1. Access your Group information and change it:

• At the home screen click on Groups under the Groups heading
• Click on the specific group in the Group column – scroll down until you find it on the table, e.g. Walking – Striders 1
• A screen headed ‘Group Details’ appears
• Just below the title of the group ‘Group Record for Walking – Striders 1’ several options are shown
• Select, for e.g., Members
• All the current members of the group will be shown

NB If you keep ‘CTRL’ pressed whilst clicking on your next option on the Home Page, the new page, the list of groups in this case, opens in a new tab, so that you don’t lose the home page. This works when making a selection on any page, so that you can keep any pages that are of interest to you open: there is never any need to lose what you were previously viewing. Alternatively, if you right click the option you wish to select, you can may also be able open this new option in a new page or window. Try it, you can’t do any harm.

2. Add individual members to your group

• The initial work to create the group will have been completed by the Group Support Team
• Access the group information as in 1. above and select Members.
• Scroll down to the bottom of the list of any members that have been added (use the black up and down arrows on the RHS to move up and down the list quickly)
• You can either add members by name or, if you know it, their membership number.
• To add a member by name, click on the down arrow next to ‘select member’.
• Scroll down to the member you want to add and click add – that’s it done.

3. Contact them as a group by e-mail

• Once you’ve opened your group (1. above) click ‘select’ at the bottom of the left-hand column. A dropdown appears and click, for e.g. ‘select all’. To the right of this you can see ‘Do with selected’ and next to it ‘Send Email’ (If you click the down arrow beside ‘Send Email’ that are some alternatives). Should you want to send an email click ‘Do with selected’ and this opens an email with all the addressees you selected.
• Above your own email address, you can see a box headed ‘Load standard message’, but on many occasions you will probably want to compose a group-specific mail, as when the Group Leader sends out the Striders 1 emails. You can attach files, such as Striders’ meet locations, and the rest is pretty standard email. Probably worth ticking ‘Tick to receive copy’, then tick send.

NB Files that you may wish to attach to an email that contain punctuation characters in their title will be rejected completely.

4. Venues

• Venues are now controlled on the web site so please leave this as "See web site for venue".

5. Download your Members details in Excel or as a PDF file

• Access your group members as in 1.
• If you want to download a complete list of group members click ‘Select’ at the bottom of the left-hand column.
• This will give you a range of options – in this case click ‘Select All’.
• Clicking the down arrow beside ‘Send Email’ gives you some alternatives – in this case click ‘Download Excel’
• Then click ‘Do with Selected’ and select which details you want to download – Email, Telephone, Mobile, Address, Emergency contact
• Your Excel spreadsheet will be downloaded.

6. Faculties

• A Faculty is a way of gathering similar Groups together e.g. all the Walking Groups or all the Table Tennis Groups
• Should you need to contact similar groups, using the Faculty is the quickest way – please contact an administrator if you wish to use Faculties

7. To Logout select ‘Home’ then ‘Logout’

8. Group Record

You should not set up Activities via “Schedule” using Beacon, as this will conflict with the current information on the existing u3a web site and confuse Members. It may be that we will move to this at a later date and select Members.

9. Group Details Screen

• The only field you should change is your Group’s name. If you do this don’t forget to press Save.
• Nothing else is worth changing as it is not recorded or seen by anyone other than the Group Leader.

Tony Wilson (System Administrators) 

April 2026