Blog posts
Product Updates
Product Updates
7 things we're working on in 2020
David Simpson
January 6, 2020
2019 was another really exciting year for the Beacon product team. We've been extremely busy this year and we've released lots of exciting features.
More importantly, we've had the opportunity to work with, and learn from, some remarkable organisations doing really great work. It's a privilege to get to work with so many great customers and to shape Beacon with their suggestions.
Two of our guiding values are that we are constantly innovating and we strive to do what we do better than anyone else in the world. In 2020 we'll be putting those values into practice as we work even harder to improve the Beacon product.
Here's a taste of what we're going to be working on over the next year:
We're constantly working behind the scenes to keep the Beacon database infrastructure robust and snappy. We overhauled how everything works in the early part of last year - this year we will be focussed on refinement and optimisation. We'll also make sure that our infrastructure is running as efficiently as possible in order to maintain our commitment to being a climate positive organisation.
Beacon makes it possible to build forms to allow your supporters to register for events quickly and easily.
Forms also allow donations and memberships to be collected easily. This year we'll be creating a new kind of form that will allow you to allocate and sell tickets to events. Naturally, all of the data about tickets and event attendance will flow automatically into Beacon.
We're working on two major improvements with regards to locations within Beacon:
Timelines are getting an overhaul. This feature allows you to see a record's changes and activities over time. We're going to make some important changes:
Before founding Beacon David and Chris were senior managers at integrations startup Tray.io. This expertise in integrations has been brought to the Beacon team and automation and integration is an important part of Beacon's product plan.
Sometimes we'll integrate with another best-in-class product (like Mailchimp, Stripe, and iZettle) but, as with event tickets, we also develop features in house when we think that is the best approach.
Our Zapier integration and import templates provide a generic mechanism for integrating with other tools but we're also working on some more direct integrations:
This year we're planning to build integrations with Xero, Donr, Office 365, Goodbox, and JustGiving to name a few.
We're improving mechanisms to allow people to update their data in Beacon without being Beacon users. This will be useful for membership organisations who want to give their members a way to keep their data up to date. It will also be useful for case work in which teams of volunteers need to keep records up to date.
Finally, a reminder that some features can also be a bit of fun! We'll be adding support for text formatting in Beacon fields so you can store more complex text data. This includes support for emojis!
We're always looking to improve based on your feedback. If there's a big feature you'd like to see that isn't in this list then let us know!
