Announcing Meetup Alliance!

So when is this darn Alliance thing going public? I applied to start an Alliance months ago and was told to wait. I'm still waiting...

So when is this darn Alliance thing going public? I applied to start an Alliance months ago and was told to wait. I'm still waiting...

This Meetup Alliance sounds like the golden ticket in those Willy Wonka candy bars. Only a few select few get in. The rest of us have to ask and ask and ask and wait and wait and wait.

Hi all,
Karina here, from Meetup HQ. I've been working on Meetup Alliance.

Amy- I'll share your comments about discussions with the development team. Also, the team has been working on making Alliances easier to find, and implementing some kind of search function. I'm not sure when that will be implemented, but it's on the radar! Thanks for your patience as we work on getting Meetup Alliance on its feet!

Chris and Brian- We've been letting Alliances in in waves. We're working on developing this product as fast as we can, but there's still a lot that needs to be done before we can launch publicly. We're taking advantage of the fact that we're in private preview mode right now to get in-depth feedback from our preview Alliance Organizers.

Thanks. Keep the feedback coming,
Karina

thanks for the response, Karina! love to hear what's going on. i totally understand that this stuff takes time--coming from someone who took over six months to format her about pages--but status updates and ETAs help those of us excited about the features not to be left hanging so long the blood rushes out of our heads and we decide to wrap ourselves in other projects. :)

So far I am not impressed. I am not looking to plan events with groups from South Carolina or Florida or California or New York. I am looking for tools to promote cooperation with local groups. Groups that I actually occasionally run into.

Karina and others at Meetup HQ; I believe that at least a bi-weekly status would be in order. To many people are asking.

Also, as someone pointed out earlier, are we going to be made to pay extra for this feature??

I mean, lets be honest, Meetup did start out free, then when their was thousands of organizers, went to fee bases services.


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All is silent at the Meetup HQ.......

I have to say, I would love some 'official' meetup input on the progress of this feature. This morning, I received in invitation to join an alliance that was recently started by a craft group organizer out of California. Now, I visited her group page and she has 36 members and my group has 142 members (the 3rd largest crafts meetup site-wide) so I am curious as to how Meetup determines who gets invited to start these alliances? I looked up the crafts groups nationwide and thought perhaps they didn't invite the largest group (with 400+ members) because it is very specifically a knitting only group, but there were several more much larger and more active groups (etsyrain in Seattle for instance with almost 300 members) that were just general crafting groups that I thought would have warranted an 'invite' over this small group. Then, I was at a loss over how to find this alliance that I had been invited to join. Thank goodness for the new search function and when I finally found this thread with the url for the main 'meetup alliance' (she did not include this link in her email invite) and went to the site, I see that the 'alliance' she created specifically names her town in the title, so I am a little stymied as to how joining the 'nationwide craft exchange alliance, anytown CA' is going to help my Arizona group prosper?? Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against this organizer, her email to me was very gracious and I'm sure she is an awesome person, but the whole thing just left me scratching my head. Input anyone??

Here be the big wigs:

http://www.meetup.com...

Only a few can you contact.

Hi Denise,

We're trying to be as democratic about who can start Alliances as possible. Everyone who contacts us requesting to start an Alliance gets put on an invitation list, and we're letting people in in waves based on when they contacted us. If you're interested in starting one yourself, contact support [at] meetupalliance [dot] com. The reason for this is that we can't determine who has the best group (and sometimes, the person with the best group might not make the best Alliance Organizer!). There are great small groups out there, so we're leaving it up to people to figure out what works best for them.

Also, for the people who are concerned about charging: we're not planning on charging for Meetup Alliance. In the future we will probably add premium features and charge for them, but even that is down the road. I can promise that we won't take away anything that we're giving you for free now.

I hope that helps answer your questions. We're working on a redesign and some new features for Alliance Organizers. It's exciting stuff!

Take care,
Karina

Hi Karina

My subject hasn't anything to do with the 4 Ron Paul Alliances, sorry, but I'd just like to say that I think this new venture is being set up in a very controlled and well-planned way. I've just become a Meetup Organizer for the Conversations with God meetup, Dublin chapter, and already I can see several meetups with possible links to mine. Thanks for the good work, all the best.

Marie Therese