Group Leaders Bulletin May 2024
Membership renewal
You should now remove any members in your groups who are listed in red - this means their membership has now lapsed.
If your group has been full, and removal of lapsed members creates a vacancy, please admit people from the waiting list.
Group Leaders' get-together
In April, six Group Leaders attended the first IGO ‘Group Leaders' Informal Meet Up’ session. It was a very sociable and productive meeting, with GL’s sharing issues they have experienced, and discussing ways in which hosting meetings and group leading skills could be helped and supported. Some issues were fed back to the IGO team to consider.
It is hoped that these informal meet-ups can be repeated, with different GLs attending, throughout the year, perhaps every 2 – 3 months, depending on interest.
To register your interest in attending a meet-up, go to the Members Beacon Portal and join ‘Group Leaders Informal Meet up’. There will not be a specific date at this point, as it’s intended that these will be scheduled on a rolling basis, depending on the number of GL’s who have joined the waiting list. A meet-up needs a minimum of 6, and max 10 persons to attend.
Once registered, you will then be on the list for the next meeting/s, and will be advised when the next Meet-Up will be scheduled.
Confidentiality
Using Beacon to contact your group members is the safest way to ensure members’ data is safe. If you do download members’ email addresses on to your PC, you must ensure that they are safe, e.g. your computer should be password protected.
It is also important to note that you must only contact group members about IGO matters.
Standard Messages on Beacon
Beacon enables standard messages (templates) to be stored to be re-used. Over time, the number of messages build up, and the system need to be pruned of messages that are no longer needed.
If you create a standard message, its title must be prefaced with your initials (i.e. CW 3D printing welcome). If you have existing messages where you have not done this, and still need to use the messages, you should open them and resave with new titles which include your initials.
At the end of May, any messages which are not labelled in this way will be deleted.
If you have created a message which you no longer need, you should
Attendance at group meetings
Only IGO members can be members of an IGO group, and should join the group themselves through Beacon.
There is normally no need to keep an attendance record for group Zoom meetings, though of course you may wish to do so. You should, however, try to ensure that everyone attending is an IGO member by comparing the names with those on Beacon. This can be difficult for large groups but please do your best!
If a member fails to attend group meetings, the Group guidelines say this:
If a member does not attend meetings for three months, they should be asked if they want to continue to be in the group and advised that if they do not reply, they will be removed. If they say they want to continue, but do not attend for the next three months, they will be removed anyway. There may be extenuating circumstances such as illness which should be addressed on a case by case basis, with appropriate discretion advised.
Hosting meetings on IGO Zoom accounts
Thanks to Hazel, we have now realised that it is possible to enable group leaders to host Zoom meetings. I am attaching an updated “How to use the IGO Zoom account” document which includes information about this. Hosting requires a Host Key which I will send out to group leaders of groups which use IGO Zoom accounts over the next few weeks. If you want one now, please
Zoom protocol
Last month’s News Extra gave guidance about members’ behaviour during Zoom meetings. This will be formalised and published in the Help and Information section of the website.
Group Leader Buddies
It was proposed at the Group Leaders get together, that inexperienced new group leaders could be supported by a “buddy”. If you would be willing to take on this role, please
Help with Beacon
Some of our group leaders have problems with different aspects of using Beacon. We are going to run a series of Zoom meetings with small numbers of participants to go through some of these. The first meeting will be held on Saturday May 3rd at 2:30pm and will cover the use of Beacon to send emails.
If you want to attend, you should join the Beacon group “Beacon Email Familiarisation”. The numbers will be limited to 6, but there will be a waiting list, and we will run further meetings if required.
Beacon and IGO Zoom calendars
The Beacon group meeting calendar for May 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
Help and Information
This section of the website is intended to cover all aspects of how IGO works. If there is something you think should be discussed there, please
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