BuzzCast vs. Convio Luminate (discontinued)

BuzzCast is great for large, complex online events - especially during the pandemic when it's been hard or impossible to gather folks in person. If you only need a smaller group of 5 or 10 people, BuzzCast is probably overkill. Once you have lots of people / multiple sessions, or want to capture and save presentations for later, you'll want to start looking at BuzzCast.

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 BuzzCast platform was excellent in every way.
• The platform is sleek and easy to use, both the backend and the UX.
• The entire team at BuzzCast is supportive and works hard to make your event a complete success.
• Building and deploying the conference was made easy by the expertise and hard-working BuzzCast staff.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Within the platform it would be great to have direct access to make edits changes (I believe this functionality is in process)

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

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

BuzzCast platform has the most amount of features that our events require (public chat/private chat, breakouts, auto-scrolling agenda). The entire platform is built and designed so that it's intuitive for our viewers and they are shown exactly how to operate the platform in under a minute. The quality of the stream is superior. The BuzzCast team is great to work with and are true partners who are all solution-oriented.

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

• BuzzCast enabled one of my clients to deliver an investors' meeting that resulted in a $10 billion increase in market cap

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

Incentivized