Blackbaud NetCommunity vs. Convio Luminate (discontinued)

For those using the events module, NetCommunity is great, though if you do a lot of walk/run type of events where individuals sponsor other individuals, something like TeamRaiser might make more sense. If you don't have the staff resources for web developers dedicated to fundraising tasks, then NetCommunity is a great tool. It's not as customisable as an experienced programmer/developer might want, but it still has a lot of options. It also has a lot of nuance, and if you cannot make an investment of time or money into getting staff trained, it's not going to work out well.

Incentivized

It does great with donor cultivation processes and the workflow feature is top-notch for automating processes. Where it does a less than stellar job is getting it to work more specifically for your organization. Often times building that kind of special feature costs a significant time and money investment and it is something that is hard to transfer when it's time to move to a new database.

Incentivized

• Data integration with The Raiser's Edge - data which is collected in Blackbaud NetCommunity directly integrates with The Raiser's Edge interface and can be seamlessly downloaded into the CRM.
• Donation/Event/Membership registration - the product comes with out-of-the-box forms that can be used for these basic functions. They are flexible, but structured enough to integrate the data back to the CRM.
• Email marketing - constituents can be emailed directly from the Blackbaud NetCommunity platform by querying the data available in the CRM. Targeted email communications can be setup as well as ongoing subscriptions/newsetters.
• Content management - general tools to manage content are available. Business users can add/modify/delete this content without tremendous technical expertise. The content can also be shared across multiple websites - or A/B split tested to determine preference.
• Friendly URLs - the product allows for friendly URLs that are also more searchable on the major search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.).

• Luminate takes some of the legwork out of setting up NSPS for nonprofit use of salesforce.

Incentivized

• When we have carding attacks on our payment gateway it is always a struggle to get all the players to work together and determine how to get us back up and running. ReCAPTCHA at the highest level is not supported, for example.
• From experience, the product has not been stable in the last couple years and all signs have been pointing towards a sunsetting of this product for years.

Incentivized

• Big Investment
• It's a sales program with a donation management overlay so it has some troubles around reporting.

Incentivized

The only reason for this is due to the fact that we are only using the product for a specific purpose that is not directly tied to the newsletters. There are better products out there for what we are doing with grant processing. We will most likely move to a new software instead of renewing for our purposes

Incentivized

The interface with Raiser's Edge and the many different ways our users can interact with the website are a big plus for us. Event registrations are our most popular transaction type and having this on line makes our lives much easier.

Incentivized

Product is stable is up 99.99% of the time. As a hosted customer, we do experience some minor downtime when routers or switches malfunction. We feel the downtime has been minimal and the communications around these outages has been good.

Blackbaud NetCommunity uses .NET technology. It can be sluggish at times if not optimized, but overall we have been pleased with the performance when handling large volumes of traffic.

Blackbaud NetCommunity and all of the Blackbaud products have a great support system. Blackbaud NetCommunity offers support through phone calls, chats, online, and email. Their response time is very quick and the support analysts work with you to resolve issues in a very timely matter. If they do not personally know the answer they will direct you to another support analyst that will be able to assist in a resolution.

Incentivized

Support for the product is horrible; often support will have you bouncing between Blackbaud support and Salesforce support and it's very rare either are able to find simple solutions. Most of the time the solutions almost always cost money and hiring consultants which, for a smaller organization, means not being able to achieve proper solutions.

Incentivized

As expected. Courseware was a nice reference guide.

I truly wish that "0" was an option. I never really pin-pointed whether the implementation issues that we had were caused by Blackbaud, or if it was part of a larger issue that began in-house.

Incentivized

We tried to use this for a while and actually had different groups set up to begin implementing the interface into our computer but for some reason, we could not get a handle on it. iMIS ended up winning out in the long run because it was easier for people of all generations to use and understand. People just preferred the layout and the usability so ultimately it was kept as our main system.

Incentivized

Of the databases I have used, Luminate CRM is my least favorite. However, it is powerful and large enough to function adequately for a large nonprofit; I couldn't say the same for some of Blackbaud's smaller products. We definitely need the full Luminate Suite (Luminate Online, Team Raiser, etc.,) to make it work, though - and we're constantly disappointed by the clumsiness of the way all the pieces interact.

Incentivized

• We were able to purchase a package integrating all types of Blackbaud products which integrate.
• We are able to update our desktop, mobile donation pages which allow us to take donations while having great support available at all times.
• The donation forms and email tools are not very visually appealing and user-friendly so this makes it difficult to implement and in return donors don't have a user-friendly experience.

• Uncertain; we have not collected data on this. Our Luminate package is quite expensive, though.

Incentivized