Causeview vs. Convio Luminate (discontinued)

I think Causeview is well suited for those who are looking to track revenue and donor information in the same place. It is good to have your database with all of your contacts integrated with the same system that you use to process things such as donations and event registrations, so it saves time and we don't have to maintain separate systems for our development work and our other revenue-generating strategies. We also use reports to pull up information about donors and use that information for fundraising -- for example, donor history and things like that.

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

• Causeview's support team is mostly helpful and quick to respond.
• Causeview integrates event registrations within Salesforce.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Event registration and donation pages could be better designed - not up to par with sites such as Eventbrite
• I would like to have the option for people to register with more than one e-mail address instead of creating a duplicate record each time someone uses a different e-mail.
• Some of my coworkers find Causeview confusing to use or difficult to find information.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Causeview's support is a lone bright spot. They are often quick to respond. They are generally helpful, although brief in their answers and explanations. I would appreciate more detailed answers to technical problems, but I do appreciate their support's problem solving ability

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

I did not personally select Causeview for my organization, but I have found it easy to use in comparison with other similar systems. The fact that Causeview can be added to Salesforce, and hop on our existing database, is very important to us and is one of the main reasons we continue to use the service.

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

• Negative: expensive per-license fee with no discount for added users.
• Negative: unreliable servers that host donate pages.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized