Integration with Meetup for non-programmers. Meetup's market power comes from its Facebook-like ability to inform Meetup users of similar Meetups happening in their geographic area or in the user's area of interest; it is superior to Facebook in its ability to organize actual activities. If it were not for these features, Meetup could be ignored by Wild Apricot users. Position Meetup as a feeder market for selling Wild Apricot (WA) services to Meetup groups that have grown to the point of needing more sophisticated member management and website integration, without relying upon programmers.

1) Map WA user logon authentication with Meetup user ids similar to WA’s existing ability with Facebook and Google+.

2) Map WA membership levels and administrative levels to Meetup organizer (i.e. Meetup administrator) levels.

3) Allow Meetup events or proposed events to show up as WA events and vice versa.
a. Map certain WA event registration types to Meetup event registrations (at least free registrations but allowing fee charging registrations should be investigated even if the payment will go through the Meetup group itself) while keeping other WA reservation types exclusive to WA resources. WA event registration types that map to Meetup would be open to event registration to Meetup users, with the registration slots being taken on Meetup showing up as registrants, or at least as slots taken, on WA.
b. WA would need to complete its planned project of allowing members to submit events and map this to the Meetup system for doing the same. Most likely events mapped to Meetup would be created on WA first then mapped to Meetup but the alternate approach of allowing Meetup events to be created and mapping to limited versions of WA events should be considered.
c. Allow WA to have proposed events waiting for confirmation from the event organizer about when and where it will happen. Map this to Meetup events that are waiting for a time. As a part of this allow even mere contacts to propose events even if the event will require an actual member to finally organize the event itself.

4) Add to WA venue booking and allow administrators and members with the right level of access to add these venues to events, then map the venues into the Meetup representation of the WA events. Meetup allows organizers to define a restricted list of venues that a group will use but it does not treat these venues as bookable resources. WA has user proposals for including bookable resources but currently has no such feature. WA could offer administrators and members with the right membership levels to book organization-defined resources (a conference room, a boat, etc.) and then to place those resources as the venue or one of several venues for an event. This could then be mapped into the Meetup equivalent of the WA event.

WA is currently superior to Meetup in terms of overall website design, sub-group creation and management, contact and member search, email blast management, more sophisticated administrator privileges, membership billing and accounting, allowing differing membership levels, allowing differing event registration types, and offering more payment processing options. Meetup is currently superior to WA in terms of publicizing a group’s existence and a group’s events to non-group members, allowing group members or even contacts to self-organize events, and it has a more attractive user interface for some of these functions.

Wild Apricot’s major selling point to us is that it offers a lot of integration without relying upon programmers, however there are powerful social media that organizations need to connect to and do so in an integrated fashion without requiring programming. We cannot ignore them. We are currently investigating using Meetup as a public front end for our organization along with Facebook but integration is a major hurdle with both social media systems.