Introducing: Beacon Bucket

With Beacon Bucket fundraisers can track the value of loose change deposited in collection tins and buckets in real time.

Understanding the effectiveness of fundraising campaigns is crucial. Fundraisers have always had to wait until the change has been counted to evaluate a campaign. But no longer. With Beacon Bucket, you can track the amount of cash being added to any receptacle and use real-time data to optimize your campaign as it happens.

How it works

I started working on Beacon Bucket in my spare room in late 2016. It's taken a long time to perfect the technology but I think we're finally there.

Beacon CTO David Simpson studies a Beacon Bucket device while looking serious

Beacon Bucket can be placed on the bottom of any receptacle you use to collect cash donations. The circuitry uses complex gimbals and motional geometry to detect the change in mass of loose change and banknotes as they're deposited and transmits the donation data via the intercloud to Beacon servers in London.

Once the donation data is recieved by Beacon servers we use the latest machine learning big data cloud-based 360 degree alogorithms to aggregrate the donations and visualise them in your Beacon dashboard.

The internal workings of the Beacon Bucket prototype device

Lots of happy customers

Barry Jenkins, Head of Fundraising at Milton Keynes based charity "GOTCHA" has been trialling the system for us.

"Up until now we've had to count the change we collect which is really time consuming." Says Barry, shaking his head with despair. "With Beacon Bucket I can track the performance of each collection tin and take action. For example, yesterday I noticed a drop in donations at the Co-op, so I went to investigate and found that some little sod had jammed a curly-wurly in the coin slot. This is the real insight we need to drive donations."

What next?

A program to mass produce these devices and to make them available commercially is already underway. We'll start off by charging extortionate fees on all the money collected, then make the product free, then shut the whole system down in a year or so and leave all of our customers bewildered.

Beacon is the charity CRM of the future and we're always pushing the boundaries of technological innovation. If you'd like to see what the future looks like or if you'd like a tour of the Beacon Dreamlabs you can drop me an email at david@beaconcrm.co.uk