I’ve been involved with groups that use Meetup.com to organize and plan for a long time, and I have to say that while they’ve redesigned the user interface a couple of times along the way, there are things that I find oddly difficult to figure out.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that in general Meetup.com is a great way to organize groups, clubs and gatherings, but still, that extra 10%…
Most groups seem to be pretty low-key with planning, but I am a member of a group that has 4-7 events per week, and you’re right, having those events show up on my calendar would be terrific. Better would be to have a single iCal calendar subscription that has all of the events from all the Meetup groups I’m a member of show up, but that one I haven’t figured out…
Here’s what you can do, however. Go to your group’s Meetup page and look on the right side. You’ll see something like this:

You want to click on the little “Calendar” icon or the word “Calendar” at the bottom of that box. Now you’ll see a big calendar with your group’s event shown:

Scroll down. At the very bottom of the page, you’ll see this:
You can see your options: RSS Atom iCal and Outlook. Click on “iCal” since you want to subscribe in a form that’s iCal-friendly.

I’m running Google’s experimental Chromium Web browser, so it warns me that the link is unusual and asks if I want to launch iCal to receive it. I do, so I click on “Launch Application”.
Now it’s iCal’s turn to warn me:

I do want to proceed, so I click “Subscribe” and it gives me some additional options:

At this point I can change the color, tweak the name, etc. The most important thing, however, is to make this an active subscription, which is the last option on the window:

I set it to update once a week – the group doesn’t add new events that quickly – but you might set it to daily, depending on how much advance warning you want.
That’s all there is to it. Click on “OK” and you’re good to go!
2 thoughts on “Can I subscribe to a Meetup.com group calendar in iCal?”
Hi Dave. Is this still relevant? I can’t tell when it was written. I just did as you suggested and chose my me.com calendar and I went to my iPhone and made sure that calendar was chosen to show and I don’t see the meetup’s events on there.
Anyway i want to toggle to see just the ones I’ve subscribed to.
Help?
thanks!
it still works in principle.Meetup put an export link on the bottom that create a subscription link that you can paste into Google calendars.