Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Luminate takes some of the legwork out of setting up NSPS for nonprofit use of salesforce. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Big Investment It's a sales program with a donation management overlay so it has some troubles around reporting. Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Uncertain; we have not collected data on this. Our Luminate package is quite expensive, though. Read full review ScreenShots