I am looking for a way to manage local groups using NB, essentially local meetup groups and campus chapters. I'd like for these groups to be as self-sustaining as possible and I want NB to be the hub of all activity so our national coordinators can keep tabs on them without having to be connected to every local group's disparate tool sets. We are currently managing these groups with Meetup Everywhere for events and Google Groups for messaging.

I want to be able to know which of my subscribers are members of these groups, which I feel like I can do with tagging.

I need them to be able to manage the following:

• maintain a public event calendar (NB events using the Meetup integration seems like the best choice for this)
• maintain a community blog/forum that is private to members of the local group (I can't figure out a way to do this elegantly in NB. Using membership levels to create member's only areas of the site was suggested, but still a bit unclear as to how to go about that. And it raises other issues because 'membership' is so tightly integrated with donations/finances. )
• message each other privately or at minimum privately to the local group. I like the idea of members being able to follow an activity stream of a local group which seems easy enough. But I'd also like to give local leaders the ability to broadcast to their group.

I guess my first question is am I asking Nation Builder to do too much/more than it's capable of?'

Second question would be how have other organizations handled managing local groups?

My current thoughts are to create another site altogether that is exclusively for members of the local groups, but the membership/permission levels issue is still murky.

I'm wary of handing over the admin keys to my NB to volunteers because of the security and privacy issues that have been raised by others here, but that's what I keep coming back to. Should I just let go and give more people access?