We are pleased to announce that MDJN PLI holders can now benefit from a 10% discount on ALL needadisco.com upgrades and renewals whilst they remain members of both organisations!

In addition, for a limited period only, new subscribers who are also MDJN PLI holders will receive a FREE 3 month welcome bonus in their first year - effectively giving 15 months' membership for the price of 12.

Discounts are available on additional coverage areas, additional DJs, postcode banners and public page redirection as well as renewals. To qualify you must have provided a current and valid MDJN PLI membership number in your name and discounts will be automatically applied at checkout. Applies to all qualifying transactions from 1st May 2013.

Many thanks to Pete Williams and Jason Clark for their help in making this happen.

For more information about the the Mobile DJ Network and their PLI offering, visit www.mobiledjnetwork.co.uk

Existing MDJN members may now add their DJmark to their MDJN profile. See the MDJN website for more details.

We are delighted to announce that full members of NADJ will now benefit from a 20% discount on ALL needadisco.com upgrades and renewals whilst they remain members of both organisations!

In addition, new subscribers who are also full NADJ members will receive a FREE 3 month extension in their first year - effectively giving 15 months' membership for the price of 12.

Discounts are available on additional coverage areas, additional DJs, postcode banners and public page redirection as well as renewals. To qualify you must have provided your NADJ membership number in Member Dashboard and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Applies to all qualifying transactions from 1st April 2013.

Many thanks to Paul Arnett, NADJ Chairman and John Forbes, NADJ Membership Officer, for their help in making this happen. A great example of two like-minded professional organisations working together for the benefit of respective members.

For more information about the National Association of Disc Jockeys and what membership can bring to your business, visit nadj.org.uk

Existing NADJ members may now add their DJmark to their NADJ profile. See the NADJ website for more details or take a look at this how-to guide published by NADJ.

From 1st April all outgoing email will be switched to a new provider - Mandrill - part of MailChimp. This offers us faster delivery speeds and improved tracking over our old supplier Google Mail.

At the same time we will start to introduce HTML-format messages which are designed to improve the legibility of our confirmation and feedback messages sent to clients, but members will also benefit from clearer, easier-to-understand messages which will display across a range of device types.

Previously, at peak times, some notification messages were being delayed for up to an hour. We expect that this will now be reduced to well under a minute.

As a consequence, you may notice that links embedded in email messages we send may be prefixed with a Mandrill domain. This is to assist our admins with mail tracking and delivery reporting. It will help us quickly identify problematic email addresses. This is nothing to worry about!

Users of our Minimum Pricing feature (Member Dashboard -> Preferences) will shortly be able to vary their minimum pricing models depending on the postcode area of the venue.

This will allow you to vary your minimum pricing based on distance.

Existing minimum prices will be regarded as "defaults" which may be amended on a per-postcode-area basis.

This new feature will be rolled out to all Secure Mode users during w/c 11th March.

By popular request we have now implemented a Venue Blacklist system for users who are running in Secure Mode.

You can now blacklist venues of your choice, and we will not forward quote requests for the same venue in future. Blacklisted venues can be whitelisted again at any time from the Venues tab on your member dashboard.

Blacklist data is private - we will share anonymous information on a venue level for example the number of members who have blacklisted, but it will never be attributed to you directly.

Look out for the Blacklist button on new leads sent from today onwards.

There are regular debates on public forums around the types and value of leads made available via needadisco.com, we are pleased to publish a statistical breakdown of all the leads processed by us during 2012. We will publish 2013 figures later in the year.

We also analyse and publish aggregated pricing information for thousands of completed gigs via www.mobilediscoprices.com where typical rates for different types of event are reported by postcode.

The following percentages are based on the stated maximum budgets for all leads offered through our sites. This is all ADULT EVENTS (16-21st parties included), with kids parties omitted.

One of the common criticisms of our current matching approach is that we tend to commoditise the mobile disco, helping perpetuate the myth that there is little to choose between one disco provider and another. Our success shows that, unfortunately, a very large proportion of clients DO see discos in this way.

Later this year we will be launching an alternative approach to run side-by-side with the current method. This new approach allows site visitors to select individual DJs based on their specific requirements and expectations. However, in order for such an addition to be successful, members must provide short DJ Profiles for each of the DJs they wish to include in the new service.

You can start providing DJ Profiles using the tools found on a new dashboard tab called "DJs" which will start appearing over the next couple of weeks. We will be running a staged rollout to identify any issues with the process. There's also more information on the subject in the support guide here. Once we reach a baseline number of profiles for any given area we will be in a position to launch.

DJ Profiles will only be published for members who hold a DJmark Silver or above.

The "Extras" tab in Member Dashboard allows you to directly advertise non-disco party services and products FREE of charge on our popular UK-Parties website. Previously you needed to manually sign up for listings on UK-Parties, but now you can choose the services you wish to advertise directly from your needadisco.com dashboard.