Forj.ai Acquires Mobilize.io: Consolidation and Innovation in the Community Platform Landscape

Yesterday, Forj.ai announced that it had acquired Mobilize.io. Forj, founded in 2020 to support professional organizations and associations with the urgent need for virtual engagement, has added Mobilize’s community platform to its offerings alongside its new LMS acquisition, WebCourseWorks. This acquisition is a significant development in the ongoing consolidation and evolution of the community platform landscape.

This big news prompted me to reflect more broadly on what this acquisition means for our profession.

Consolidation is nothing new in this space. Over the years, many acquisitions and mergers have occurred in the community platform ecosystem, such as:

• Sprinklr acquired GetSatisfaction in 2015

• Lithium acquired Jive in 2017; Vista Equity Partners subsequently acquired Lithium and then merged it with Spredfast in 2018 to become Khoros

• Personify acquired MemberClicks in 2020

• Higher Logic acquired Vanilla in 2021

• GainSight acquired InSided in 2022

• Microsoft recently folded Yammer (a 2012 acquisition by the tech giant) into its Viva product

Forj's acquisition of Mobilize is part of this trend of consolidation.

The motivation for this consolidation is to accelerate the innovation roadmap for community platforms (so they don’t need to build from scratch) and to create more all-in-one products that include community as a key part of the customer value proposition. With this acquisition, Forj is positioning itself as the preferred provider for association and professional organizations looking to combine training, virtual events, and community interaction under one digital roof. And any association not looking to improve these three aspects of their offerings? Probably not going to last through the next generation of the profession.

The acquisition of Mobilize by Forj and similar consolidations are good news for the community management profession, especially for newcomers. They make all-in-one products accessible without the extensive technical and design customization (read: cash) needed to build on Khoros, Salesforce Community Cloud, or Vanilla.

I have been lucky enough to work with and get to know key team members at both Forj (based in Wisconsin, like me!) and Mobilize over the years. While Forj is relatively new to the scene, its focus on professional groups and associations is definitely going to give the other primary player in this space, Higher Logic, a run for its money.

And having worked with the Mobilize team over the years and through its several iterations, I can say that it's one of the most comprehensive community platforms out there that does not require technical know-how to update and iterate. Since its founding in 2014 by Sharon Savariego and Arthur Vainer, the platform has diligently improved its offering and become one of the more robust options out there, especially for professional groups and associations.

Community professionals should be aware of the consolidation and innovation happening in the market and hold their tech stack lightly. Get to know the alternative options in case you ever need to migrate unexpectedly. And community platform builders should be aware that the path to success for many small community platforms will likely be acquisition by a larger organization—if they’re lucky. Consider this your sign to prioritize and streamline your core feature set and target audience.

To read the original acquisition announcement, go to the Forj website.