How Finding Your Feet use Beacon to power Scotland’s leading amputee charity

If you thought amputees lacked a sense of humour then you’ve clearly never heard of Finding Your Feet, Scotland's leading amputee charity. Founded in 2014 by world record holder and quadruple amputee Cor Hutton, they support folks with limb absence and their families all across the UK. Starting as a peer support group, FYF quickly grew to a network of over 1,000 ‘Troopers’ who help both pre and post amputees, and their families, to adapt to a new way of life. 

One of the biggest challenges often facing recent amputees is a feeling of isolation. FYF runs over 80 clubs each month, both in-person and online, with something for everyone - swimming, crafts, education courses, motorsports, gardening, yoga, even skiing and snowboarding. They even arrange transport for Troopers, free of charge, so everyone has the opportunity to join in regardless of their circumstances. 

But FYF is more than a social club. They go above and beyond with free counselling sessions, regular check-ins, and practical advice with things like employment support and help with driving as an amputee. 

As they grew, they quickly realised a more robust platform was needed to manage their data. They did their research and in June 2021 chose Beacon. 

“The Live Chat function is invaluable to us; we often find ourselves stuck with how to set something up, or in the finer detail of a complicated filter or smart field.  The team are amazing – they always find the answer for us, and respond in a really friendly, humorous manner which we love. Their love for a funny GIF matches ours.” 

FYF immediately moulded Beacon to the way they work, bringing all of their operations neatly under one roof. They suddenly had access to a much deeper level of information about supporters and Troopers and they used it to improve services across the board. 

For the first time ever, FYF had full visibility over who was signing up to clubs but then not showing up. 

“To be able to phone and say “Look you’ve not been for a while, are you okay?” lets them say “No, I’m not” so we can go in and help them, and there’s no way we’d be able to do that without Beacon. It’s just too hard to track” 

A simple check-in like this can be a lifeline to someone struggling and helps to ensure that nobody gets left behind. 

FYF have used Beacon to streamline their volunteer management from the ground up. Volunteers now have access to their own portal so they can log their hours, check what calls have been assigned to them and sign up for any upcoming volunteering opportunities. They’ve even created automated email notifications to keep the volunteers who are running clubs fully informed with attendee details beforehand, removing a lot of admin work for the team. 

Keen to remove even more manual tasks, FYF have made clever use of the automation tools within Beacon. Beforehand, anytime they rustled up an idea for a brand new club to engage Troopers, a lot of the admin needed to be repeated to create it in the system. FYF have removed that repetition with Beacon workflows, automatically populating the necessary data and retiring the old copy & paste jobs once and for all. 

In the case that a Trooper passes away, the team want to be sure that their family is respected. So once their record is updated, the fundraising team is automatically flagged to pull next-of-kin from outreach communications, and any sensitive information is automatically deleted. 

The custom dashboards have given the FYF team a new level of oversight over their operations. They now get full details of club attendance at a glance, so they can assess how each is doing and if resources need to be allocated elsewhere. It also makes creating trustee reports a breeze with instant access to relevant stats like new Troopers and volunteers, the funds raised and by which each campaign, and what types of clubs are most popular. 

Beyond transforming how they work day-to-day, the fundraising team have let their imagination run wild since implementing Beacon. Making clever use of Beacon forms, they ran a pet photo competition where people submitted pictures of their furry friends and asked for votes via donations. They raised over £2,000 with the lovely Dod fetching a well deserved “fur-st place”.

They even ran a birthday fundraising campaign using Beacon Forms rather than the traditional Facebook approach. 

“The data that we can capture from Beacon is so much better than what we can from Facebook” 

All of these improvements fuel one core result - enabling the team at Finding Your Feet to reach even more people with limb absence, and further growing their community which has helped so many through a difficult period. 

If you’d like to see how Beacon could transform your charity, book a demo with a member of our friendly team or sign up for your free 14 day trial today.