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CharityEngine vs. Convio Luminate (discontinued)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    CharityEngine

    Score4 out of 10
    Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
    CharityEngine is a CRM specifically for nonprofits. It allows nonprofits to centralize and leverage their data to enrich donor relationships and raise money. Features include forms, advocacy campaigns, text-to-give, email marketing, peer-to-peer fundraising, and real-time personalization, and PCI-certified payment processing.N/A

    Convio Luminate (discontinued)

    Score6 out of 10
    N/AConvio Luminate was a nonprofit CRM option acquired by Blackbaud that is currently discontinued, and no longer available.N/A
    Pricing
    CharityEngineConvio Luminate (discontinued)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    CharityEngineConvio Luminate (discontinued)
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    CharityEngineConvio Luminate (discontinued)
    Small Businesses
    Agentforce 360 for Nonprofits
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Agentforce 360 for Nonprofits
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    DonorPerfect
    Score8.4 out of 10
    DonorPerfect
    Score8.4 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Ellucian CRM Advance
    Score5 out of 10
    Ellucian CRM Advance
    Score5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    CharityEngineConvio Luminate (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    4.0
    (1 ratings)
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    4.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    1.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CharityEngineConvio Luminate (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    CharityEngine
    CharityEngine has the POTENTIAL to be a good CRM, but both unresponsiveness to the more complex problems go unresolved for months at a time. Employee turnover is huge, which is likely because upper management is doing nothing to solve the internal problems. I would NOT recommend this CRM at this point. While CharityEngine does allow reasonably robust storage and querying of data if you plan to send emails through your CRM, look elsewhere. CharityEngine's framework is clunky and counter-intuitive, in addition to frequently just not working at all.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Read full review
    Pros
    CharityEngine
    • Allows users to create unique queries to generate targeted data.
    • Allows the entry of addresses from all around the world, not just US addresses.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Luminate takes some of the legwork out of setting up NSPS for nonprofit use of salesforce.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    CharityEngine
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    • Big Investment
    • It's a sales program with a donation management overlay so it has some troubles around reporting.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    CharityEngine
    There are a lot of frustrating things about the general usage of CharityEngine. It syncs with a nine-digit zip code database, but doesn't automatically populate exportable fields with this data - it must be manually requested for each record. Buttons that allow a user to quickly move to a specific area of the data in a customer record frequently stop working after updates; are found by users and reported, and then take a month or longer to be fixed. A clunky and counter-intuitive "creative" database frequently fails completely and is always slow.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    CharityEngine
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    CharityEngine
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    CharityEngine
    • CharityEngine has allowed our organization to grow in the past few years, but it has not kept up with industry trends and avoids making changes and updates requested by users.
    • Our overall business objectives cannot be met with CharityEngine alone. We must export data and use other applications to generate the data we need.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Uncertain; we have not collected data on this. Our Luminate package is quite expensive, though.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    CharityEngine Screenshots

    Screenshot of the campaign dashboard.Screenshot of the performance dashboard.Screenshot of the sustainer dashboard.