Now live! Follow organizations, hear about events, and control notifications

The summary:

1. You can now follow organizations in Bloom - when you join events, you’ll be given the option to follow the organization
2. You can follow or unfollow from the organization’s page and from settings
3. When organizations you follow add new events, you’ll receive a push notification and see their event in the “Events you follow” section of the Events tab
4. You can control your notification settings via the settings menu (the gear in the top right of your profile)

A message from our founder:

When we started Bloom Community, we wanted to create a safe space to build sex-positive and edge-of-culture communities. That vision has always been clear, and the tactics have evolved over time. When we transitioned from hosting only group dates in parks to partnering with community event organizers, we realized how many more people we could help connect.

Today, I'm excited to announce the next evolution of this partnership. You can now reliably learn about the events from organizers you love by following them in Bloom, and when they add a new event you’ll receive a push notification.

In a world of social media that is increasingly conservative when it comes to sex-positive and edge-of-culture events, it is extremely important that we continue to have robust tools to help our communities connect. We’ve heard from many event attendees that they are disappointed when they miss events they would have attended because they didn’t see the invite on Facebook or missed the email. We've heard from hundreds of organizers that Facebook and other social media companies downrank their content and their events, ban them from advertising, and make it challenging to get the world out. Unfortunately, the tools that these companies provide for most event organizers are not available to organizers who create edge-of-culture events.

And yet, these community organizers create some of the most valuable spaces for some of the most vulnerable people with marginalized identities. And they push culture forward. We think that the place we need to be innovating is at the boundary of culture. These community events create the world we want to live in - they invent culture and pioneer identity acceptance - from LGBTQ+ rights to normalizing ethical non-monogamy, kink, and psychedelic healing.

We're excited to support these boundary expanding events and communities with Bloom. We love partnering with them and making it easier for them to do their important work building community. The next evolution of our software is giving Bloom members a way to follow the organizations they most want to hear from and receiving notifications when those organizations add new events. We also want to give Bloom members control over that experience - you can turn off notifications from organizations you follow and still learn about their events in the “Events you follow” section. With this, we are also launching specific notification controls over all of the notifications you receive through Bloom. To modify your settings, go to the settings page on your profile (the gear icon in the top right), and click “notification settings”.

We've heard your feedback requests for following organizations, hearing about their events, and having control over notifications. Thank you all for the amazing feedback. We're building this with you and for you. Please keep it coming.

-Luna Ray