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Product Updates
Product Updates
Product Update - June 2026
David Simpson
June 1, 2026
Our team has grown, fun new features have been released, and we're storming ahead with our project to completely overhaul the core Beacon database. It's an exciting time at Product HQ!
Back in March I described the Beacon engineering team's largest undertaking of 2026, moving our main data store from Amazon RDS to Google Spanner. Excitingly, this project is on track and we're looking forward to sharing shiny new blazing fast Beacon with you before the Summer is over! You can read my product update describing our motivations and the benefits we're expecting.
We've introduced an Alumni Element aimed at Schools, Universities, and other educational institutions. You can now conveniently store Alumni, educational histories, and extracurricular histories. If you're considering bringing this part of your organisation into Beacon, then please get in touch.
You've now got a couple of new options for visualising your data in Charts. You can use a pie chart (although, for the real data nerds, it's technically a donut chart) to show proportions, and you can use a line chart to better display trends over time. These options are now available for you to use in Charts. These new charts can also be displayed on records and in dashboards, just like bar charts!
Beacon now supports Intelligent Retries in GoCardless. If a supporter’s recurring payment fails (usually due to temporary insufficient funds), GoCardless offers an automated recovery feature called Success+.
Instead of your team manually chasing the supporter or retrying the payment on a random day, Success+ uses AI and machine learning to predict the best day and time to retry the collection (such as the day immediately following a typical payday). On average, this automated feature successfully recovers over 70% of missed payments.
To activate Success+:
You can find out more in our GoCardless guide article.
We've updated our guidance around Sandbox accounts in Beacon for Ultimate customers. Ultimate plan customers now get 1 permanent sandbox account (no expiry) and unlimited temporary sandboxes (3-month expiry). You can find our new guidance in our Sandbox guide article.
A joyful time for the Beacon Product team - we've got two new Product Managers on board: Stoo and Pete. You'll no doubt be hearing from them both as we ramp up the pace at which we build new features and refine existing ones. Welcome aboard!
Just in case you've been living under a rock and you missed it: We've been voted the top Charity CRM in Fundraising Magazine's Annual CRM survey again. You can see the full results in our CRM Survey 2026 blog post. We've been given 4.8/5 for ease of use and 4.8/5 for investment in development. As usual, we'll take this as inspiration to keep pushing harder to make Beacon better than ever and to keep driving innovative ideas forwards.
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Connect with fellow Beacon customers, share ideas, get tips, and discover best practices.
The Beacon Chat Facebook Group has over 700 members and we'd love to welcome you in.
This group is exclusively for Beacon customers.
Our focus is currently on our migration to Google Spanner - but next we'll then be working on our new contact preferences system to support soft opt-in amongst other things!
See you next time, Beacon fans!
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