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

We’ve just released a much-awaited feature — a way to instantly add members to your group. Using our new Import Members tool, you can get members into your group and start sending them email communications right away. Importing is faster than the usual method of inviting members to join, since inviting members requires them to act on their invitations before they get your other group emails.

Importing your members takes four easy steps:

1. Choose your members’ settings. Do they all have the same group membership type, or are some new and some alumni? How long do their memberships last? Tell our system.

2. Pick an import plan. You can cut and paste a list members’ names and email addresses, or import a list of contacts. If you’re coming over from MSN groups, we’ve got some extra tips for you in our MSN Transition Guide.

3. Review your data and make any changes. Fix a typo, change a membership end date, that sort of thing.

4. Review the email that will go to your imported members. This email tells members they’ve been added to your BigTent group, how long their memberships last, and how often they will get group emails. Personalize it if you’d like.

Read more about this new feature in our help area, or create a group and give it a whirl. Happy importing!

We’re excited to start our company blog today! As a quick introduction, I am Laney Whitcanack, a founder of Big Tent and likely frequent contributor to this blog. We started BigTent to make it really easy for trusted groups—the people and the communities you care about and interact with on a daily basis—to connect online. Our platform provides these groups with a safe and secure place to continue the conversations that start in monthly meetings, on the playground, or in the front yard. We’re excited to have you join us here on our new blog, in a new conversation about what it means to have trusted communities communicate and connect online.

We hope that this blog can be a place for considering what it means to build, sustain and grow trusted groups online and off. In the future, Big Tent community members of all stripes, from group members, to product developers, even to Big Tent advertisers, will have a turn at the mike. Of course we’ll have the obligatory announcements and discussions of cool new features, but we also want this blog to be a place where we share experiences and reflections on community building in these exciting technological times.

We’re glad you’re here.

And that’s what’s new under the Tent today.

–Laney