Group Leaders Bulletin April 2024
Member renewals
Members should have renewed their membership now but we allow a month’s grace before they are removed from groups. Anyone who has not renewed will soon appear in red on Beacon and will be noted as lapsed. On 1st May, you should remove any remaining lapsed members, if they have not been removed by one of the team.
If your group was full, and removal of lapsed members creates a vacancy, please admit people from the waiting list.
Group leaders’ get-together
Group leaders have expressed an interest in getting together in small groups (no more than 12) to share knowledge and experiences, and put forward ideas and proposals to IGO.
For this purpose, we have set up a Zoom meeting on the 16th April from 4:00-5:30 which you will be able to join through the Beacon Members Portal – it has been set up as a group called 'Group Leaders’ Get together'. The number attending this meeting will be limited to 12, but further meetings will be arranged for people on the waiting list.
Group Leaders meeting
The Group leaders meeting on the 13th March was generally considered to be very useful. We will be following up on suggestions and requests, and plan to have another meeting in June.
Waiting lists on Beacon
There are now 3 groups where people have been waiting unnecessarily to join groups for more than 4 months - and 2 groups where people have been waiting for more than 2 months, so all in all, a great improvement. Thank you!
Beacon now puts everyone who applies to join a group onto the waiting list, even when there are vacancies. Beacon will notify you when it has done this, so you need to admit them and let them know you have done so. If you are in doubt, please check your group on Beacon to see if more members can be admitted.
Resigning as group leader
If you decide you are no longer able to lead a group, you may want to ask group members if anyone else is willing to take over your role. If you do not want to do this, or you don’t get any volunteers, please
Help with Beacon
The Beacon system is essential to the management of IGO activities and most of our group leaders use it effectively and without problems. If you do have difficulty with it, there is help available at Beacon for Group Leaders and also in the Beacon User Guide.
You can also
IGO Zoom bookings
I believe that I have now updated all the IGO Zoom links until the end of December. The link details are unchanged. If I have not notified you of this, please
Beacon and IGO Zoom calendars
These are the links to Beacon group meeting calendar for April and the generic IGO Zoom calendar.
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
How to change your change your group webpage on the u3a website and your Beacon entry
These are entirely separate – changes on one are not automatically implemented on the other.
If you want your website entry to be changed, you should use this form – this will then be implemented by the IGO web team. Alternatively, you can contact us
All the group information on Beacon is controlled by the group leader(s) and can be changed by them at any time. There is information about how to do this in the IGO Beacon for Group leaders.
GL Bulletin Archive
Previous versions of the GL bulletin can be found here.
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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