Product Update - January 2025

Here's the latest news from the polite and charming humans of the Beacon product team.

Beacon's speedy new export infrastructure

Beacon's exports have always been really flexible and useful, but now they're also blazing fast.

We’ve completely redesigned how exports work behind the scenes to make the process more efficient and, crucially, way way faster.

How fast? Well, for example, it's now possible to export 10 million people records in 22 seconds. Exports that previously would need to be left for hours to run will now finish in minutes.

Amusingly, you’ll now find that the limiting factor for Beacon exports is the speed of your internet connection when downloading the file!

The infrastructure updates that make this possible are the same ones that are powering Beacon's awesome new Time Machine feature, and we're going to continue to invest in using the latest technology to make amazing things possible.

Variables in email template subject lines

You can now use variables in the subject lines of email templates sent from Beacon. A little more personalisation in your friendly messaging!

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Copy cards

Every card on a Beacon record page now has a 'Copy' button. If you've perfected a card and want to use it again, it's now really simple to make copies of your other cards, just like on a dashboard. You'll need to be an admin in customisation mode to see the new button.

Create OR Update workflow triggers

You can now trigger a workflow to run when a record is either created or updated. This means you don't have to create two separate workflows to handle these scenarios any more.

Join the Beacon chat Facebook group!

Connect with fellow Beacon customers, share ideas, get tips, and discover best practices.

You can find the group here and we'd love to welcome you in.

Please note that this group is exclusively for Beacon customers.

Next up

Next, we're working on Record Access, which will give you fine-grained control over which Beacon records your users have access to. We're also very close to shipping our Fundraise Up integration.

We've got some exciting plans for making Beacon faster and more reliable this year, and I'm looking forward to sharing details of our new Record Access feature soon!