As part of your move to Beacon, we strongly recommend allocating at least one Beacon Champion within your team. This could be your dedicated database manager, or perhaps it's the member of the team in charge of leading your migration. Your Beacon champion will be your internal expert on all things Beacon. Whilst we have a wealth of free resources to help you get to grips with Beacon, we firmly believe that empowering your team as experts of their account is the most effective way to successfully manage your CRM.
What is a Beacon champion?
🔒 A Beacon Champion is likely an 'admin user' of Beacon.
Champions need to have an in-depth understanding of what being an admin means and the responsibilities that come with it. They will be the team member that colleagues come to when they:
Aren't sure how to apply a more complex filter to a set of data
Think they might need something in Beacon customised
Can't access something they think they should have access to
Understanding their role as an admin and being able to answer those questions that lighter users might have is at the forefront of being a Beacon Champion!
🖐️ High touch user
It's also likely that they'll be a much heavier user of the database, meaning they should know their way around Beacon like the back of their hand.
Beacon, as we all know, is super customisable, which means it's really important for at least one person on the team to understand how the database is structured and what custom data you are storing. Hand in hand with this comes an in-depth understanding of your team's processes and how Beacon is set up and customised to help with those things.
💬 Beacon lingo
When chatting with our support team, it’s helpful if we can quickly establish whether you’re having trouble with something unique to your account (Custom) or core Beacon functionality.
Beacon Champions should aim to develop a good understanding of Beacon vocabulary, like 'Fields', 'Cards' and 'Record types'. This allows us to support you as effectively as possible.
1️⃣ Account expert - the first point of call
The Beacon Champion for each team should be the first point of call for all team enquiries. Whilst the support team is available to all members of staff (and we encourage everyone to ask the questions they need to), we find things typically run better when customers have one person on the team who can try to answer those questions first. Understanding your account is at the very forefront of what it means to be a Beacon Champion - we want you to be experts at managing your account.
👫 Don’t do it alone
It’s generally a good idea to have more than one. This might be a Champion for each team in larger organisations where that division of responsibility is clear. If a key team member leaves your organisation, you want to feel confident that your account will be in safe hands without them.
Managing your Beacon account
It's equally important for you to think of the best ways possible to manage your account once your initial implementation is complete. You have your brilliant new database; now what?
We share your ambitions! We hope that Beacon will aid and allow you to grow and develop as an organisation, yet this inevitably means change. Perhaps you want to introduce a membership scheme, or you want to transfer your volunteer data into Beacon now you've seen what it can do. We want you to feel prepared for anything that might be thrown at you. Beacon is quite often the heart of an organisation’s data, so managing major events like expansion, data consolidation, or even staff turnover is something to be mindful of.
We've found a few things have been useful for Beacon customers:
🗣️ Champion meetings
Team leader/ Beacon Champion monthly Beacon meetings - these are great for coming together and talking about how things are going and to answer any questions people might have:
Beacon Champions have questions too! It's a great way to collate knowledge, even if no changes need to be made.
There's a lot of crossover in Beacon - you'll probably find that multiple teams are often using the same record types - this is a good chance to make sure everyone is using those things consistently to ensure clean data!
It's also important to remember this before making any structural changes to Beacon - it's a good idea to discuss any changes that might impact other users
To stay aware of what other teams are using Beacon for - an open discussion about Beacon use might flag to other teams aspects of the database they could be utilising or using better
✂️ Don’t over customise
As a general rule, try to avoid customising Beacon too much, and make sure you have sign-off from another Beacon Champion before you do so.
We want Beacon to be flexible and love that it can be easily tailored to suit your needs. However, it might raise alarm bells if, soon after your implementation, you're making lots of new changes to the database
Are you storing data correctly?
Do your Beacon Champions have a good idea of data structure?
Does each custom field or record type have a clear and defined purpose?
Will you be able to manage the upkeep of new additions?
🗒️ Document your processes
Some may find it useful to create in-depth internal documentation on your Beacon account. This will typically go through customised aspects of the database, so staff understand how to use Beacon for things that they won't be able to find in our guides.
This typically includes more process-based information about how each team can use Beacon to carry out their day-to-day work. We find that some customers record videos to include in their internal guides, which has proven quite effective. This has its pros and cons:
Pros | Cons |
It's an excellent resource for training new staff | Thorough documentation takes time! - this will take a bit more work during the initial set-up to get right. |
Existing staff feel more comfortable using their new software - this often leads to better reception during the onboarding period. | Really good documentation typically needs manual upkeep - it will likely fall on your Beacon Champions to ensure the information stays relevant for their teams. |
It acts as a reminder for anyone who needs to jog their memory on something (without having to rely too heavily on your Beacon Champions) |
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👬 Let us know!
Let the Beacon team or your dedicated Customer Success Manager know who your Champions are! The more we know, the better our support can be. Make sure, as part of your processes, you loop the Beacon team into any major staff changes so that we can support you and the team.