Organisation & background
Beacon Apps Ltd, based in Shoreditch, London, was founded in 2017. It’s privately owned and profitable, not venture-backed, and has grown to a meaningful-sized team serving small and mid-sized UK charities.
Functionality
Beacon CRM is a charity CRM in which people and organisations are linked to gifts, regular-giving agreements, memberships, event attendance, cases and volunteer applications. Fundraising covers soft credits, in-memory giving, funds, campaign hierarchies and trust applications. Modules can be switched on for memberships, events and ticketing, case management, volunteering, and grantmaking with scored applications and grant payments. Forms feed records, a supporter portal offers self-service access by emailed link, and workflows can update records, send emails and pass data to Mailchimp, Dotdigital or Zapier. Administrators can add custom fields and create new object types.
Localised features
One-click Gift Aid submission to HMRC, the UK’s tax authority, through the fundraising module, with a Charities Online XML or CSV audit trail. Integrations with the UK fundraising platforms JustGiving and Enthuse are included.
Implementation model
Delivered by a third-party partner: the default, vendor-recommended route, though not strictly required. Over 30 certified agencies deliver most projects, since a 2022 shift away from in-house delivery. A free self-implementation guide exists for technical teams wanting to self-serve.
Hosting
Cloud-hosted by the vendor in the UK on AWS and Google infrastructure, including Beacon AI. Beacon disclosed a data breach in August 2026, affecting over 1,000 charities; database backups were likely downloaded.
Last full research
August 2026