Introducing: Smart Thanking

With Beacon Smart Thanking you can take advantage of cutting-edge AI and Machine Learning algorithms to automatically write personalised thank yous to your donors, and to deliver them via the optimal channel for that donor.

We’ve now made it easier than ever to create an engaging, personalised giving experience thanks to recent advances in AI and Machine Learning technology. By analysing demographic data about the donor and their donation history, our algorithm can determine the perfect thank you message, and the precise channel to best use to deliver it. No need to ever write a thank you again!

How it works

When a donor makes a donation via a Beacon form, a request to generate a thank you is sent to our Complex Heuristically-Engineered Engagement Response System. The system analyses all of the data that you have stored about the donor (e.g. their postcode, size and frequency of previous donations, date of birth, shoe size), combines it with data about their new donation (e.g. time to complete the donation form and the device they used), and pulls in data from other publicly available sources (e.g census data, social media posts, the DVLA).

The system then calibrates the appropriate language, tone, style, and length of a perfect thank you message.

Finally, the system determines the optimal channel for delivering the thank you. For example, this could be an email, text message, hand-written letter, or telegram.

For example, Lord Heathcliffe Winston-Smith, a resident of Chipping Mulberry who donated £10,000 a year and has recently increased his contribution to £20,000 received the following hand-written message on high-quality 180gsm stock:

My dearest sir,

We trust that you are in good health and remain as roguishly handsome and intelligent as when you made your last donation. Imagine the sheer delight that you bestowed upon our reverent selves when we received your most gracious of gifts. A number of colleagues became overwhelmed and fell down in a swoon of gratitude.

Mo, 17 from East London, a provisional driving licence-holder who has just completed the Great North Run, got this message via social media app A-Flz:

Thanks for the bunce. Nice one.

Live demo

Below, you can see the dynamically generated thank you that would be automatically sent to you based on the data available from your browser.

With AI systems this sophisticated, perhaps the days of human-written thank yous are numbered.

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 either send a reasonable and consistent transactional thank you followed up by a Mailchimp nurture campaign, or send out personally written thank you messages by a competent fundraising professional" says Barry, shaking his head with despair at such madness. "With Beacon Smart Thanking we can just automate that whole process with computers, doing away with any of that pesky subtlety or nuance that a fundraiser can bring to the table".

What next?

The future of the tool is to expand the range of thank you channels on offer. We’re currently in conversation with a sky writer and several barbershop quartets. We’ll also continue to play fast-and-loose with the GDPR ramifications of data enrichment to make sure as much data as possible is available.

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 you can drop me an email at david@beaconcrm.org