You may have noticed that LinkedIn rolled out some new features for groups:

• Group managers can add RSS and Atom feeds to the News section. New posts will show up as new news items.

> My take: good thing!

As long as the group manager doesn't clutter things up with too many feeds or feeds from irrelevent sources, this should be an easy way for a group to automatically feed company, sector, issue, or interest updates into the group's news stream. Since group members can comment on each news post, it could add a rich layer of discussion around relevant topics within the community. 

I've added NTEN's blog feed and the 09NTC Twitter feed to our members-only LinkedIn group. We'll see how that goes. I'll definitely remove the 09NTC feed after the conference. If the updates don't seem to add positively to the LinkedIn group, I'll remove it even sooner.

• Group managers can message the entire group once a week. Group members receive the messages according to their group notification settings. Messages are also posted as new discussion items automatically.

> My take: good thing!

Previously, there was no way for managers to message group members except by posting discussion items or writing to individual members.

It looks like LinkedIn has built in safeguards with this new feature to keep the focus on community discussion rather than update-blasting. With the limit of 1 message per week, group managers should think carefully about how to use that message. Also, because the message will be automatically added as a discussion post, it should remind the manager to keep the messages discusssion-oriented as well as provide a place for group members to respond and discuss the message online in a shared space, and not our inboxes.

• Jobs section includes comment feature.

> My take: ok - sounds good. 

To be honest, I don't have much of an opinion on this because I haven't ventured into the jobs area of any group. Our NTEN group hasn't used it at all. It seems to make sense to upgrade this to a discussion-of-jobs area, as there are plenty of job boards and forums, and the nature of these LinkedIn groups seems to be to discuss the issues, not just announce.

Here we come to the real problem with the recent changes to LinkedIn Groups, from a group manager's perspective:

• Managers can no longer download the list of group members or the list of those requesting to join the group.

> My take: hate it.

One of the things I really liked about LinkedIn Groups -- and what set it apart from other public social networking sites that allow groups, like Facebook -- was its higher level moderation and management tools. 

We decided to make the LinkedIn group available to current NTEN members only for this very reason: we could verify member status and approve current members to the group. 

If those requesting to join the group weren't current members or if we couldn't verify their member status based on their LinkedIn profile, we could download the list and email them all at once to let them know their options for verifying member status, becoming a member, or participating in the NTEN community in other ways. (And no, we weren't adding them to our email lists when we did this. We made this very clear in our one-time email message. We're good that way.)

Furthermore, without being able to download the list of Group members, we won't be able to compare it to our database of current members each membership cycle to administer the "members-only" aspect of the NTEN LinkedIn group.

We have almost 700 folks in our LinkedIn group now. The only option we have to cross-check these folks against our 2009 current members list is to do it manually, looking through the LinkedIn screens and comparing to our list of current members -- which includes about 6000 folks. Any volunteers out there willing to help? I didn't think so.

I realize many folks would say maybe we don't need to make the group limited to only current members. That's an option, of course, but we're not ready to give that member benefit up yet.

The overall NTEN community has over 12,000 folks, including members and those who participate in our online community and access our free programming and resources. We have many ways for anyone interested in nonprofit technology to connect and communicate with each other, including our online community, Facebook group, and Twitter networks -- not to mention this blog, where anyone can engage in a conversation with us around the news and issues we post about.

Is it so bad to provide an NTEN member benefit that integrates with the LinkedIn professional network tools and community?

The added features will benefit the discussions and communications within the group and between managers and group members. But LinkedIn has taken away what was one of the best features of their groups: the ability for managers to efficiently manage lists of members and requests to join.