Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. Leap Patron Management

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

PatronManager is probably best for a larger organization with a dedicated technology expert because a lot of the features require someone to understand the back end a little bit more, especially when you need help (and a lot of the webinars or feature releases are way over the average person's head!). Data mining becomes frustrating because the reporting features are very backwards. PatronManager is very user friendly on the ticketing center and its easy to train new employees on this side.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Building custom reports is intuitive and user friendly.
• Integration with third party apps such as MailChimp is seamless and functional.
• Support requests are handled quickly, and the annual user conference offers special training and in-person demos.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Reporting features are difficult to use.
• Built for orgs that have IT management, challenging at a small shop.
• Not easily customizable.

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

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

The PatronManager user experience is far superior, and custom report-building is the easiest I have ever seen on a CRM platform. Pricing is also competitive, and customer service + support far exceeds other platforms I have used in the past.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• PatronManager has saved us a lot of money compared to former ticketing software (Vendini).
• PatronManager has less ticketing fees associated, enabling audiences to up their purchase with an add-on donation that we get to keep.

Incentivized