Bonterra Network for Good offers a nonprofit fundraising suite of applications, with donor management features like intelligent tracking of donor readiness and targeted messaging.
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Blackbaud Luminate Online
Score 4.6 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
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 supporters Make the right ask at the right time Launch creative fundraising campaigns Automated campaigns stimulate engagement and action through targeted welcome messages with personalized…
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Pricing
Bonterra Network for Good
Blackbaud Luminate Online
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bonterra Network for Good
Blackbaud Luminate Online
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
$500
Required
Additional Details
Pricing is based on how many contacts are imported into the Donor Management System. All packages have unlimited users, unlimited campaigns, unlimited peer-to-peer pages, unlimited emails and communications, and optional events and auctions. All packages also include support and data migration.
Luminate Online is priced based on the number of email addresses on file, modules used and service plan. Our peer to peer offering, TeamRaiser, has a transactional, shared success pricing model.
We evaluated and continue to evaluate a lot of products. Companies that have their food in the door for non-profits, or higher education, is extremely appealing to us. They know our business. And a stable, larger company like Blackbaud provides a level of confidence and comfort …
We genuinely liked NFG and would've stayed if it were at a different price point. As a nonprofit, we often have to make difficult decisions about pricing, and this was one of them. We enjoyed using it for donor management and communications. Unless they've upgraded, I'd say we had to use an outside service for Peer-to-Peer fundRaising, but otherwise it was a good tool.
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.
In exporting reports, it would be helpful to have a "select all" option so you can easily select everything without having to manually click each one.
In exporting reports, it may be helpful to have the option of saving various options for different needs so you don't have to manually click or unclick each choice every time, as you can currently only save one type.
It would be helpful to be able to change an event/ticket information after it has already gone live for sales as we recently had an issue with this.
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.
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.
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.
I am a one person development department. I cannot say enough how much time this product has saved me and how much more I am able to accomplish with all of the features. I consider myself fairly tech savvy, but this product is super easy for even a fairly non tech savvy person to use. I also very much appreciate their customer service team and their commitment to constant improvement to and value added to the product without making it hard for users to use.
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.
In 5+ years we have never had an issue with it not working when we needed it to. It is very reliable and doesn't seem to have a lot of bugs or interruptions in service.
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
It is always fast for us and reports have a very quick upload time. We don't integrate it into other programs so I'm not 100% sure about that, but it always works when we use it and is very reliable. Even when we run Excel files for complete information on donors, it always works very fast.
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)
Most of the time they are quick and friendly and help me resolve any issues. There have only been a couple of times that we couldn't find a resolution and I was just told that NFG didn't have that capability.
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.
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.
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.
We only had one hiccup with the domain that was an issue on our end but NFG struggled to help us. It was finally resolved and we've been good ever since
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.
We used Little Green Light for several years at a previous employer. LGL did not have the extensive integration capabilities or the level of sophistication that BGF has in terms of email, video, donor campaign pages, and exceptional customer support. For these reasons, we chose to go with BGF instead of LGL.
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.
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.
Minimized the resources necessary to run an online presence. For instance, one moderately tech-savvy person can handle it.
Provides a pathway to increase the number of events the organization can manage.
By being part of a larger group of non-profits that utilize Network For The Good, we receive additional assistance and ideas from related organizations.
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.
