Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. DonorPerfect

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

I love that I can integrate with Donor Search to learn about a person's past giving history to learn more about their interests. DonorPerfect also lets us upload a photo of our donors so we can easily identify them when they visit us or Attend a function. I wish the photo upload offered a larger image and multiple images, some donors send me pics of their visits and pets and it would be great to also store those right in their DP account.

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

Incentivized

• DonorPerfect is extremely customizable in every possible way. I love that you can customize what you see when you view a donor's record and how you see it. Fields can be active or hidden, and arranged in any way you choose. In addition, you can create custom fields and parameters, which can be used to enter text freely, as a drop-down box, or as selections with check boxes. The other awesome thing about the options for customization is that you can add, remove, or change fields at ANY time. My organization has used DonorPerfect for over 10 years, but just a few days ago, I added a field to the main screen in our donor records that is now relevant and helpful to my colleague and me as we work together. I feel like the possibilities are limitless in making it DonorPerfect your specific needs.
• DonorPerfect reports are extremely versatile, and can literally be created to produce any data set imaginable. You can create, name, rename, save, and delete any reports in your profile. You can run very broad, lengthy reports, (which generate surprisingly quickly!), or very specific, detailed reports. You can create and save filters for quick use, or start from scratch each time you run a report.

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

Incentivized

• It could provide some of the standard reports fundraisers need as canned reports
• It could provide optional salutations so you could mail to only one person - not both
• It could enable us to set up monthly giving categories without using their donation program

Incentivized

It is by far the most cost-effective

Incentivized

Poor cash batch interface. Almost half of our receipts are generated by cash and this interface does not support our needs very well.

Incentivized

It's always up when we need it. There are some errors that happen and are not reproducible and cannot be resolved. But [they are] very few and none that cause disruption for the organization.

Incentivized

DonorPerfect is as reliable as your internet connection. It is a cloud based application and therefore you cannot pinpoint where the bottleneck is should you have one. But for the most part the app runs quickly.

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

Support is so easy. We use chat most often - as we can get someone quickly. The support folks know the product and get answers quickly. If they need to escalate an issue, they do so quickly. The training is great and easily accessible. You can take classes over and over until you completely understand concepts

I was able to utilize the support team to train me in areas where I could not figure out how to use the application.

Incentivized

It was decent.

Incentivized

DonorPerfect provides an extremely easy to use importing tool and the support team was awesome. You don't have to do it in house; for a reasonable fee you can get it done by them.

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

I have only ever used DonorPerfect, but I have looked into two or three other options over time. I apologize that I cannot recall all their names at this time. What I found was that even though they typically brought more to the table at that time, the cost jump was huge and I couldn't justify the ROI to myself. But DonorPerfect has continued to add to what they offer and I was glad I never changed platforms.

Incentivized

[There have been] only two outages since we have started using it and they were extremely information proactive. This should scale easily based on your internet connection.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Positive - using a standard Donor management system across a wide geographic area has reduced our infrastructure costs and training requirements
• Negative - We are not realizing the full potential of our donors because we are missing opportunities for engagement, and missing connections and opportunities because DonorPerfect's limitations.
• Negative - Limited/poorly implemented API has significantly increased our development costs as we struggle to implement DonorPerfect data with other internal systems.

Incentivized