Bringing "Soft Opt-In" to Beacon

Soft opt-ins are here (as of the 5th of February 2026), and we’ve now got some clear and helpful guidance from the ICO about how to make use of them.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at what you can do with soft opt-in, what we’re building into Beacon to help you to manage soft opt-ins, and what you can do today to get ready for the updates to Beacon coming later this year.

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Softly softly

In a nutshell, soft opt-in allows a charity to send email marketing without consent, as long as the message furthers its charitable purposes.

According to the latest ICO guidance, there are a few requirements if you want to do this:

• You’re a charity.
• You obtained the recipient’s contact details.
• You did this through the person expressing an interest in, or offering or providing support for, your charitable purposes.
• The sole purpose of your direct marketing is to further your charitable purposes.
• You provided the recipient an opportunity to refuse or opt out when you collected their contact details.
• You give the recipient an opportunity to refuse or opt out in every subsequent communication.

The latest ICO guidance has some really good explanations of what these all mean in practice, along with some examples of good and bad practice.  I’d really recommend setting aside some time and reading it carefully.

We should soon have some official guidance from the Fundraising Regulator, too.

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Soft opt-in. Hard problems.

At Beacon, we have been completely reworking how our Contact Preferences model works.  This means new functionality on People records, new options on forms, updated functionality in import templates, and updates to every app.  There’s a lot of work to do to make this seamless for you, but we think you’re really going to like what we’re building.

You’ll be able to store lots of different contact preferences:

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You’ll also be able to store contact preferences for each contact point, rather than for a person as a whole.  For example, you’ll be able to store contact preferences for a specific phone number (a ‘Contact Point’) and preferences for how you plan to use that phone number (a ’Contact Type’).

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Finally, you’ll be able to record what they would like to hear about, called their 'Interests'. Interests help you to be both targeted and nuanced with your communications.

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Hard deadlines

Releasing our new contact preferences system is our top priority once we complete our project to move to Google Spanner.  This project is on track, and we’re currently expecting to be able to release our new Contact Preferences system in Autumn 2026.

Soft launch

There are things you can be doing right now to prepare for this change. We recommend:

• Review your forms: Ensure you include the explicit consent option for any Beacon forms you want to support Soft Opt-In in the future. Add an “Opt-Out” option to any custom forms outside of Beacon.
• Understand the new legislation: We highly recommend you read through the latest ICO guidance to understand the implications of the changes for your charity.  How you choose to make use of soft opt-in will depend on your organisation.
• Assess your current Consent options: As we roll this out, we will be prioritising migrations for customers with the simplest consent structures first (those with the fewest number of options in their ‘Contact consent’ field).  If you have consent options that you don’t really need, now is a good time to tidy things up.

Soft scoop

We’re working hard in the Beacon product and engineering teams to make sure that you can take full advantage of the new soft opt-in legislation. We’ve spent a long time thinking very carefully about the best way to give you control over how you manage contact preferences in Beacon. Bear with us, and I think you’re going to really like what we’re building for you!