Just select the friends you’d like to invite, your friends will see a request on their Facebook Home pages.

For this feature to work, your BigTent group must be set up to allow members to invite their friends. If you’re an admin of your group, visit manage > invite members > new invitation settings and make sure this is the case.

We hope you’ll enjoy this increased ability to grow your group. Stay tuned for more cool integrations with Facebook, and let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

Best,

MaryAnn and the BigTent team

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/BigTentGroups

Hello admins and awesome community leaders,

My name is Jaine and I’m one of BigTent’s Community Coaches. I wanted to let you know that our free webinar, How to Grow Your Group, is back by popular demand!

During this webinar, I’ll share 10 tips and tricks on how to grow your group. We’ll also have a portion devoted to sharing our best practices so we can learn from each other. Here are the details:

How to Grow Your Group

Wednesday, October 28 @ 9 am Pacific/12 pm Eastern

Register for FREE: bigtent.webex.com – click through the weekly calendar and register for “How to Grow Your Group”

Please let me know if you have any questions or would like more information. I have grown my own group, Moms and Tots San Diego (www.bigtent.com/groups/mtsd), from zero to 700+ members in just three years. I have also partnered and shared best practices with over 3,000 groups on BigTent.

I hope you can attend!

Best,

Jaine, BigTent Community Coach since 2007

Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bigtentgroups

Tell a Friend Campaign

Here’s some food for thought! You now have a chance to win a 3-month or 1-year subscription to the Saving Dinner Menu-Mailer group on BigTent.

What’s a Menu-Mailer, you ask? Only the most convenient way to get healthy and helpful dinner recipes at your fingertips. Every week, the Saving Dinner team will send you six mouth-watering recipes, complete with a handy shopping list to get you in and out of the grocery store in record time. You can learn more about Menu-Mailers here.

We have 30 3-month subscriptions (a $9.95 value) and three 1-year subscriptions (a $29.95 value) to give away. On April 10th, 20th, and 30th, we’ll hold drawings for 10 members each to win a three-month Menu-Mailer subscription. On April 30th, we’ll also select our three grand prize, one-year subscription winners. (We will notify the winner via email and we will announce them here on our Blog.)

In order to win, start using our new “Tell a Friend” feature to spread the word about your BigTent group or groups.

How to Enter

Go to Your BigTent Group Buzz page and click on the “Tell a Friend” button on the right-hand side of the screen. For every friend you contact through “Tell a Friend” between now and April 30th, you’ll receive one entry into our prize drawings.

A Few Notes

1. Don’t worry if you’ve already told your friends, we’ll include everyone who has used this feature since it was launched on March 19th.
2. We’re not able to track who uses the Facebook component of the “Tell a Friend” feature, so you’ll have to use the other options to get entered. (Though we still highly encourage you to post about your groups on Facebook.)
3. Make sure to check with your group admin before you invite people to join the group. In some cases, admins may prefer you to spread the word and point friends to the group’s webpage.
4. You can learn more about using “Tell a Friend” in this help article.
5. If you don’t belong to a group where you can invite a lot of people, feel free to join one of these national groups and invite your friends to join these:

• Saving Dinner free newsletter group
• How to Shop for Free
• Manic Mommies
• Parent Leadership Collaborative
• Neighborhood Leadership Collaborative

Good Luck and Happy Inviting!

- Rufus and the BigTent team

1. Invite friends. Grow your group without lifting a finger! Now members can invite their friends to join your group. Group members can type in email addresses of invitees, or import contacts directly from AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, or MSN.

2. Tell a friend. It’s free publicity for your group. Members can send their friends a message containing a link to your group’s public website, or they can even share a link on their Facebook profiles.

3. Manage area upgrades. In an effort to make our management tools more accessible, we’ve moved some things around. We’ve created a new “Group Dashboard” tab, which allows you to update settings for different features, plus take care of common administrative tasks.

We’ve also added a “Get Support” tab, which points you to several resources to help you launch and maintain your group.

We hope these new features will help spread the word about your groups, and assist members in establishing more meaningful connections. Got questions or feedback? Please let us know. We love to hear from you!

Best,

Michelle and the BigTent Team

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!