IGO Group Leaders meeting will be 13^th March 3pm

Apologies – we have had to change the date again.

This is an opportunity for us to get together to exchange ideas, raise problems and suggest solution.  If there is something you would like to have discussed, please let us know and we will include it. A detailed agenda will be included in next month’s News extra, GL bulletin, and on the IGO website.

Waiting lists on Beacon

We have noticed that around 30 IGO groups on Beacon have people on the waiting list even though the groups actually have vacancies.

When a member clicks to ‘join the group’ and there are spaces, Beacon puts them on a waiting list for your group. We ask that you admit people to the group on Beacon as soon as you can.

When a member clicks to ‘join a group’ and it is full, they are notified that they will be added to a waiting list. The group leader is informed of this via email.

Many groups admit more members than their maximum on Beacon, but no one should feel obliged to do this.

I will send information to group leaders who have 3 or more people waiting unnecessarily with a request to correct this, or authorise me to do so.

Common Beacon issues

1. Members Portal and Group Leaders Beacon

People sometimes forget, or do not realise that there are two different ways of accessing Beacon.  The Members Portal is open to all members, and allows them to join and leave groups, manage their personal information and view the Beacon Calendar. Each u3a has its own Beacon Portal link.

The Group leaders login page allows group leaders to view and amend information about their group, to see a list of members and people on the waiting list, to email group members, and to add information about meetings to the Beacon Calendar.  There is a single link for all u3as and you must choose Interest Groups Online from the drop-down menu.

2. Difficulties with sending emails using Beacon.

It is not necessarily obvious that the left hand button saying “Do with selected” has to be selected to send an email rather than the right hand one saying “Send Email”.

3. What is the point of the Beacon Calendar?

Not many group leaders add information to this and this may be because they believe it is pointless. The meeting information is already provided in the Beacon group information so why do we need a calendar?

Reasons for having a Beacon Calendar

• The calendar allows someone to see the actual date of meetings rather than “2^nd Tuesday” which is not always immediately obvious.
• A calendar of meetings for a single group can be generated, or a member can generate a calendar of all the meetings of the groups they are in.
• In addition, the calendar can provide specific information about what is happening at each meeting, for example a book group could give the name of the book to be discussed at the next meeting – a group member may have forgotten this, lost the email etc.
• It will also allow people to find out what is happening in other groups and decide if they would like to join them.

I will continue to encourage group leaders to complete calendar entries, and if they don’t, I will do them myself where possible.

Zoom meetings on IGO accounts

Following a request from a group leader, we have decided to enable members to join the Zoom meeting 15 minutes before the programmed time.  Anyone who tries to join before that time will get a message saying “waiting for the host to start the meeting”. They will be admitted automatically 15 minutes before the start time, even though there is no host.

It will take me a while to do this for all the groups. If it doesn’t happen with your group, let me know and I will amend.

Deceased members

If you are notified of the death of a member of your group, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. so we can amend their record accordingly.

Beacon and website group pages

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.

Beacon and IGO Zoom calendars

The Beacon group meeting calendar for February and the generic IGO Zoom calendar are attached.

If there are errors in the Beacon calendar, you can correct these yourself, or ask me to do so.

The IGO Zoom calendar shows the times when Zoom meetings are booked on one or other of our Zoom accounts – please check this if you use an IGO Zoom account and let me know if there are any errors.

Groups and members

We now have 101 groups and 1551 members.

As always, a big thank you to all group leaders, new and old, for running our IGO groups – we would not exist without you

From Catherine, on behalf of the IGO team.

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