Beacon makes it easy to collect individual and recurring donations online. There's no code to write, plus we take care of a lot of the things you probably don't want to worry about, like:

We connect with industry leading payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, and GoCardless so you can securely process credit card payments and direct debits online.

To make it possible for Beacon to accept donations, go to Settings > Payments in your sidebar (you'll need to be an admin), and connect with at least one payment provider:

Different providers will be displayed to donors at different times:

Once you've connected your payment provider(s) with Beacon, you're ready to create your first donation form.

​

After the form is submitted, you'll see that the following happens automatically:

You've been notified via email that the donation happened

Single, monthly and annual donations are all enabled by default on your form. If you do not wish to offer any of these options to your donors, you can click to remove them from your form.

​

You can choose which payment option you'd like to be pre-selected when somebody first visits your donation form. This could be either a single or a recurring option.

To choose the default payment, simply click the radio button (circle you can click!) next to your preferred payment option.

​

When someone donates via a Beacon form, Beacon immediately sends an acknowledgement email to them:

You can customise the subject and content of this email, as well as the team member who the email is from in the acknowledgement area of the form settings.

It can be useful to know when someone has made a new donation online through one of your forms.

In the notifications section, you can customise who receives email notifications from Beacon each time a donation is made, as well as the subject and content of the email:

When donation forms are submitted, we automatically create the relevant records in your Beacon database. There's no manual entry to worry about!

Each time a new payment is created, you'll probably want to make sure it's categorised in the right way. For example, it might make sense to set the following on all new payments:

This is how the fixed data section helps you. It makes it easy to segment your data going forwards.

When new payments, people or declarations are created via a Beacon form, Beacon sets this fixed data on every record created (as well as the data that comes from questions on the form).

You can customise the fixed data that Beacon sets to fit your needs:

​

You can add a section to your donation form which invites the donor to increase their donation to cover the costs of processing their payment.

You can choose a percentage of the selected donation amount to add to the total donation. This will be the same for both single and regular donations, where the amount will be added to each subsequent payment taken.

You can also decide whether this box will be checked by default.

This additional donation is added to the donation total; stored on the Payment record in the 'Amount' field.

The amount that is added to the donation is stored in the 'Covered fees' field, and if eligible for Gift Aid, we'll claim on the whole amount.

Recurring donations are handled a little differently to single donations. They're collected either via Direct Debit (GoCardless) or credit cards (Stripe).

It usually takes GoCardless 1-2 weeks to set up a direct debit mandate with a bank (this is totally normal!), and then the mandate becomes active. Once active, you're able to charge payments directly to the donor's bank account.

For credit cards, the first payment is charged immediately.

As such, when either a monthly or annual recurring donation is made via a Beacon form, the data flows into Beacon a little differently:

In GoCardless/Stripe, we also set up a Subscription that will automatically bill the donor the amount they entered during the donation form - at the earliest possible date, and then every month after that.

When each payment comes in, Beacon automatically saves them on your behalf, linked to the relevant Subscription and Person. This happens in real-time; Beacon gets notified as soon as each payment is processed.

If you'd like donors to be able to pick a day of the month that their donation will be taken, you can enable it with the toggle in the 'Payment' section of your form.

​

This will appear as an optional dropdown list on the form, with a choice between the 1st, 15th, and 25th.

If you have multiple currencies enabled, Beacon lets you take single and recurring donations in any of them.

When you create a form, the currency will default to your account's primary currency. In the form settings, you can change this to any other currency you like: