Day to day management

The Group Coordinators Introduction gives a well balanced view of getting a group up and running. It covers getting a group established, how you might run it: the sessions or discussions and so on. It also covers communication, practicalities, the chain of Command, resources and money management.

This page concentrates how you might manage your group through Beacon and Siteworks. You should have a clear understanding between the two.

Beacon

Beacon is the online website for management of the members of your group. From here, you can add members, remove members, promote then to Group Coordinator (but see latter note) and promote them from a 'Waiting' member, to a fully fledged joined member.

Beacon has an excellent support site for help. From this link, you will want the User Guide for guidance and training on all aspects of using Beacon. Section 5 is all about Groups. It is worth studying this while you are logged in to Beacon.

IMPORTANT NOTE: When your time comes to hand over the baton as Group Coordinator to someone else in your group, then you will see that you can indeed promote a regular member to Coordinator. However, they will not be able to do anything until they have also been promoted to a 'System User'. Only Web Admin can do this, so it is essential that you let Web Admin know you have a change of Coordinator.

Waiting Lists. Beacon supports waiting lists for groups that are full. When we imported members (from Arda) who were waiting to join a group, the default date was the date we imported them, so they all have the same date. The computer said "No" to any edits of the date! If you have no record of the order in which members joined your waiting list, seek assistance from the Groups Admin, he has a list exported from Arda.

Siteworks

Siteworks is the 'front end' public facing webpage for the Shrewsbury u3a. This is the page the public will see when they do a Google search for 'Shrewsbury u3a'. If you update your group in Beacon, then you must make sure that the Siteworks page also reflects your changes. There is no automatic synchronisation between the two sites.

As a Group Coordinator you may have some access (after training) to edit the page for your Group/s. Note that only one Group Coordinator can be given access to edit your page at a time. So even though you might be the lead coordinator, it could be acceptable to allow one of the other Coords in your group to be the author of your group page - if they have a bit more interest in IT than you!

If you do not yet have privileges to edit Siteworks then, in order, your calls for help should be:

Your Category Leader
The Groups Administrator
Web Admin.

Siteworks too have a useful documentation webpage. It covers everything that even the Site Admins need to know, much more than you will ever need. For a Group Coordinator, you will most likely want the Editing and Blocks section.

You will probably want to include some pictures and perhaps some pdf media files on your Group's page. Siteworks has a media library to choose from or you can upload your own. Our policy is to use either pdf files or if it is a presentation such as PowerPoint, then a Powerpoint file is fine. JPG files should be used in preference to png files.

✅ Do use PDF files
✅ Do use Presentation files. (eg PowerPoint)
✅ Do use jpg or jpeg files.

❌ Do not use Word docs.
❌ Do not use Libre Office docs.
❌ Do not use Google docs.

The Media Library is covered in Section 5, Core Components of the Siteworks guide. Do note however, that anything you publish must comply with GDPR and Copyright restrictions.

What this means in practice, is that you cannot upload photos of your members or publish their personal details without their permission. In the 'Description' field of the media file, you should add a statement to the effect that you have obtained permissions from any members concerned, or checked the copyright of a photo or image you have obtained from elsewhere. Add in the date and your name (Initials will suffice).