5.11 Groups for one-off events

One-off Events

Traditionally, u3a Group meetings take place at regular intervals and have an ongoing list of members.

Most u3a's will also operate ad-hoc one-off events such as a Coach Outing. The trip may well be offered to all members, or perhaps a pool of interested members that will number more than the capacity of the coach.

One way to manage this is to create a Group that will only have one scheduled event. It may be a good idea to prefix this with "z" so it appears out of the way at the bottom of the Groups listing.

In this example the group zCoach trip Nov20 is limited to 56 attendees. Once publicised, the Group Leader Hilary Barker can add members to the group. This makes it easier to communicate to those going, manage numbers, and to create a register on the day.

After the event the Group can be given the status "Inactive" and eventually deleted.

IMPORTANT:
Please note that deleting an Event will not affect transactions relating to that Event though the transactions will no longer be associated with that Event. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that the Details box states the name of the Event and the reason for payment so that subsequent examination of accounts can be fully explained. This must be done before the transaction is reconciled (cleared).

Tip:
An alternative way to manage one-off events and payments is to initially set up the Event with a limit of 1 attendee (the organiser) and a Waiting List. Members expressing an interest in the event can be added to the Waiting List by the organiser, or by the member via the Members Portal.

Once payments have been received, members can be admitted to the Group (having first increased the Waiting List limit) and associated transactions can be added to the ledger.

Regular Events

The techniques described above can also be used for regular events. For example, a Walking Group in Beacon may well have all the u3a's members who are interested in walking - many more than can be accommodated on one walk. Individual walks can be created as temporary Beacon Groups in the same way as the coach trip example.

v2	2021-05-04	Graeme Bunting	Moved from Knowledge Base
v3	2021-06-16	Lyn Bossons	Paragraph about deleting the event added
v4	2023-01-26	Graeme Bunting	Tip about managing Events with a Waiting List added.