Since the beginning of the year, we’ve rolled out several small—yet impactful—improvements to make Meetup more intuitive, reliable, and efficient for organizers. Here’s a quick summary of 16 top updates you may have missed!
Creating events & managing attendees
Creating events and managing attendees are core parts of every organizer’s experience, so we introduced a range of improvements to make the whole process smoother from start to finish:
- 🎪 Better UX for adding venues to your events. In the past, you couldn’t search for and add previously created private venues, nor could you search public or private locations by address. With the new experience, you can now do all this easily when creating a new event.
- 🧩 [PRO] Custom fields in event registration form. You can now ask users a series of tailored questions during the RSVP process, with flexible custom fields that support phone numbers, multiple choice, checkboxes and short-form answers.
- 📅 Automatic events in Google Calendar. Previously, members had to manually add an event to their personal calendars—resulting in a static entry that didn’t update if details changed. Now, RSVP emails automatically create an event in an attendee’s Google Calendar (provided they have the correct setup).
- 1️⃣ One-click download for attendee and member details. All the information formerly found in Attendee details, Members list, and Registration responses (Pro only) is now available in one consolidated document—making member management faster and easier.
Group reviews
Reviews don’t just promote transparency—they help your group thrive by showcasing your community, building trust with new and existing members, and giving prospective members real feedback to review. In fact, members are significantly more likely to RSVP when they can see a group’s ratings and reviews.
For this reason, in late March, we introduced…
- ⭐ Public group reviews. Your group’s average rating is now visible across Meetup. This score reflects how members have rated your past events, giving prospective members a helpful snapshot of your group experience. Written comments submitted after March 27 are now visible, too.
Then, based on organizer feedback, we introduced three updates shortly after the initial rollout:
- 💬 Respond directly to individual reviews (web-only). Whether it’s to thank a member for their kind words or follow up on a question or complaint, organizers can now reply directly to individual comments.
- 🤨 Mandatory explanations for low scores. Anyone leaving a less-than-stellar review (3 stars or fewer) must now provide details about what contributed to their negative experience.
- 💫 Clearer user interface. We updated how reviews appear in a group’s information section, making it easier to interpret ratings at a glance.
Privacy & safety
Privacy and safety are of paramount importance—it’s essential that we help organizers and members create safe and respectful online and in-person spaces. Recently, we implemented:
- 🙅♂️ New measures against banned members. Banned members can no longer view any public details about the group they were removed from. This includes the group’s homepage, events page (past events and calendar), individual event pages (including the attendee list), feedback overview, discussions, and photos.
- 🤫 Private messages for attendees only. A new Send as private comment ☑️ option in your event’s comments section ensures the message is only visible to event attendees. This makes sharing private information—like a phone number or address—more secure than ever.
- 🚯 Less spam. New tools and protocols with in our spam prevention systems now prevent over 2,000 spam group discussions per week.
Images
Photos are one of the best ways to give new members a feel for what’s ahead—and they’re treasured mementos of your group’s shared experiences. With these recent updates, your group’s images go even further:
- 💎 High-quality event images. We’ve improved how event images are processed and displayed. Photos now appear at their original resolution, instead of being automatically compressed into blurry versions.
- 🖼️ Add photos from past events as Featured images. You can now use photos from past events as the Featured photo for new events during the event-creation process.
- 📎 Attach images to Contact Members messages. Back by popular demand! Make your group communications more engaging with the ability to attach images directly in the Contact Members tool.
Navigation
Finally, we’ve rolled out a few simple—but useful—improvements to make navigating Meetup easier:
- 🔗 Clickable links in Messages and Discussions. We standardized how links work in key communication channels like Messages and Group Discussions, making it easier to share important information (like a map link) with members.
- 🧑🦳 Clickable member profiles from Messages. Clicking a member’s profile photo in Messages now opens their full profile.
We have even more exciting updates planned for Meetup—and we can’t wait to share them with you soon! 🚀
— The Meetup Team
Last modified on September 30, 2025
