Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. MemSys

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

It is well suited in a public media organization that uses a separate tool for tracking donor touches and engagement and has a separate donation page. In my opinion, it is not a great use case if you are looking for something intuitive or easy to use.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• tracks donations and pledges
• Prints reports of donor activities and income totals
• Connects to PBS Specific systems

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• It behind on technological features
• Is slow to produce improvements
• Has not integrated with a wider range of payment processors

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

MemSys was selected because of its features specific to public media. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it does not show features that would enable it to compete with other CRM systems well.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Decrease in donor retention due to slow receipting and access to our special features
• Slowed productivity due to increased manual entry from lack of integration with various payment processors.

Incentivized