Groups, interest groups, convenors, leaders, coordinators - there are many names you may go by if you organise a group in your u3a. But not everyone is confident using technology and using Beacon may be something you're a bit unsure about. Going at an extra slow pace, this session will get you started with the basic tools in Beacon for group leaders.

Aimed at u3a secretaries (not membership secretaries), during this session we'll go through the key functions in Beacon that are relevant to secretaries, including an overview of the member record and member management. However, this session is not sufficient for membership secretaries and we run a separate course for them.

Beacon is a membership management system, built by u3as for u3as, so it's no surprise that membership secretaries are usually the main user of Beacon in their u3a. In this session, after a quick overview, we'll look at the tools you have to manage your membership before looking at the communication tools and how you access all of the data held in Beacon, including extracting data. We'll also take a look at how your role and that of the treasurer work together.

Many people now like to "self-serve", so enabling online joining and/or renewal in Beacon allows your members to manage their membership and payment themselves. And it also saves membership secretaries a lot of work!

In this session we'll demystify setting up your PayPal account and configuring Beacon as well as showing you the process for your members. We'll also cover dealing with online payments and how to make sure Beacon is set up to manage this new method of payments in the most efficient way.

Aimed at membership secretaries and treasurers, you should be familiar with Beacon and the processes for managing membership within it as this is not a beginners' course.