Meetup’s VP of Product, Daniel Pardes, and Product Manager, Mike Bass, share insights on future Meetup improvements. Plus a live Q&A session with organizers.
Your group’s input can help organizers everywhere. Organizers, share this survey about online and in-person events with your members. We’ll share the findings back in a future blog article.
Main Takeaways
- Your group’s input can help organizers everywhere. Organizers, share this survey about online and in-person events with your members. We’ll share the findings back in a future blog article. Feel free to take the survey as well.
- We created the option for online Meetup events so that our communities can continue to meet when in-person events aren’t possible. That being said, online events are here to stay!
- We know how important meeting in-person will be for our recovery, but that timing will be different for everyone. As restrictions are lifted we should all look to local experts for guidance on when it’s safe to meet. We are also creating resources to help organizers with the transition back to in-person events.
- We’re listening to your feedback and working to improve Meetup by building the tools you need as quickly as possible. Here are product updates on the horizon:
- Improved communication tools for members and organizers
- New homepage featuring online events
- Automatically adding online event links when adding events to your calendar
- Increasing accessibility
- Adding compatibility with more video conferencing services. There have been over 50 new services added and more to come.
Top Q&A Questions
Will product updates be available globally?
- Mike: Yes. If something is new, we may focus on a certain region to test it. Once we know a feature is ready for a wider audience, it’s exciting to get to ship that globally. Getting new products translated is important.
Is the Product team aware of features that were taken away in the past that organizers really valued?
- Dan: Yes. And that experience has taught us that we need to be talking more about what we’re doing so it’s not seemingly random or imposed upon you. I can’t promise we won’t remove things, but when we’re removing things we’ll try to give replacements and if not, at least give you a reason why.
I’m getting a 50-70% no-show rate for my online events. Is this typical?
- Dan: Having spoken to several organizers, that’s not unheard of at all. I myself have been seeing more no-shows for online events. You’re certainly not alone in seeing that. Tip: I typically message my members (aside from the automatic event reminders) an hour or two before to let them know, “hey don’t forget, we’re signing in here.”
What happened to Meetup Experiences? What worked? What didn’t?
(Meetup Experiences was an experiment Meetup launched in 2019 where organizers could host one-time paid events.)
- Mike: Through Meetup Experiences, we learned that members are looking for high-quality events, and they’re ready to pay ticket fees to attend them. We’ve taken a lot of the lessons from Meetup Experiences, like focusing on templates, having a consistent design, and including an event overview and agenda. Those lessons are definitely coming into play as we think about Meetup going forward.
Last modified on June 23, 2021
