Meetup.com email address sharing request

If you are an organizer of a WordPress meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. group that is part of the chapter account (i.e. your group is listed here and you are have the title of “Co-Organizer” in the group), then you would have received an email recently with the subject line “Action needed: Connect with WordPress”. The content of the email would have looked something like this:

This is a new feature that Meetup.com has launched, so it’s worth explaining exactly what it is and what it means for you as a meetup group member.

How things work at the moment is that the Global Community TeamGlobal Community Team A group of community organizers and contributors who collaborate on local events about WordPress — monthly WordPress meetups and/or annual conferences called WordCamps., as administrators of the chapter account, do not have access to any email address of any organizers (or members) of the nearly 500 meetup groups. We are able to contact all organizers of a single group via the form on the group page itself (as all group organizers can), but that doesn’t reveal any of the contact information to us.

This new feature from Meetup.com aims to make chapter account management easier by displaying the email addresses of the group organizers to chapter account administrators. It is important to note, however, that this is entirely opt-in for each individual organizer. If you decide not to share your email address with the account administrators then it won’t be shared, but if you would like to share this information, all you need to do is click on the “Confirm” button in the email that you received.

The real question here is why this matters – why would you choose to share your email address?

As this feature is brand new to us as well, we haven’t fully thought through the implications yet, but at first glance there are a number of distinct advantages to having the email addresses for all meetup group organizers:

  • It would save a lot of time when sending out the annual meetup survey results.
  • We could use the email addresses to automatically add new meetup group organizers to the Making WordPress Slack group – this would reduce the friction when on-boarding new organizers.
  • We could finally look into a realistic way to automate the assigning of WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ profile badges to meetup group organizers.
  • It would go a long way to helping us maintain reliable contact with all organizers.

I’m sure we’ll discover more benefits of this over time, but those are some initial thoughts about why this would be helpful for the meetup program. If you do decide to opt-in,  we will never share your email address with anyone and we will only use it for the purposes of improving the meetup program for everyone involved.

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