This week, we’re excited to announce our latest release, which contains two great additions to BigTent:

1) Shopping: Earn money for your group with our new Shop feature

We know that many groups work hard to raise money for their activities & causes, so we’ve created an easy way for your group to do it. We’ve added an area where members can make purchases from select retailers who allow us to return a portion of these sales to your group. Some of these retailers include iTunes, Benefit Cosmetics, Disney Store, Netflix and Office Depot. To see a full list of retailers, and to start shopping, just go to your group and click on the Shop tab.

2) Color Customization: Add color to your group with themes

Last release we gave group leaders the ability to feature content such as news, photos, and even video on the group Buzz page. To let you further personalize your group, in this release we’re allowing group leaders to customize the group’s theme color (header and links) and background color. Group leaders can pick from a pre-defined set of colors and background patterns to customize their BigTent group.

We hope you enjoy these new additions to BigTent. As always, leave us a comment if you have any questions.

Best,

- Rosa & the BigTent Team

Thanks for tuning into part two of our series on BigTent security features. This time, we’ll take a look at some features that groups use stay safe on our site:

1. Timed memberships. Sit back and relax, while BigTent manages the membership process for your group. With BigTent, you can have automatic renewal invitations sent out to your group, and lock out anyone who fails to renew in time.

As a result, you ensure that only paying and/or active members get to enjoy the benefits and resources your group has to offer.

2. Membership approval. BigTent gives group leaders controls to approve or reject potential new members. When someone first applies to join, you’ll have a chance to review his membership form before letting him into the club:

3. Customized group information sharing. Each group leader on BigTent gets to decide how information sharing works within her group. She decides how much admins get to see about members, and what members can see about each other. In small groups, members often see lots about each other, such as phone numbers or addresses, while larger groups tend to restrict this information to leaders.

No matter how you set up your group, group admins can access the information needed to keep the group running, while members can feel comfortable participating online.

Questions? Comments? Let us know what you think at hello@bigtent.com. Want to try Big Tent? Click here to sign up your group.

-Mia & the BigTent team

One of BigTent’s main goals is to provide a secure online place for community groups to call home. Depending on your group, the notion of security can take on a variety of definitions. For a parents group, it might mean giving members a way to upload photos of their children — and having peace of mind that only other trusted members will see the images. For an alumni group or professional association, security might mean the ability to restrict the roster and other networking resources to members who are paid-in-full. For all groups, it means protecting members from spam and other unwanted intrusions.

Here are three ways we’ve set things up to fortify BigTent against prying eyes:

1. Restricted access. The only way members can join a BigTent group is through a special email invitation from a group leader. The leader may invite a member directly, or the member may cruise over to the group’s website and use it to request an invitation. To see this in action, check out our public page for the demo mothers’ group, Bay Town Mothers’ Club. If you look in the upper righthand corner, you’ll see a mini-form for potential members to request group membership:

Keep in mind that invitations are single-use only, and can’t be forwarded to unauthorized recipients.

2. Site encryption. We use https to keep outsiders from accessing your data when it’s in transit between your computer and our servers. All pages that contain sensitive personal information are encrypted and are as secure as a banking website. Every page of the manage area is encrypted as well.

3. Individual logins. A lot of groups that switch to BigTent are used to maintaining their own admin-only website areas, where the whole group shares a single username and password to log in. Sharing login information creates a problem whenever a member leaves (or gets banned) from the group, since that person can still access protected data.

On BigTent, each member of your group uses his or her own email address and password to gain access. Members can change their email addresses at any time, and can even use them to join multiple BigTent groups.

Stay tuned for another post that covers the tools we offer admins to guard the gates of group information.

Can’t wait to learn more about BigTent? Sign up for a live web demo, or drop us a line at hello@bigtent.com.