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Product Updates
Product Updates

Product Update: December 2022

David Simpson
December 1, 2022

Ho Ho Ho! Here are some festive treats from the diligent elves in the Beacon product workshop.

Beacon now supports Google Analytics 4

Google is switching off its older version of GA (known as Universal Analytics) in July 2023. You'll need to switch over to Google Analytics 4, and we recommend that you do this as soon as possible, because you won't be able to access your old data after July. More information is available from Google here, and about how to switch over in Beacon here.

Relationships for Organisations

There's a new 'Relationships' tab on Organisation records, which will show you all of the People records with relationships with this organisation. It all works in the same way as relationships with people. You can read more about how relationships work in Beacon here.

Screenshot 2022-11-30 at 12.08.53

Import Relationships

You can now import your existing relationships from a spreadsheet into Beacon. Your import has to be in a very specific format, and we've written a guide to take you through how to do this, here.

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Adding text to forms

You can now add more text to forms wherever you need to add some more information or context. You can add a new section that's entirely text, and you can add text in place of a field.

Screenshot 2022-11-30 at 14.42.09

More flexible checkbox fields

Checkbox fields can now be displayed as buttons which require a choice to be made. This is handy when you want users to make the active decision to choose 'no' rather than leaving a box unchecked.

Screenshot 2022-11-30 at 14.52.20

Discount codes for tickets

You can now add discount codes when selling tickets for an event. Here's a quick summary of how this works:

  • From your form setup you can add as many discount codes as you like
  • Discount codes only apply on the form to which you've added them
  • You can set either a percentage discount (e.g. 50%) or an absolute value (e.g. £2)
  • If you want to add a code that makes a ticket free, create a discount code for 100%
  • Discounts are applied to the total amount, not per ticket

You can read more about discount codes in this guide article.

Screenshot 2022-11-30 at 15.01.34

Ticket-level availability restrictions

As well as setting a limit for the number of attendees to an event, you can now restrict the availability of tickets in some new ways:

  1. "There are only 10 VIP tickets for this event".

You can now set the number of each type of tickets which are available for an event. For example, you can offer 5 'early bird' tickets and 2 tickets for the 'Royal box'.

  1. "You can only buy 1 VIP ticket per transaction for this event".

You can restrict the number of tickets of a particular type which can be bought in a single transaction.

We've added some new messaging to ticket forms to make it clear when your attendees hit any of these limits.

Screenshot 2022-11-30 at 15.59.05

Cover fees on memberships

You can now add a 'cover fees' section on membership forms (as well as donation forms). This will increase both the amount of the membership, and the amount of any additional donation, by the percentage specified. Next, we'll be adding this to ticket forms, too!

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Become a Beacon expert with Beacon Lighthouse

If you're looking to really get to grips with Beacon then you can enroll in one of our free online courses through Beacon Lighthouse. We've recently added Deep Dive courses on Major Gifts & Grants and Events & Ticketing, all curated by Senior Customer Success Manager and Lighthouse Keeper, Luke.

Did you catch our first webinar?

Yesterday the Beacon Customer Success team hosted our very first webinar. It's a good opportunity to meet the CS team, to get a recap of some of the things we've released this year, and to find out about our priorities for 2023. You can watch the recording here.

Beacon chat: You're invited to the coolest club on the interweb

Beacon customers are invited to join our private Facebook Group. It's a place to exchange ideas, tips, and best practices.

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

The group is only available to Beacon customers.

Up next...

Soon we'll be releasing conditional fields/sections on forms, an updated PayPal integration, and the first version of our Enthuse integration. We're also making improvements to how membership forms work.