Group Leaders' Bulletin December 2023
Support for group leaders
You all do a great job running your groups which run smoothly and provide a great source of enlightenment, pleasure and social interaction to our members. If any problems arise within your group, the IGO team and u3a are there to provide support and assistance.
A basic requirement is that members treat one another with respect at all times. If you are concerned about the behaviour of any of your group members, please contact us for help in dealing with this.
Requests
Keeping members informed about meetings.
We will be advising members to use the Beacon calendar to find information about meetings. All but a few groups appear there. Some of these have been entered by group leaders and I have entered as many of the rest as I can, many of these based on information on Beacon. You may want to check these as some of them may be listed for dates around Christmas when your group is not meeting. I am attaching the Beacon calendar for December as a PDF file.
Some members have asked for .ics link to Zoom meetings – these can be added to personal Google or other calendars These are provided by Zoom when you book recurring meetings, and I include them in the Zoom bookings for IGO Zoom accounts.
Requests from group leaders
If there is an issue which you would like to see discussed here, please let me know.
Beacon and website group page and Beacon calendar
Please check these from time to time to ensure they remain accurate. You can change Beacon details yourself. You can request changes to your webpage by using the Group Information form.
Information
Help with Beacon
I am planning to run Zoom sessions to help group leaders to use Beacon. I’ve created a survey to try in find out where people are having problems so I can tackle the right issues. Please complete the survey if you do have any difficulties with Beacon. It shouldn’t take long – it just needs your name, and a series of yes/no selections. If you are confident with Beacon, you do not need to do the survey.
Limits on file size sending email via Beacon
I discovered recently that there is an upper limit of 20MB to the file size which can be sent by Beacon. This is only likely to be exceeded if the file includes lots of very large image files – likely to be Powerpoint or PDF files. There are many websites which will enable you to reduce the size of such files without degrading the quality at no cost – google “compress PDF file”.
Sending images using Beacon email
Currently, the 'Insert > Image' feature does not work. If you wish to include an image, attach the file to your email.
Images for group web-pages
We are now working to add an image to each group page, but this will take some time.
If you sent an image to us already and it has not appeared, could you please send it again, as it may have got mislaid in the interim.
IGO Zoom accounts
The generic calendar for the IGO Zoom accounts is attached, and a slightly amended “Using the IGO Zoom accounts” document.
Number of groups and members
We now have 98 active groups and 1437 members – well done everyone!
As always, a big thank you to all group leaders, new and old, for running our IGO groups – we would not exist without you.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New year to you all
From Catherine, on behalf of the IGO team
