Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. FrontStream

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

Given the experience I have had this year, I couldn't recommend any part of their service. The product doesn't function as advertised and they don't communicate with customers to let them know what they are doing to fix it. It is a level of service that is completely unacceptable on every level.

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

Incentivized

• FrontStream Panorama allows you to customize a larger portion of your pages that you design if you have experience with HTML and coding.
• FrontStream Panorama allows you to integrate their other platforms, such as bidding for good, which is for auction items, and connect those to their ticket registration software.
• FrontStream Panorama allows you to pull reports and customize and save reports you might use often.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Looks dated in my opinion.

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

They do not seem to care about the problems of their customers. They do not return phone calls. They do not provide the updates on their support page that they promised. They have had two weeks to repair the basic functionality of their system and they have been unable to do so. This is a complete failure as far as I am concerned.

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

We switched from Classy.org to FrontStream Panorama and then back to Classy.org. But, originally what intrigued us about FrontStream Panorama was the ability to customize our fundraising pages. Visual design is so important to storytelling and to raising revenue and it seemed like a real opportunity for us to create beautiful campaigns that raised more money. They were also slightly less expensive than competitors.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Saves staff time
• Increases donor participation

Incentivized