Overview
What is Blackbaud Luminate Online?
Luminate Online aims to help non-profits engage more effectively with supporters and raise more money by enabling integrated campaigns for digital, social and mobile channels. According to the vendor, Luminate Online helps non-profits:Better understand online supportersMake the right ask at…
Luminate Online - Benefits for donation pages, receipting, and email templates
Very, very powerful. More than a little complicated.
Essential for Non-profits!
Moving on from Luminate Online
Luminate Online - essential tool for nonprofit email marketing
It does a lot, if you can afford it.
Shining a Light through Luminate
Luminate Online - Great for team-based fundraising and email marketing
Luminate Online - The sky's the limit!
Luminate Online Review
Luminate Online will illuminate your business processes and make them brighter!
Luminate Online - Your Fundraising Hub
New to Luminate
Luminate Online-Great tool for email marketing
Awards
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Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
What is Blackbaud Luminate Online?
Luminate Online aims to help non-profits engage more effectively with supporters and raise more money by enabling integrated campaigns for digital, social and mobile channels. According to the vendor, Luminate Online helps non-profits: Better understand online…
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee required
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Blackbaud Luminate Online?
According to the vendor, Luminate Online helps non-profits:
- Better understand online supporters
- Make the right ask at the right time
- Launch creative fundraising campaigns
Passions, preferences and giving history trigger additional campaigns building stewardship through more relevant interactions and opportunities to engage. The company also aims to offer top notch support and numerous free resources. All clients receive a personal Customer Success Manager to offer best practices and resources to succeed.
Blackbaud Luminate Online Features
- Supported: Dynamic Email Campaigns
- Supported: Online Fundraising with Smart Donation Forms
- Supported: Donation Processing
- Supported: Fundraising Analytics & Reporting
- Supported: Calendar Events
- Supported: eCommerce Capabiltiies
- Supported: Engagement Factors
- Supported: Luminate Advocacy
- Supported: Peer to Peer Fundraising with Luminate TeamRaiser
Blackbaud Luminate Online Screenshots
Blackbaud Luminate Online Video
Blackbaud Luminate Online Integrations
Blackbaud Luminate Online Competitors
- Salsa Engage
- Classy
- Bonterra Development + Digital
- Engaging Networks
Blackbaud Luminate Online Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Supported Countries | Canada, United States, Some European Countries |
Supported Languages | English |
Frequently Asked Questions
Blackbaud Luminate Online Customer Size Distribution
Consumers | 0% |
---|---|
Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 30% |
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 50% |
Enterprises (more than 500 employees) | 20% |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(154)Attribute Ratings
- 9Likelihood to Renew21 ratings
- 10Availability3 ratings
- 9.2Performance9 ratings
- 6Usability26 ratings
- 5Support Rating32 ratings
- 7.3Online Training14 ratings
- 8In-Person Training2 ratings
- 3Implementation Rating4 ratings
- 6.6Configurability9 ratings
- 9.8Product Scalability11 ratings
- 6Ease of integration1 rating
- 5Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 9Vendor post-sale1 rating
Reviews
(1-25 of 85)Blackbaud Luminate Online
- Peer-to-peer fundraising via the TeamRaiser module is simple and easy to personalize for every participant.
- Online giving can be done via the Donation Form module with a robust feature set allowing for branding and styling specific to your organization.
- The Constituent 360 modules allows us to gather detailed information about our visitors. This module also has a variety of tools for exchanging this data with other systems such as a CRM.
- The modules within Blackbaud Luminate Online could be more uniform and robust for back-end users.
- The API and Web Services features for Blackbaud Luminate Online are easy to use but could be more extensive so that more data is accessible to customers for tasks such as ad-hoc reporting.
- Access to view (and possibly edit) templates used in producing the Blackbaud Luminate Onlinecontent would be a wonderful addition.
- Online donation page management
- Analytics for page performance
- Templates (donation pages, newsletters) for E-blasts
- Clunky at times
- Report builder could use some improvement
Very, very powerful. More than a little complicated.
- Recurring/Sustaining Giving Management
- Online Donation Forms
- Email Marketing
- Blackbaud Luminate Online is a big, complex, sometimes overwhelming system.
- Takes a lot of training to get to a comfortable point with it.
- Has not changed much for UE in the past decade.
Not great for: Very small shops, it takes a lot of training to set it up well, and may be too much for some.
Essential for Non-profits!
- Donor profiles specific to the donor
- Online donor management system
- Analytics to track campaign success
- Would prefer a cleaner looking UX on mobile
Moving on from Luminate Online
- Donation forms
- Variety of built-in features
- Email marketing
- eCommerce
- Data management & manipulation
- Reporting & analytics
- Automation
- Documentation & user support
Luminate Online - essential tool for nonprofit email marketing
- Effectively monitor the engagement stats for email campaigns
- Responsive & mobile-friendly donation and survey forms
- Run reports on a variety of online metrics
- Out-of-the-box reports are not robust enough for many national nonprofits' needs
- Customization is needed for many campaign components; not everything is point-and-click / drag-and-drop for a novice user
- Auto-notifications are good, but don't always perform as expected
It does a lot, if you can afford it.
- Luminate has what I think is an excellent email marketing component, with analytics and tracking capabilities equal to or better than the product our organization chose to replace it.
- Event creation is easy, once past the learning curve.
- Luminate is a comprehensive platform that covers many bases.
- Luminate is a deep platform, and requires a very skilled administrator conversant with a number of areas: design, coding, finance, etc., in order to give a professional-looking appearance. There are many expensive consultants that provide this service.
- When we last used Luminate, the "Participant Center," used by event registrants, was pretty clunky.
- Lack of accessibility was a problem.
Shining a Light through Luminate
- Clean and fresh look
- Mobile friendly
- Great support team when questions arise
- Copying an event from year to year you have to go into multiple areas to make all the changes - having a more streamlined process would be helpful.
- It doesn't fully integrate with our database (Raiser's Edge) which is also a Blackbaud product.
- Online fundraising
- Email Marketing
- Integration with other systems (Raiser's Edge, Salesforce, etc)
- Advocacy module is weak
- Blackbaud support has struggled for some time
- Lack of product updates (though we hear they are coming soon)
Luminate Online - The sky's the limit!
- Luminate Online is a comprehensive program that lets you manage email lists, sell event tickets, collect survey information and host donation pages all in one.
- Luminate Online has a direct connector to our Raiser's Edge database, which is a huge help to ensure that our data matches within both systems and saves time with data entry.
- Luminate Online is very customizable.
- One issue we came across is that the event module is not very functional for what we need to sell event tickets. There is no way to ask for each registrant's name, and there is no way to send notification emails when someone registers for an event. These are 2 things that are absolutely necessary for us so we are not able to use Luminate Online for our events, and I am disappointed such a robust system is missing such key functionality.
- Luminate Online can be a bit cumbersome to navigate. I feel you need someone with deep technical and coding skills to truly utilize Luminate Online to its fullest potential.
- While the connector to the Raiser's Edge database is great, there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure it functions well.
Luminate Online Review
- Luminate Online is great at keeping forms simple. You are able to make email sign-ups really easy for constituents. They can also manage their email preferences very easily.
- Segmentation is also a strength. Luminate Online allows organizations to segment their constituents into groups or interests, making it easier to send targeted communications.
- Raiser's Edge integration is also a big plus. Luminate Online is able to "talk" to Raiser's Edge to ensure that constituent records are up to date with their online giving. Raiser's Edge is also able to send information back to Luminate Online to make sure that any changes that are made in Raisers Edge are reflected on the record in Luminate Online.
- Luminate Online's Raiser's Edge integration can still use further development. Specifically, allowing donation form comment/notes to be mapped into fields in Raiser's Edge for donors to add any notes regarding such gifts.
- Advanced permissions
- Tight integration with Blackbaud CMS
- Great system performance
- Consistency of user interface across modules
- Increased functionality of Organization records across modules
Luminate Online - Your Fundraising Hub
One of the main factors is that you can start small and as you grow the platform will grow with your organization.
- Team raisers: If your organization has team raisers, Luminate is the one you should be using. The whole arsenal of tools to use arond TeamRaisers is really unmatchable. You can even set the Event Manager Center to grant your event managers to some or all of the management options of the system. You decide the degree of delegation you give to your event managers.
- Email. Do you need to communicate with your supporters? Email will be your tool of choice, do it with the rich text editor or go old school with the plain editor and add your HTML directly. Do A/B testing to pick your best design and measure message performance. Pick your target and see a detailed report of your target audience before sending the email. Once the email is sent, keep track of the results with the information on the panel and the performance report of your email together with a bounce email report, etc.
- Need to recruit volunteers? The survey module will help you create your form for them to fill. What the system may not offer you can achieve with its flexibility and the great support for custom Java scripts.
- Personal events, ticketed events, and the Ecommerce module could use some updating. But they are workable.
- Multi-locale is sometimes a hit and miss but for the most part works pretty well.
New to Luminate
- Tracks constituent preferences and interests
- Many options for form customization
- Reports on online giving trends
- Options in the back-end of the system can be overwhelming - too many options in multiple layered lists
- Organization gifts cannot transfer from Luminate to Raiser's Edge - the connector does not allow this type of gift to flow, so a manual process is required
Luminate Online-Great tool for email marketing
- Email marketing
- Suppression of opt-outs
- Online giving
- The support could use some improvement. It is getting much, much better now that they are owned by Blackbaud, but there are still some areas that need work.
- The integration with Raiser's Edge is fantastic, but has been unstable as of late. This is adding a lot of down time to gift entry, where gifts can not come down through the connector. But the RE/LO integration feature is a huge improvement!
- Querying and reporting within Luminate is a little clunky.
ilLuminating our Potential
- Many coding options
- Allows for creative displays
- Easy to schedule appeals
- Not adaptive to mobile
- Adds phantom coding on occasion
Luminate - easy online email marketing
- Track email open rates, click through rates, donations associated etc.
- Peer to peer fundraising tracking and emails.
- Emailing groups is easy and intuitive - in multiple languages too.
- A few things in events aren't multi-language by default.
- Team Raiser out of the box isn't pretty - best to have redesigned skin.
- US customers tend to get improvements first - but that's typical of anything for us Canadian customers.
Luminate Online - worth the investment
- LO is a great one-stop-shop for registration/fundraising events. Allowing users to register and then fundraise using the same tool (i.e. the same login) is a great way to enhance fundraising results. Also having this information be a part of the main database is incredibly helpful for an organization.
- LO is great for email campaigns - the system allows you to create different groups and queries of your database and then target constituents with messages that are appropriate to them.
- LO's donation forms are pretty simple to set up and are an easy way to track both online and offline donations.
- LO's TeamRaiser can be a bit tricky to use. It's a great tool, but to make it look really nice and be user friendly, it needs someone with some coding expertise to set it up.
- Parts of the LO system are still not mobile responsive (the participant center in particular). I know LO is working on this, but until it's done, this is going to be a frustration for some users.
- While Blackbaud has really invested in tutorials and help/support areas, LO can still be incredibly overwhelming for an organization that is new to the system and doesn't have the money to pay someone to help set it up, or doesn't have someone on staff who has used it before.
Ruminate about Luminate
- The donation forms are easy to set up to start collecting donations instantly.
- Getting an e-mail out the door is fairly straightforward.
- The TeamRaiser module is great for fundraising for big events with multiple registration levels and allowing participants to fundraise on your behalf.
- Constituent management is fairly easy.
- Reporting needs some work, this is being worked on in their new BETA program.
- The eCommerce module needs some work. It would be great to have more ability to customize parts of it without having to rewrite the code.
- The Events module could use some improvements as well.
- The Personal Fundraising module needs a lot of work. It really cannot work as needed right now. We started using TeamRaiser to handle this, but it could be great.
Luminate Online Review
- Clean, professional looking emails.
- Wide variety of reports.
- Personal Fundraising and TeamRaiser functionality for events.
- Reporting on sustaining gift.
- General internal user experience for gathering data.
- eCommerce is clunky.
Happy Team Raiser user
- Peer to peer fundraising
- Coaching emails
- Tax receipting
- Organizational records
- Organizational gifts
- Integration with RE - not all LO information gets recorded in RE
Luminate: Great for the correctly sized operation
- Donation form creation is easy and user-friendly. They are also easily organizable within the system.
- It's great for creating surveys when forms don't necessarily have the flexibility we desire.
- Content is easily created and uploaded to our website.
- Email management is limited. Constituents are only able to have a primary email address and a secondary address which is only mailed to when using the CC function. Sending to the correct and preferred email address is difficult to discern and effective use in Luminate requires extensive data cleanup.
- Reports are not as user-friendly as in other programs. It has occurred multiple times where users are unsure how to get specific fields to pull in reports.
- TeamRaiser is a challenging addition to Luminate. Campaigns within it require extensive work and management.
Luminate for Marketing!
- Luminate does a great job of giving detailed information of online donors and sending them automated emails in return for their donation.
- Luminate also has easy step-by-step guidelines for the email creation.
- Luminate provides multiple ways to analyze and track data.
- I would like to be able to customize more of the font and word placement in the email creations.
- As of now, you can not insert a video into the email, only a photo with a hyperlink to the online video. I would like to be able to embed the video into the actual email.
- I would like to be able to see the last time that I ran queries for my online donors so that I am not overlapping donors or missing donors because of dates.
Luminate great in theory and has potential - but it needs some investment quickly to be cutting edge & user friendly
- E-commerce. Our stores are easy to navigate, mobile friendly and it is fairly easy to manage products in the stores.
- Donation pages. We can modify the look and feel of the pages and have different donation campaigns that we can send out.
- The single sign-on functionality works decently well for us, between LO and our web developer. We use it for our member network/portal.
- Reporting. It is cumbersome to pull or assemble reports out of LO. It doesn't seem user-friendly and should be updated to more current functionality.
- Surveys. Survey are ok, but if we want to customize beyond the approx 15 survey question template, we are stuck.
- Integration with Raiser's Edge. There is limitations on the integration, and this could improve immensely so that clients don't have to do an export/import process as a workaround.
- API integration. This is complex and has its limits as well. The API integration seems hard to use.
Luminate Online Review
- Dynamic and static group creation. Luminate Online allows for the building, addition and removal of records in groups.
- Email campaign management.
- Online donation form creation and management.
- Constituent profile management, especially related to the capability of deleting erroneous or non-valid records.
- Creation and modification of customized acknowledgement and receipts.
- The capability of having organization records that are tied with RE7 records, currently the system does not include an email, MemberId or ConstituentId field.