Once your historical data is in and cleaned up, it’s time to start collecting new data.

Beacon forms help you grow your supporter base, take donations, sign up volunteers, and receive applications for grants, memberships, events, and more.

You can create and customise different types of forms in Beacon, including:

If you don’t see all of these options, don’t worry—some form types only appear when you have the right Elements enabled.

Every form in Beacon creates or updates a Person record. We use 'full name' and 'email address' to deduplicate People, so you must collect these on all forms.

A lot of other things are up to you!

If you're going to use Beacon donation forms to collect donations via your website, this is a great place to start!

Take donations through your website and even collect Gift Aid Declarations if you're using Beacon for Gift Aid.

If you're a membership, sponsorship, or adoption-based organisation. you might want to use Beacon forms to process your new Memberships and renewals of existing Memberships.

Don't forget, you can collect Gift Aid Declarations directly via your membership forms too. So if you're processing Gift Aid via Beacon, make sure this is included on your form.

Signup forms are the most versatile and flexible type of Beacon form.

Whilst not the easiest forms to get to grips with, understanding the basics of signup forms and what they are capable of, will give you the skills you need to customise all types of forms.

If you've used Google forms before, now is the point to unlearn everything you think you know about forms. Whereas you might be used to adding your question to the form first and seeing the responses to that answer appear in google sheets, Beacon forms work a little differently.

Start thinking 'field before form'.

Excellent! Now that we have forms set up to bring new People into Beacon, lets consider other ways that we can automate the data that flows into Beacon.