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

If someone requires having a lot of customized fields for donors or wants to drill down to really minute details, it might be for them. For the average fundraiser, development director, or non-profit, I think they are great.

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

Incentivized

• Easy to use, simple, fast
• Built in recommendations and notifications
• Easy reporting
• Online giving
• Affordable
• Simple to get started
• Scalable as we grow

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

Incentivized

• I can't think of any.

Incentivized

It's a great product with room to grow, and I know they are growing. I used Donor Dock in a previous job when it was very new, and the growth I've seen over the last 4-5 years is impressive. It's an affordable product, and you save money on not having to purchase an email platform in addition to the database.

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