take a holistic approach to creating learning materials
- They offer consistent value
- They built and nurtured strong communities
- They diversified their marketing channels
- They hired a team
- They kept their prices affordable
- They used Thinkific integrations
When they first got the idea to transition from individual and group tutoring to a course-based program, Meagan and Alex didn’t throw themselves into creating the most elaborate licensing exam preparation program to ever exist.
Instead, they started small by putting out a PDF document on Gumroad. While that worked for a while, it did not eliminate, or even assuage, the huge problem that Meagan discovered during her one-on-one and group tutoring sessions: learning differences.
“[During the physical sessions] she was noticing the problems that students who learn differently or are from a younger generation were having. As millennials in our 30s, we think about people who are just coming right out of school. There’s a different learning environment, so much more happens online, so much more happens with bite-sized videos instead of long-form content.”
That was the spark that ignited their transition from Gumroad to Thinkific. When they signed up with Thinkific, they immediately got access to features that gave them creative freedom to shape Agents of Change into what they knew people needed right now.
“What we like about Thinkific is that we can do videos and text. A big thing we needed was accessibility features, and Thinkific gave us that. Now, we can meet all learning styles—if someone needs closed captioning or they need us to provide the material in a different way, we’ve found that Thinkific is able to do that for us.”
My gripe with online courses is that many of them seem to be a cash grab; they’re crazy expensive and, from the way the courses are set up, you can just tell that the creator(s) took no heed of their prospective students’ needs.
That’s not the case with Meagan and Alex, though.
When creating Agents of Change, they both centered their prospective students right off the bat. Knowing to do this was largely because Meagan, in addition to being a licensed clinical social worker, also has a Master’s in Special Education. That degree exposed her to the different ways that people learn.
“I know a lot about learning theories and how different styles are needed for different types of learners,” says Meagan. “I, myself, have ADHD, so I learn differently. [My goal was] to bring all of those different pieces together to be comprehensive in a way that’s going to represent all people.”
To achieve this, Meagan and Alex initially created 5-7 hours worth of content. But Meagan had big aspirations for the brand, so at intervals, she and Alex do a needs assessment exercise where they ask their customer base what they’d like to see in the course. They took feedback from people at different stages of their careers and tweaked the content to cater to their needs.
A great approach they took was making the revised course flexible. For example, a learner with dyslexia may struggle with the written word, so there are audio files for them. And someone with ADHD, like Meagan, who might find it difficult to get through three straight hours of content, will manage nicely with the bite-sized lessons that Meagan provides.
They also have an Agents of Change mobile app, which is a rarity in many online course programs. Explaining the need for the app, Alex says: “[Social workers] have to drive to their jobs; they’re often on their feet or busy all day. Studying a book is not the best way for them to work through content or refresh their memories on certain themes.”
They started with the Thinkific App to test their theory and see whether people would gravitate toward an app-based medium of learning. And they did. “We heard good feedback,” Alex continues. “We saw a lot of people using the app, so about three or four months ago, we decided to do the branded app through Thinkific.
“Now we have our own Agents of Change app in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, and we’ve seen encouraging results from people who use the app as part of their studying… to listen to some course audio files on the go or do a quick refresher on a topic at lunchtime or at work.”
Right from their Gumroad days, Meagan and Alex have prioritized offering value to their students. It started with their free resource, a file containing 10 practice questions, which people loved. Then, when they moved to Thinkific, they were able to give free previews of the course.
“People get some exposure to the course, even though they don’t understand exactly how the course works. The free preview sounds so simple, but it has been great at helping folks understand what we offer before putting down their money for this investment.”
Meagan and Alex also created a ton of free blog and video content around questions they received from other social workers, which they hosted on their website and YouTube channel respectively. In fact, the free content they’ve shared gives people a good enough idea of what the licensing exam is going to be like.
Even as she creates free content for Agents of Change, Meagan regularly updates the main course. She doesn’t want Agents of Change to be the home of the same outdated information she found during the initial market research before starting the business. So she identifies the updates in the social work industry and incorporates those changes in her course.
She explains this: “The DSM, the Diagnostic Statistic Manual, gets updated at times. So whenever there’s an update, we have to change the course, too. The Code of Ethics that social workers work under changes, so we make sure that we keep up with that.”
I ask what happens when students take their licensing exam prep course and pass. And that’s when Meagan tells me about the continuing education space.
“We looked at the health of the business and said, ‘We have this great community here. How do we continue to engage after they get licensed?’” Meagan recounts. “Social workers, and many health professionals, have to take continuing education to keep their licensure. So we thought, ‘That’s a great way to continue to engage our clients after they pass [their exams].”
In 2023, Meagan and Alex moved into the continuing education space. For this, Meagan interviews leaders in the mental health field to provide professional development content. “You can take your test with us and continue to utilize our professional development tools, which is a lifelong learning milestone.”
One of the main goals Meagan and Alex had as they built Agents of Change was forming a strong community. Now, they have a Facebook community with 15,000 members and an email list with about 50,000 subscribers. They grew these communities by offering free resources and nurturing their members.
Meagan hosts two live study groups each month, which allows students to engage with her in real-time and helps her garner valuable feedback about the course program. The constant value she provides fuels the word-of-mouth marketing that happens when someone uses the course.
“Once people have used the program, it’s word of mouth. We get a lot of [feedback] like, ‘I heard about you from a coworker. What’s really cool about our Facebook community is that people who have passed the exam still stay around to help others.”
The continuing education space that Meagan and Alex have now started to operate in also allows them to offer valuable content to those in their communities who have already gotten their license.
Meagan and Alex have built a strong community and help so many social workers–aspiring and experienced alike–because they take marketing seriously.
In addition to their Facebook community and large email list, they also maintain a blog, a YouTube channel with ~19,000 subscribers, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn accounts, and a podcast where Meagan breaks down practice questions, and discusses salient topics like overcoming test anxiety and bouncing back from a failed test.
But they didn’t start using all of these marketing channels overnight; they started simple: one channel and some valuable lead magnets. “We were in search of [a place] where we can find large communities of social workers we can share our product with and get some testimonials,” Alex recounts. “We found them on social media and we were able to give them things for free, get feedback, and grow from there.”
As the business grew, they started to post more free content on other channels, like their blog, YouTube channels, and, eventually, their podcast. And since many social workers hang out on Facebook, they run paid ads on that platform to expand their reach.
Their email list has been a big part of their journey to growing Agents of Change. On their email list, they share free resources, like product previews and free practice questions every week. They also share course testimonials, which primes those who are thinking of taking the exam to invest in the course.
“Email is a critical part of [lead] nurturing, especially if you’ve captured someone very early on in their test journey. Some folks are on our mailing list for over a year before they’re ready to take their exam, and we’re happy to help them learn.”
One thing Meagan and Alex have realized from diversifying their marketing channels is that although there’s some overlap between their different communities, each platform allows them to attract different people with different needs. As such, they’ve organized the content they put out on each platform into a kind of funnel that leads from one to the next.
For example, they’ve noticed that folks on TikTok and Instagram are just learning about the exam at a high level, so they offer basic content on those platforms. The Facebook community, on the other hand, is more in the weeds, so they answer specific questions and make conversation with members.
The main course contains everything they need to know to pass the ASWB exam–and when they’ve gotten their license, folks can head to the LinkedIn page to get content that will help them grow in their careers.
Alex says:
“We’re trying to, with our products and marketing, serve the entire lifespan of a social worker, from school to retirement.”
As an entrepreneur with a fast-growing business, there’ll come a time when you can’t handle everything on your own without burning out. You’d have to hire a team to help you when that time comes.
It was no different for Meagan and Alex.
Agents of Change was quickly growing and they’d built strong communities across several platforms. It was not easy for both of them to handle content creation, content updates, and community engagement and management all on their own.
So they hired two social workers to work part-time for them as a community manager and a social media content manager. On why they hired social workers, specifically, Meagan expounds: “It’s really important that we hire people who represent what our product is. That has been really helpful, too, because [Agents of Change] has grown massively in a way that we didn’t envision.”
Even though the two new hires work part-time, Meagan and Alex include them in the brainstorming and product ideation aspects of the business.
“We do a ton of team communication,” Meagan tells me. “We have weekly standup meetings and do a lot of road mapping for where we want to go. And every year, we have one new big feature we try to push out. We set that as a goal so we can continue to improve our product.”
Despite how extensive their Bachelors’, Master’s, and Clinical exam prep programs are, the basic course only costs $95. This is relatively cheap for the amount of information Meagan shares and much cheaper than competitors.
On keeping their prices low, Alex says that during the initial market research, he found that many course companies were charging between $300 and $400 on average for a decent test prep course.
“Social workers are not the highest-paid people. They already come out of school with a lot of loans, so it was important for us to give many free options, and also keep our initial offering at a low price point relative to others out there. $95 puts us at the most affordable test prep in the entire space.”
Alex mentioned, however, that there are different lessons or practice exams that people can add onto the $95 course if they want to go beyond the basics, but these are optional. “You can pass the exam by taking the basic offering. You still get those free study groups twice a month and the community perks for a $95 one-time fee.”
Meagan added to this by saying that her decision to keep the price point low is based on her values: affordability and accessibility. That’s why, even though the course is inexpensive right now, Meagan and Alex still host a scholarship fund for people who can’t afford it.
“Every year, we give away 15 to 20 packages to those who are experiencing financial hardship and are unable to afford the fee. Giving back and doing pro bono work is important to us,” Meagan shares.
Because of this, they use Thinkific’s coupons and discount code features to make things easier for people, even for those who don’t win the scholarship.
Since transitioning from Gumroad to Thinkific, Meagan and Alex have been able to 10X their annual revenue and transform Agents of Change into a thriving business. When I asked them how Thinkific has helped them monetize their course and grow their business, they mentioned Thinkific integrations and Thinkific pricing structures.
They started with PDF files that contained practice questions that students would have to write down on paper and score themselves. But with Thinkific, they were able to integrate their course with Brillium, an assessment builder that has enabled them to give out tens of thousands of practice exams and valuable feedback.
Beyond Brillium, Meagan and Alex have also been able to integrate AI functionality into their course. “Meagan and I received feedback from many students who were looking for someone to ask questions to in real-time,” Alex explains. “They could send us emails, but it might take a day or so before we can get back to them with an adequate answer… so instead, we created a tailored AI tool to serve as a 24/7 tutor that can answer their questions, give them practice questions, and direct them to the right places.”
The AI chatbot does present them with extra business costs though, so Alex uses Thinkific’s pricing features to price the bot as a monthly subscription separate from the one-time course. “I think having the flexibility around different pricing options, whether that’s subscriptions, one-time pricing, add-ons, or order bumps has helped us turn our ideas–integrations or otherwise–into reality and then price them so that it’s fair for our students but also pays for the cost of the business, too!” he says.
This year, the couple plans to keep growing in the continuous learning space and solidify Agents of Change as a leader in the test prep space for social workers. In the next five years, they envision hosting a conference for social workers. Alex says:
“Knowing that we now have one of the biggest communities of social workers out there, we are coming back to our vision and purpose of this business, which is helping social workers throughout their careers.”
Looking to launch your own online course program? Start your journey with Thinkific today—for free!
