Anthology Encompass vs. Blackbaud Online Express vs. Blackbaud Luminate Online

Importing and exporting data is failry easy. Automation for e-mail marketing is severely lacking.

Incentivized

For 100% tax-deductible donations, I 9.5/10 recommend Blackbaud Online Express. The only thing is that it does not charge debit cards automatically, so I have to do it myself. Using Blackbaud Online Express forms for events gets more complicated. The way events work in Raiser's Edge in general is already complicated, so maybe it's more on Raiser's Edge than it is Blackbaud Online Express.

Incentivized

Blackbaud Luminate Online is an excellent solution for online giving, providing a wealth of tools for producing donation forms. It also is outstanding for peer-to-peer fundraising, such as event-based efforts like walks, cycling tours, and so forth. The Email module is outstanding if you need an internal solution for communicating with your donors and supporters. It provides a wealth of tools for crafting emails, and for reporting on the results.

• It allows us to create fields as needed.
• Creating an export of data is really easy.
• Merging of records is fairly simple.

Incentivized

• Online donation forms are easy to create and place within our existing website. The donations received are easily transferred into our Raiser's Edge database.
• Creating email communications for our constituents is very simple to achieve in Online Express and the statistics provided are very helpful to see what our constituents are clicking on.

Incentivized

• House Donor Information. Easy report pulling. Queries and lists.
• I like how everything is housed on one platform. Webpages, emails and donor profiles. User friendly.
• It works nicely with other blackbaud products such as Raiser's Edge. Easy importing and exporting options.

Incentivized

• A more inclusive duplicate identification tool would be great.
• QR tickets for event registrants would be great and move you into this century.
• Allowing more flexibility with event creation is vital to us at this time.
• Additional automation would be great. Email event info, then to those not registered, then a reminder to those registered. Now it is entirely manual throughout the entire process.

Incentivized

• It does have some "quirks." It can be a little tricky to process the batch until you have done it a few times.
• I had a problem finding a constituent yesterday - he was purchasing a program ad for an event - that I knew was in the database. It turned out that he had been marked inactive, and so apparently wasn't included in the search results.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

It does not have the automation or event tools that we are desperately needing at this time.

Incentivized

We’ve decided to leave Luminate and are moving to a system that better caters to our and our users needs. Luminate has proven difficult to use and has limited abilities when it comes to data management, events, and peer-to-peer functionality. Reporting is also very complicated and requires a great deal of time to utilize properly.

Incentivized

The software is old and complicated. Not very intuitive to learn.

Incentivized

You have to be very tech savvy to use Luminate to its fullest potential. You can get buy with the training, but there is a steep learning curve and you almost need 6 months to 1 year of in-person training to really be able to anything substantial. The online training lessons are not going to cut it while learning this program.

Incentivized

It is usually up and running.

Incentivized

It's a very rare occurrence if the system isn't available when I want it. I can easily log in from home after hours if need be, and the security is enforced, but simple when you're legit! They are very good about sending email reminders and updates when system maintenance will be performed, and it's always during middle of the night hours when you likely wouldn't be using it anyways

Incentivized

No integration.

Incentivized

Pages load fast and 98% of the reports do run in a matter of secons/minutes. There is this one report I have that can take hours to run, but this is due to the amount of transactions being requested for one of our biggest online fundraising events (Transaction report)

Incentivized

I usually get an accurate response to issues. Your service techs are knowledgeable in how the software works and is set up.

Incentivized

Customer service for all of Blackbaud's products has really lacked over the years. They are starting to get better in the last year but it can very frustrating. The online knowledge base community is the best resource for information. At times it can take hours for a customer sect even rep to help with questions or problems which is not at all ideal in this industry.

Incentivized

Support staff are usually incredibly helpful and responsive. There are several ways to contact them (chat, logging a ticket, phone) which makes it easy to get help when you need it. Once in a while I get a support staff member who isn't quite as helpful, which is why I gave it a 9 instead of a 10, but that is rare and if I follow up with someone else, I get what I need.

Incentivized

N/A I've only attended webinar training, which is great when you are on live, not so much when watching a recording.

Incentivized

Initial training was great and the instructor was very patient and helpful during the set up process. Blackbaud has a variety on online self-paced classes that supplement the training you receive. The only downfall is after training is complete. I've found the support for Luminate to be a tad lackluster. We often encounter issues that aren't on Luminate's development road map and have had a series of cases be opened.

Incentivized

Most are recorded, so questions that arise are not easy to get answered.

Incentivized

When I used the training, I had actually been using Luminate Online but figured it might help me learn to use the tools more effectively. And it did. The sessions were helpful and even as a current user I felt like I learned how to use the tools more effectively.

Incentivized

Unknown. I wasn't here.

Incentivized

Implementation of Luminate itself was rather smooth, but the process involved for TeamRaiser was very difficult. Even after implementation we relied on support to help with various aspects of TeamRaiser from page design to reporting and front end user issues. The support offered for issues with Luminate was very good, but again TeamRaiser support was lacking.

Incentivized

None others to date.

Incentivized

Blackbaud Online Express is mainly used strictly because of its integration with Raiser's Edge. If a client uses Salesforce for constituent/lead management, other products can offer more flexibility in designing donation forms, email templates, etc. However, they all have their own negatives in Salesforce integration -- that is a whole other can of worms. While the Raiser's Edge integration of Online Express isn't perfect, it is relatively painless compared to the competition's Salesforce integration. Also, for NFP's, Blackbaud's NFP focused business model is a plus.

Incentivized

The only other product I have used for this type of fundraising work is NetCommunity and it hasn't been as scalable or versatile. It doesn't really offer the peer to peer fundraising of Luminate or the constituent management, web page development and considered donation forms. NetCommunity didn't even come close which is why we replaced it with Luminate.

Incentivized

Luminate Online is a great scalable product as it provides various price points dependent on your quantity of email addresses. This allows both small and large organizations to utilize the product, which has strong email capabilities. It also means smaller organizations aren't forced to pay astronomical fees in order to have access to a quality product.

Incentivized

• The cleanup process is very painful due to lack of any automation
• Identity checkpoint would be great if we could control the fields being matched.

Incentivized

• Regardless of project or initiative, all fund-raising efforts are managed in one place for the entire organization.
• Donor management is concise, thorough, and systematic - no individual or organization is overlooked.
• Snapshot reporting of successful grant applications and fund-raising are readily available.

Incentivized

• We've increased our online giving +200% although this is due in part to our focus on the channel and not entirely on the product.
• We've been able to increase employee efficiency by selecting email lists per message within Luminate Online. With our prior solution we needed to request data be pulled from our database for event email.
• We've really done a great job of growing our online tribute and memorial giving through the use of custom links and the pre-populated information has really helped with the back end processing.

Incentivized