Product Update: November 2021

       Here's your monthly roundup of the latest solid gold features from the Beacon product team.
     

       Improved date handling in smart fields
     

You can now do some pretty cool things with dates in Beacon that you couldn't do before!

       Date manipulation
     

We've added two new functions to date smart fields, DATEADD and DATESUBTRACT.

This lets you do handy things like this:

Or this:

These smart fields can be filtered using Beacon's standard date filters. You can find out more about manipulating dates here.

       Date formatting
     

If you're using a short text smart field, you can change the format of a date that you pass to it.

This is really useful for email templates or document merges and Beacon allows you to display dates in thousands of different formats. That means you can always find a format you'd like!

For example you can show dates like this:

Or maybe just the month:

Or even with some extra text:

More information and the available formats is here.

       Annual Recurring Donations
     

You can now collect regular annual donations on Beacon donation, event registration, and membership forms.

None of your existing forms will have changed, but you can turn annual donations on from the 'donation amount' section on your form configuration.

       
allow memberships to be gifts
     

On a membership form you have the option to offer memberships to be purchased as gifts, but sometimes a membership is always for someone else.  For example, memberships that are specifically for children.  There's a new option on membership forms to remove the choice of giving a gift and to always assume that the person filling in the form is not going to be the new member.

You can find out more about giving memberships as gifts here.

       Beacon Facebook Chat is the coolest place to be...
     

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...
     

Next, we're doing a pretty sizeable upgrade to how timelines work. We'll be introducing loads of useful timelines functionality.  We're also improving our import template library to make it easier to navigate and to pave the way for us to create lots more useful import templates.