This Community Update features the latest news about Meetup, brought to you by the product team. This month, Prerna Singh (Twitter, LinkedIn), Senior Director of Product at Meetup, along with Daniel Pardes (Twitter, LinkedIn), VP of Product, highlight some of our first quarter product launches including enhanced group search functionality, improved event filtering & sorting, as well as the highly-anticipated “happening now” event search feature. Prerna and Daniel also share their plans for other features to come in 2021.
Product Update Main Takeaways:
- Happening now
We introduced a way to find events that are happening soon. It’s been a hit with both members and organizers. For members, it brings more choice and more immediacy to the thing that Meetup is great for, which is finding other people who share your interests or identity. And for organizers, it’s great because it means more RSVPs and more interested members who want to join your community. - Sort by date
Sometimes it’s nice to know what Meetup recommends. In recent feedback sessions with organizers and members, almost everyone that we talked to mentioned that it is to be able to see events in chronological order. - Group search
We built a new group search infrastructure from the ground up. Our new group search is faster, it’s more accurate, and it helps find your groups that meet your interests. - Contact members
We’ve started to rebuild the bulk of the system right now. We’ve got the part where you can send emails to all of your members running in a completely brand new system.
Top Q&A / Resources:
- Q: Any plans on improving the API as a Meetup Pro member? It’s one of the things I use most, is we list our events on our own website but the API has been very hard to utilize.
- Prerna: Yes, very much so. We totally hear you and we’ve heard this feedback from a bunch of our other Meetup Pro customers as well.
- Q: To clarify, can a member RSVP to an event happening now?
- Prerna: Yes, they can.
- Dan: Yes, but the window for that is changing. So you can’t necessarily RSVP 45 minutes into an hour-long event.
- Q: Are all members of the development team required to be active Meetup group organizers themselves? and if not, would like to suggest that.
- Dan: Organizing a group no, although many people are organizers.
Everyone in the entire company (every single person certainly including our CEO) goes to at least one event every single month. It’s not quite the same as what you said but I think it’s the same intent, which is, we need to use our own product and we need to love our own product, and that is definitely a focus of ours.
- Dan: Organizing a group no, although many people are organizers.
- If you want to be a participant in our next user feedback session, sign up here: http://bit.ly/meetup-feedback-signup
- If you’re interested in joining the team, check out our careers page: www.meetup.com/careers/
Last modified on June 23, 2021
