Bonterra Grants Management vs. Convio Luminate (discontinued)

CyberGrants is very adaptable, so it's ideal for any team that has a large number of grants to review, especially teams with multiple grant applications running on different timetables. Their employee engagement features, while not something we've used, are an area we'd love to explore further, because they create an overall snapshot of giving to an organization (tying in-kind support from volunteerism, etc. in with gift matching contributions and grant applications). If you only receive a few grant applications, or a lot of your grant applicants are very hesitant to use computers or online applications, it might not be as worth it for you.

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

• Custom grant applications - it was easy for us to create applications that asked exactly the right questions. Features like downloadable budget templates were perfect for us, too.
• Easy review process - we're able to see the status of any grant's review process in just a few clicks.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Help guides on the admin page aren't always the most helpful for the specific questions I've had.
• Reporting is almost TOO comprehensive - it can be a little overwhelming at first!

Incentivized

• 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

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 saved on administrative work is a huge win. We used a simple web form for our applications, and spent a lot of time and energy manually entering details into our old system.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized