I was wondering if anyone came across a Ning site that was able to accomplish this...
At the moment my network is geared towards a specific interest group (example: roller derby) in a city (ie. Seattle) with event postings, forums and 99% of the members being from Seattle.
At the moment my network may be attractive for people who like Roller Derby, but because it is so specific to a City, people from other cities dont sign up for it as events and forums are not relevant for them. I want to be able to open the network to attract all Roller Derby enthusiasts worldwide without diluting the content of the event postings and forums so that people of that specific city only see events show up for their city. Essentially I am looking for the best of both worlds, to get more members on who would love to meet Roller Derby enthusiasts worldwide ...but at the same time have members able to choose the city they are from so parts of the site is greared towards that city while the rest is shared.
I'm thinking along the lines of Craigslist where you land on the Craigslist.org main page and can sorta switch between cities...but with pages like photos, etc. shared amongst all cities while events syndicate for the user specific city only.
I am unsure if this will involve me making a landing page listing a bunch of city names and then purchasing multiple ning networks that esentially look the same with variations in the events page or if there is a better way of doing this or programming this. I was wanting to see if any creative minds out there has any ideas on this.....
Thank you so much in advance
Replies
You can start simply by using your "Groups" feature in your Ning network more effectively. Make up some new Groups which might appeal to other potential members--either city, regional, or topic names--and include info and a spot for forums & photos for those group members on their new page. You might also put a note in a text box on your Main page to encourage outlanders to look at your new groups.
There are also ways of sorting Events by Group names through the "Event Type" designation. Here's what I said about that in a reply to another discussion:
"I put this phrase in a Group Description text box: See the Events listing and search Popular Event Types for --- (can be the name of any Group) for information about this Group's Events, past and present."
The key is getting your Group leaders (or Admins) to always use the same "Event Type" in the Add Event Page Module. If you get them to do that, then a search using that "Event Type" (Group Name or --) will retrieve just those Events. Try it & you'll see what I mean. Note: Event Type phrases with more than one word, i.e., Roller Derby, must be connected by an underscore or hyphen (roller_derby), or your search term will be both roller and derby, which is not what you want!
I'm not sure if it's exactly what you are looking for, but take a peek at my network. http://thehumantouch.ning.com
I'm still working on ways to make it even more useful and do some of the things you're wanting to do, but for the most part the structure is set up, I just need to add functionality now.
*Side note: I have a few derby friends... Link? I'll send them your way:)