Bonterra Guided Fundraising vs. Convio Luminate (discontinued)

Each time I have called, emailed, or messaged Customer Support, they have been very patient and very helpful in trying to address my concern or explain how to do something. As a relatively new user, customer support is very important to our organization from both an efficiency and customer communication perspective. Response time is very important, and Bonterra's Customer Support wins my vote for this feature.

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

• The ability to create fundraising pages has streamlined our fundraising efforts.
• Our fundraising coach has given us multiple ways to go about getting donors and has provided some creative problem solving.
• We are finally able to track our donors and update them as soon as possible!

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Every organization you enter has to have a point of contact with their email address listed. The point of contact also has be entered separately as an individual. If you use “email all” to your donor list, the contact gets emailed twice. This seems like it would be easy to prevent in the system but it’s currently not possible.
• Event ticketing is extremely limited unless you pay significantly more as an add-on. This should be included as a default feature.
• Emails sent through the system can end up in spam filters. Given how much email gets sent through their system, they should find a way to overcome that.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We are still learning and rebuilding our nonprofit using this platform, so this year is a trial run to see how we can increase our network and our donations. So long as we are able to see a significant return on investment in terms of donations received through the platform, we will renew for next year.

Incentivized

I was able to learn the software in just a month, which truly speaks to how easy it is to use. With enough clicking, you're able to figure out what you're wanting to do. Generally, with anything you can think of, Bonterra Guided Fundraising has it covered. The whole interface is intuitive and responsive enough that I don't waste time trying to navigate the site, which is great.

Incentivized

Bonterra customer service is slow and terrible. They take forever to address the actual issue, constantly making incorrect assumptions about the issue. I have spent more than 45 minutes on hold, just to speak with a customer service representative when the chat function was unable to provide assistance with my issue.

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

If an organization can afford it, having [Network for Good] do the data migration will save time.

Incentivized

For us, Bonterra Guided Fundraising offered the best overall bang for the buck. There were cheaper options that didn't over the features we needed and more expensive options that we felt didn't offer features as good as the ones we were seeing at Bonterra. For an overall option that did more of what we wanted to do, Bonterra was the best choice for us.

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

• the time that I have to spend on pulling and analyzing data is greatly reduced, allowing me to use my Executive Director time more efficiently
• as a 1-staff office, we are able to have a great way to use and analyze our data
• The Silent Auction feature has helped us raise about $9,500 in our first auction, and $14,000 in our second. We are excited about the current third auction.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized