There are a plethora of online survey and form tools that can help you to collect feedback, ask questions of your supporters, or gather vital information. Some of the common ones are:
This article covers when you should use these tools instead of a Beacon form, and how you should you get data from them into your Beacon account.
Beacon forms vs Survey tools
Beacon forms are flexible and integrated directly with your Beacon database, letting data flow into all the right places automatically.
When to use a Beacon form
Here are few scenarios where you're usually better off using a Beacon form than an external form:
To take donations, event registrations, and offer memberships
Beacon has specific forms that take care of all the variety and complexity on these processes, including taking payments and creating the variety of records that might be needed.
Collecting personal information about your supporters
If there are standard personal details you need to collect, which already have fields on People in Beacon, then Beacon's signup forms are a flexible way to be able to collect or update that information. Think phone numbers, contact preferences, dates of birth, or their specific interests.
Collecting core operational information
If you have a process that is done regularly and stays relatively static then Beacon is a great place to store it, and our signup forms are the best way to get that information into your account. It might be rehoming applications for a animal rescue charity, requests to volunteer or logging hours for those who work with volunteers, or booking enquiries for a charity that offers training.
When to use another form or survey tool
There are also some specific circumstances that a third party survey or form is the better way to go:
Variable surveys
Survey products make it very easy to come up with brand new questions for every survey you run, or to change questions as you go, as each survey doesn't need to fit into a specific structure; they're all independent from each other.
One off surveys
If you're only doing a survey once, creating a structure in Beacon for that information isn't the most efficient way to go - use an external tool.
Anonymous responses
By their very nature a CRM like is about your contacts, or linking data together, and all Beacon forms require a name and email address to submit them. Use a separate form provider to gather anonymous information or when it's not directly relevant to other records in Beacon.
Design control
If you want to have more control over how questions are displayed, or the styling of the forms, a 3rd party tool might be the best way to go.
Integrating a survey tool with Beacon
Just because you're using an external tool doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't useful to have some of that data in your Beacon account.
What data should be added to Beacon
Not all data needs to be in your CRM. Ensuring you're only adding the useful information keeps your account clean, tidy, and more manageable.
Responders
If you'd like to record who has responded to your survey, for example so that you can use that data for further marketing, we recommend creating a Campaign record for your survey and adding Campaign member records for each of the People who've completed it.
Answers to survey questions
We usually recommend not to store answers to surveys in Beacon, in particular where they're changeable or one-off questions. Keep the data in your survey tool or as spreadsheets for analysis.
For any questions in your survey that are operationally useful to have in your Beacon account, you can create fields for that information. Exactly where these fields would be stored depends on the data, but where there's not a clear answer then a generic place to add it could be the same Campaign member record created above.
How to add the data
Data can be added in two main ways: Imported from a spreadsheet, or automated via our Zapier integration.
Import from a spreadsheet
Export the data from your survey tool as a CSV file, and map the columns in the sheet using an import template. Full details about how to import data can be found here.
Automatically add new submissions via Zapier
Most survey tools will have an integration with Zapier, which you can then use to pass details into your Beacon account automatically.
To create a campaign member record, you might have a Zap such as this, which finds (or creates) the Person who submitted the response, and then creates a Campaign member record that links to them:
