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Hi, I’m trying to use the Meetup / Instagram for Business zap so that every time there is a new event on Meetup the zap publishes a post on our Instagram feed. I haven’t been able to finish the setup because the integration with Meetup does not retrieve the featured image and, since Instagram is a photo-based app, if there is no image then there is no post. 

 

Has anyone else come across this? I contacted support and they said they will try and see how this could be fixed but in the meantime they suggested to write here and see if someone else had encountered this issue.

 

Thanks!

Hey @Central London Humanists,

Welcome to the Community! Ah, the featured photo field isn’t currently available when using the New Event Meetup trigger. It appears you’ve already reached out to our Support team and they’ve added you to a feature request to have it included. I don’t have an ETA on when to expect that to be sorted by, but we will email you once it is! 

In the meantime, other users had reported success by adding a custom field in Meetup to store the event image URL. That should allow your Zap to then see the URL for the image in that custom field and allow you to pass that over to the Instagram step.

Hope that helps! :)

Hi SamB, thank you so much for your reply! It does sound like a great idea! How do I create a custom field for the MeetUp app? I’ve looked on the Help and also searched on Google but there doesn’t seem to be any documentation for the MeetUp app in particular. Is it only something that a software developer can do?

Hey @Central London Humanists! :)

I did some further digging and couldn’t find any documentation online giving details of how to create custom fields in Meetup either. I wonder if something may have changed and it’s no longer possible to create custom fields in Meetup. Sorry about leading you down a wrong path on this!

I’ve been thinking about this further and there’s a couple of potential workarounds I can think of that may work:

  1. Use Meetup’s email notifications - This will depend on the information that is received from Meetup in the email notifications that are sent when a new event is added. If those email notifications contain the featured image for the event, then it’s possible that you could use Email Parser by Zap to extract the event image URL from the email - Trigger Zaps from new parsed emails
  2. Store event details in spreadsheet - You could manually record the event image URL along with their names in a spreadsheet type app, like Google Sheets, as you add them into Meetup. You could then use a Lookup Spreadsheet Row step in a Zap to automatically search for the event by name and retrieve the relevant image to send on to Instagram.


Though not ideal, hopefully one of the above suggestions may useful in getting your workflow up and running in the meantime!

Thank you so much, SamB, for your kind help and for taking the time to think of those workarounds. I shall give them a go and will keep you posted :)

You are most welcome @Central London Humanists! Fingers-crossed one of those workarounds will do the trick! :)

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