Mark Zuckerberg unveils new features for WhatsApp Communities

Mark Zuckerberg has announced new features for WhatsApp Communities and their groups. Now, groups belonging to a WhatsApp community can create events for their groups, making it easier to come together in person and online. He also announced that community members can now reply to admin announcements in Community Announcement Groups, so that admins can get feedback from members, while announcement groups remain an easy place to catch up with what’s happening in your community.

Mark Zuckerberg, announced the news on his WhatsApp Channel, saying “If you're in a WhatsApp Community, you can now create events in your groups and reply to admin announcements. Over the next few months more groups will be able to create events.”

New to Communities: Events and Replies in Announcement Groups

Since launching Communities, it’s been exciting to see how people with common interests  – neighborhoods, school associations, hobbyists and more – use the feature to keep groups that belong together connected and organised. To help bring communities even closer together, Whatsapp is introducing a new way for people to organize events and launch organised replies to Announcement Groups so members can respond to important updates from admins.

With events it’s now easier for people to plan their get togethers directly in WhatsApp, whether it’s setting up a virtual meeting or birthday dinner. Anyone can create an event and others can respond so the whole group knows who is coming. Guests can also find the event in the group’s information page, and those going will get an automatic notification when it’s getting close. Events are coming to groups that belong to a Community first, and will roll out to all groups over the coming months.

Whatsapp is also bringing replies to Announcement Groups, so admins can hear from their members while keeping these groups an easy place to catch up on what’s happening in your Community. Replies are grouped together and minimized so you can see what others have said in context, and notifications are muted for everyone.

Over the next few months, it’ll keep rolling out new features to Communities and groups so people have more tools to keep their lives organised on WhatsApp.

Communities lets neighborhoods, parents at a school, organisations, workplaces connect multiple groups together under one umbrella to organise group conversations on WhatsApp. In India, there are multiple organisations, like Rocket Learning, Project Stepone, Pinkishe Foundation that are using Communities to stay better connected and organised, in their common goal of driving social impact at scale across the country.