Your dashboard is a really great way to see an instant summary of the data in your database. You can customise it to keep an up-to-date view of the things that are most important to you.
Note: Your dashboard is unique to you as a user. This means you can set up yours however you like!
To help you get started with setting up your dashboard, here are some examples of cards you might find useful:
Donations this / last financial year
You may find it useful to see an up-to-date total of how many donations your organisation has received so far this year, or in the previous year.
Give your card a title and select ‘Metric’ as the card type. Select the payments record type and select ‘Sum’ as the card metric to be displayed. Select the ‘Amount’ as the field on the payment record type that you want to total.
Now apply some filters to ensure that the only payments you are totalling are donations that were made this financial year or last financial year.
Tip: You may want add other payment types to your card’s filter such as ‘Legacy’ payments, if you want to include those amounts in your organisation’s donation totals
Congratulations! You now have a total of all the donations made to you this financial year
Campaign success - Participation
Perhaps you want to track the success of a particular campaign you are running. You may want to monitor the number of responses that campaign has received.
Give your card a title and select ‘Progress’ as the card type. Select the Campaign member record type and select ‘Number of records’ as the card metric to be displayed.
Note: Don’t forget to set a goal! This will be your target number of Campaign Members you hope to engage with this campaign.
Now apply some filters so your card shows only Campaign Member records that are related to the Campaign you are tracking.
Tip: If the success of your Campaign member records is denoted by a particular ‘Status’, include that in your filter too.
Congratulations! You now have a total of all the campaign members that have responded to your campaign, and can see a visual representation of how close you are to your participation goal!
Campaign success - Financial
When tracking the success of a campaign, it may also be useful to see how close you are to fundraising targets set for that campaign.
Give your card a title and select ‘Progress’ as the card type. Select the Payments record type and select ‘Sum’ as the card metric to be displayed. Select the ‘Amount’ as the field on the payment record type that you want to total.
Note: Don’t forget to set a goal! This could be your fundraising target for this particular campaign.
Now apply some filters so your card shows the calculated total of only payments that are related to that campaign.
Congratulations! You now have a total of all the payments that have been received as a result of your campaign, and can see a visual representation of how close you are to your fundraising goal!
All people on your email mailing list that do not have an email address
Depending on your role in your organisation, it may be your job to ensure that all people signed up to the email mailing list receive their regular updates. It may be beneficial, therefore, to refer to a live list of all those people within your database that have signed up to receive email updates, but have not provided an email address.
Give your card a title and select ‘List of records’ as the card type. Select the People record type. Set the primary value as the person’s ‘Name’.
Tip: You could go one step further here and add a secondary value to display for each record listed on your card.
Now apply some filters so your card shows a list of only people that are signed up to your email mailing list and do not have an email address.
Note: If, in your database, all the people who have 'Email' as their contact consent are sent your newsletter, you won't need to include the filter for 'interests' - it depends how you store this information!
Congratulations! You now have a list of all the people that are signed up to receive your email newsletters or updates but do not have an email address.
Donors without Gift Aid declarations
To ensure you're not missing out on any potentially claimable Gift Aid on your donations, you might want to make sure that anyone who has made a donation to you in the last four years has a valid Gift Aid declaration. Let's take a look at how to create a dashboard card for all those people that do not, so you know who to contact in your next Gift Aid declaration campaign!
Give your card a title and select ‘List of records’ as the card type. Select the people record type and set the primary value as their ‘Name’.
Note: You could also add a secondary value that you would like to be displayed, such as their address.
Now apply some filters so your card shows only those people who have made donations, but do not have a related Gift Aid declaration. Since we are filtering for related records we will have to apply some additional filters.
Make sure to filter your related payments for donations made in the last 4 years.
2. Filter your related Gift Aid declarations to show only those people that have less than one related declaration.
Congratulations! You now have a list of all of the people that have made a donation in the last four years, but do not have a valid Gift Aid declaration.
Your recent communication
Tracking your recent emails and communications with people is super easy in Beacon thanks to the activities record type. Since every member of the team will be logging who they've been in contact with, it may be useful to see a list of people only you have recently spoken to.
Give your card a title and select ‘List of records’ as the card type. Select the activities record type and set the primary value as the ‘Name’. As your secondary value, you may want to see who (or which record) in Beacon this activity was 'Related to'.
Now apply some filters so your card shows a list of only activities that you are the owner of and happened in the last two weeks.
Note: You may want to see fewer activities, such as those that happened in the last week, or perhaps you want to see all your activities from the last month - you can adapt the time period for which to view activities so it fits your needs.
Tip: You could also specify which type of activities you want to see in this list. If you only want to monitor which emails you have sent recently for example, you could filter for type is email
Congratulations! You now have a list of all your recent email communications in the last two weeks.
The really handy thing about dashboard cards is that you can click straight through to this list of records to export them, just like any other filtered list view. Just hover your mouse over the top right corner of the card and click ‘View people’.
