Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. GoMembers

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

The product was purchased four years before implementation. After having been stalled for more than a year, we were tapped to get the software setup and implemented on a tight six-month deadline. And because we hadn't been involved in the selection process and primary setup, we basically had to start from scratch. I can't say what questions were asked, since I wasn't a part of the selection process, but if you are - and beyond anything else - know upfront what your overall business objective goals and end results are before selecting a product. If the product doesn't meet your needs - with or without modification - keep moving. Research, research, research.

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

Incentivized

• Membership management.
• Meeting management and registration.
• Accounts receivable.

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

Incentivized

• The new customer service portal seems to be missing a lot of the product documentation/training manuals. In order to access them, I had to submit a ticket and receive a file via FTP.
• The process by which to get a quote or proposal has been sometimes challenging and lengthy. It's certainly been a point of frustration from time to time.
• The GoMembers (Association Management System) product has changed the way we do business, but some of the functionality seems to be incomplete or missing. Basic functionality of certain processes within the system are cumbersome or just don't make much sense to our technical team, or the end user.

As with any company, we are always looking and interested in technology that can make our operations run smooth. I don't believe we'll be changing providers anytime soon, however if our needs grow and Aptean/GoMembers isn't capable of that functionality we will be required to look elsewhere

Some of the GoMembers CRM is intuitive, some is counter-intuitive. What might seem like common sense to me might not to another user. Having been through the setup of the product, it's easier for me to anticipate the steps needed to complete a task. For the average user, possibly not.

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 from our project manager and trainers was bar-none. They were there both before and after Go-Live, answering questions and anticipating any snags along the way.

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

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

Incentivized

• Upgrading to the GoMembers system has led us to initiate and complete a company wide overhaul. We have streamlined many administrative functions, reduced time spent manually tracking certain information. Although we are less than one year of being live with the system, countless hours of staff time has been saved due to system driven changes and improvements.