Product Update: June 2020

Here's all the latest Beacon product news brought to you from the studies and living rooms of Beacon's engineering team.

Improved Direct Debit management with GoCardless

Donors can now select a day of the month when they would like their regular donation to be collected. This works for direct debits and for regular card payments.

Within Beacon, we've improved the GoCardless card that you can add to your Subscription record. This card now shows the status of the Direct Debit mandate and GoCardless subscription as well as displaying information about upcoming payments.

From this interface you can also take two useful actions:

1. Update the amount of a direct debit
2. If a payment is still 'pending' then you can cancel the payment

In the future you will also be able to update regular card payments in a similar way.

Internationalised Beacon forms

We've introduced a translation framework into all Beacon forms which enables them to be translated into other languages. For now, Beacon supports French and Welsh, with more languages to come. Anhygoel!

You can also configure your donation forms to collect donations in any currency of your choice. Très Bien!

We're also upgrading our mapping system so that international addresses are correctly geocoded and shown in location fields.

Workflow improvements: Apps can now be used in workflow actions

We're continuing to improve Beacon's automation capabilities. We've updated our workflow and apps frameworks to enable apps to be used in workflow actions. This means that you can use workflows to do useful things like automatically add a form submitter as a contact in Dotmailer when a form is submitted.

You can also add a Mailchimp action to add the form submitter to a Mailchimp audience.

A huge thank you!

On behalf of the engineering team I'd like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who filled in Fundraising Magazine's CRM survey. As a product, Beacon was rated highest out of all of our competitors. This is really humbling and has inspired the team to keep improving things to make sure we live up to your expectations. You can see a summary of the survey results and download the full results in this blog post.

Up next...

Next month we'll be making some more improvements to forms, adding a form for collecting Gift Aid declarations, and making the way that we handle contact preferences more flexible.