We just made it easier for you to edit your Alliance preferences. Until yesterday, you had to go into your account settings to change your group information or email settings. Now, you can do that on a new page: Alliance settings. To get there, go to your Alliance's homepage. If you're logged in, you'll see a "settings" link under the Alliance name. Changing your email address or password still happens on your Account page.

We also updated the "join" form for the Alliance. This should help inspire people interested in your Alliance to get involved. Check out the changes and stay tuned for more.

We just launched a new feature called "Discussions."

We're hoping this helps you and the other members of your Alliance communicate. You'll be able to create discussions and reply to them either on the site or through your email.

How to use it:

You can participate in discussions through email or on the site. If you want to participate in discussions without having them clog your inbox, you can select "stop sending me discussions" in your account settings. You'll still be able to read and post discussions on the site. You can also choose to get specific discussions emailed to you by subscribing to individual threads.

Email:

Send and reply to discussions using your Alliance's email address: <alliance_URL>@meetupalliance.com

On Site:

You'll see a new tab on your Alliance's homepage, called "Discussions." If you click that tab, you'll see all the discussions for your Alliance.

To create a new post click the "start a discussion link" at the top of the discussion section.

Privacy

When creating a new discussion, you can choose to make it public so anyone viewing the site can see it, or private so only Alliance members can see it. Unless you're sharing sensitive information, we recommend you make your discussions public so they're easily accessible to search engines and people interested in the Alliance.

From now on, you'll also be able to mask your email address if you're concerned about privacy. To do that, check the "hide my email address when I write discussions" checkbox in your account settings. We recommend that you don't mask your email address so other Alliance members have the option to reply to you individually rather than reply to the entire list.

Please note: If you do not mask your email address when you write a discussion, other Alliance members will see your email address, even if you post from the site.

Talk, Share, Coordinate

Our goal is to help organizers help each other. We're excited to see what you do with this new feature. If you have any more questions about what this can do for your Alliance, email support@meetupalliance.com.

Welcome to the Meetup Alliance blog! My name is Karina. I'm a Research Analyst here at Meetup. I've spoken with many of you over the past couple of months and I've been following your Alliances since they launched. Wendy, our Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, and I will be using this space to tell you about new features, explain what we're working on, and share great stuff going on Alliances.