As bigger and more complex communities continue to form on Geneva, we’re adding a bunch of different ways to make it easier to manage your home’s members. Today, we’re excited to introduce a new concept on Geneva that we’re calling Member Groups.

The basic idea is simple: Instead of manually adding a bunch of people to a bunch of different rooms one-by-one, you can add them all to a Member Group (say, “Designers” or “Cohort 1” or “Pro Members”), and then give that Member Group access to whatever rooms in your home you’d like. Think of it as a way to batch-add members to rooms.

Here’s an example: You run a big fitness community with members all over the country and have a couple of different rooms in your home for people who live in New York City: a chat room for NYC Talk, a forum room for NYC Restaurant Recommendations, and another forum room called NYC Events where people can share upcoming meetups. Now imagine Dara from New York joins your community. You can simply add her to the “New Yorkers” Member Group — which you’d previously set up to give access to those three rooms above — and she’ll automatically get added to those rooms.

Here’s another: You’re a writing coach who leads a big community of up & coming writers and want to make it so that certain rooms in your home are only accessible to paying members. You set these rooms up as locked rooms and give access to these rooms to anyone who’s a member of the “VIPs” Member Group. Now, when a new person joins your paying membership, all you have to do is add them to the “VIPs” Member Group and they’ll get access to all of those locked rooms.

(Note: Member Groups are used to control access to rooms, and are independent from roles, which are used to control permissions like who can add/remove rooms, who can change your home's name, etc.)

Token groups

“Token Groups” are a special type of automated Member Group for web3 communities that make it really easy to gate access to certain rooms in your home based on if someone holds a certain amount of crypto tokens or a specific NFT. As the owner of a home, you can set the rules for who gets access to what — and then when a member joins your community and connects their MetaMask wallet to Geneva, we check what tokens they hold and grant access accordingly 🪄. After a month in private-beta, these are now fully live for everyone! You can learn more about Token Groups & Token Gates here.

Member group magic home invite links

In addition to your normal home invite links, you can send special Member Group invite links that not only bring people to your home (if they’re not in it already) but also automatically add them to a specific Member Group once they’re in. These are really useful if you have a bunch of different sub-groups and want to customize which rooms each gets access to from day one. You can learn more about these here.

Adding people to member groups via our API (coming soon!)

For those of you who use 3rd party payment systems or membership platforms and want to give people who are “paying members” (or “active ambassadors”, etc.) access to exclusive rooms in your home, we’re also working on another special type of Member Group that’ll be powered by our Membership API & an integration with Zapier. Essentially, this will let you automate the addition & removal of people to a Member Group (which, in turn, will give/remove access to a set of rooms that you specify) based on whether or not their email address matches one in your outside database. More details coming soon! 👀

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And this is just the beginning! Member Groups are a new foundational element that we’re excited to continue building with, making them even more flexible and powerful over time. If you have any questions or ideas on how to make them even better, join our Homeowners Home and let us know!