Meetup’s Changes (and What You Can Do About Them)

There's a possible change coming to the way Meetup handles tickets for events. There's no impact to The Events Calendar, but the updates may be an opportunity for you to create a profitable event marketplace.

There’s a possible change coming to the way Meetup handles its subscription pricing and ticket fees. We love Meetup around here, and we’ve even integrated it into our Event Aggregator service so that you can easily sync your Meetup events and your WordPress calendar. We think it’s important that you know what’s changing over at Meetup and how it might affect you.

What? Changes? What are they?

First off, it’s worth noting that Meetup’s changes are limited to a small test group, which means things are still up in the air. Will the changes roll out to every Meetup user? Maybe and maybe not. But the fact that they rolled it out to some customers and shared the news with everyone else suggests they’re moving forward.

What changes are we talking about? The first is awesome news for y’all who subscribe to Meetup’s service as an event organizer. Meetup is dropping the subscription price to a mere $2 per month. That’s an 80 percent savings overall!

The second change is more complicated. Meetup members (those who register for events) will need to pay $2 to reserve a spot at your event. In other words, attendees are required to cough up a couple bucks to register for the event. That fee goes directly to Meetup.

OK, maybe that’s not so complicated: While event organizers could save money, attendees will have to pay more.

Shows cost for members going up and cost for Meetup organizers going down.

The most unfortunate part of these changes is the way Meetup communicated them. Many organizers and members were left confused about when the changes are happening and who will see them. Meetup issued a letter that helps explain things more clearly.

What you can do about the changes

What do you need to do in the meantime? Luckily, nothing changes as far as The Events Calendar and Event Aggregator are concerned. Your events from Meetup will import into your WordPress calendar as usual.

Avoid RSVP fees

If you’re looking for an alternative to Meetup fees, it’s worth taking a look into our our free Event Tickets plugin. With Event Tickets you can create an RSVP field on any page or post on your WordPress site. Attendees can RSVP for free, and you manage it all. Want to sell tickets and start earning revenue? No problem, you can do that too. You get even more control when you add Event Tickets Plus and The Events Calendar to the mix.

Create your own events marketplace

Then, you might consider taking things a step further. Why not take advantage of Community Events so your visitors can submit their own events to your calendar? And since we’re going there, why not use Community Tickets so your visitors can sell tickets for those events too? Not only is that a powerful combination, but it supports split payments, which means you can split the ticket revenue with the organizer of the event.

Users get to submit events and sell their tickets. You get a cut of the revenue. You cut out the middle man. Everyone wins!

Shows the flow of creating an event marketplace, from creating your calendar with The Events Calendar to sharing ticket revenue with Community Tickets.

Here’s the recipe: Create your online calendar with The Events Calendar, mix it with Event Tickets to enable ticket sales, sprinkle in a dash of Community Events to allow users to submit events, then top it off with Event Tickets Plus (along with Event Tickets) to connect sales and payouts to WooCommerce. Every ticket sold could be money in your pocket, instead of money in Meetup’s pocket.

That’s all for now! We’ll do our best to keep you posted with more updates when we learn about them.