Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. DonorDock

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

DonorDock is probably the best nonprofit CRM for small to medium sized nonprofits, when you consider features, use-ability, and value. For most organizations, it’s going to have everything you need to get the job done. For very large organizations ($4 million raised through fundraising annually), or those where money is no object, and they want something 100% custom-built, it is not the best choice.

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

Incentivized

• Ease of Use
• Donor Profiles
• Email to Lists
• Integrated Communication System

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

Incentivized

• Does not include e-commerce functionality
• Does not include built in auction tools, but they can be integrated

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

DonorDock is a better fit for financially challenged nonprofits that are still looking for a powerful tool.

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

Incentivized

• Better donor retention
• More new donors through better donor tracking
• Increase in our monthly donors
• Increase in gift amounts through better donor relationships