Each time a form is submitted, Beacon can automatically send both an email acknowledgement to the person who filled out the form, and a notification email to someone at your organisation that a new form has been completed.
Tip: Looking for notifications for things other than form submissions? See our related guide here.
Acknowledgements
The acknowledgement setting is on by default, but you can toggle it on or off for each form.
To customize acknowledgment messages for specific forms in Beacon, follow these steps:
Navigate to the specific form where the acknowledgment message needs customization.
Open the form settings.
Locate the section for acknowledgment or confirmation messages.
Edit the text or layout of the acknowledgment email as needed. This process allows you to tailor messages effectively to suit the audience or event type.
You will need to set which user the email is marked as coming from (it defaults to whoever created the form originally), and you can then customise the text of the email that will be sent.
You can add new fields in your template by clicking the button on the right of your text:
Depending on the form, you may have just one email template or you may have several to cover the various options in the form. For example Signup forms have just one template, but Membership forms have five or more!
Tip: Any replies to acknowledgement emails will go to the person chosen in the 'Acknowledgement email from' drop-down.
Tip: If you copy an existing form, the acknowledgment message from the original form is retained in the copy. This can save significant time when consistently using similar acknowledgment formats.
Notifications
The notifications work in much the same way as acknowledgements, aside from who gets notified.
You can add any number of people to notify including team members (start typing their name and you can select them) or by directly entering email addresses (hit enter after each one to add it).
Styling notifications and acknowledgements
As well as adding a logo and banner and button colour, there are a few other ways you can add styling to your form. You also have the option to bold, italicise, or hyperlink the text in email acknowledgements, notifications or the 'Description' of any form section.
Simply highlight the text you want to add styling to, and the options will appear:
Beacon forms also support emoji - so feel free to add some of these for an extra personal touch.
That's it! Your form notifications and acknowledgement emails now have some additional styling!
Frequently asked questions
Best Practices for Form Acknowledgements
For Single Events: Customize the acknowledgment message to address specific event details or attendee instructions directly.
For Repeated Events: Utilize the "copy form" feature to carry over acknowledgment messages from similar past events.
Understanding Limits: Plan for manual effort required to customize new forms' acknowledgment messages, ensuring accuracy and consistency in communication.
Can I use a generic email address, such as [email protected], for form acknowledgements?
Acknowledgements can only come from users of your Beacon account, so if you'd like to use a generic mailbox for your acknowledgements you can invite it to your account as a read-only user - it will then be available to be set as the acknowledger!
Is there a merge tag for whether someone gave a Gift Aid declaration?
Yes! You can include {{{gift_aid_declaration_ticked}}} in your acknowledgements or notifications to see whether the donor gave a Gift Aid declaration on that form.
The merge tag will display either Yes or No depending on whether they chose to give a declaration or not.
Can I set default acknowledgment messages for all forms?
Beacon does not currently support global default setting modifications for acknowledgment messages. The default automated acknowledgment message used when creating a new form is fixed and originates from Beacon's default email template. To alter the acknowledgment message, you'll need to manually edit it after creating each form. However, if you copy an existing form, the acknowledgment message from the original form is retained in the copy. This can save time if you want to preserve an existing acknowledgment message format across similar forms.
Can I add images to my emails?
Yes. Whilst you can't upload a picture file directly to your emails, you can add an image by using a link to the image, but that image will need to exist somewhere on the internet already.
For example, we're going to use this picture in our email. We add a link to it by using the following format:
