Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. Mobilize

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

Mobilize is very well suited to add processes around your non profit activities. Especially to host events and intimate your audience in real time about any new and upcoming events. It also automates the whole process to collect feedback from your audiences. Not so suitable to target new audience for your events.

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

Incentivized

• Event RSVP.
• Automated confirm emails/texts.
• Integration w/ NGP-VAN tools (EveryAction, Votebuilder).

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Doesn't help provide top of the funnel audience.
• Connecting like-minded people to mobilize crowd together for a common cause.
• The insights can be more actionable.

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

Before using Mobilize, we were handling confirmations using traditional organizing methods. By shifting to Mobilize, we freed up our organizers to focus on new volunteer recruitment and cut our flake rate significantly. We still use EveryAction from NGP-VAN, but we set up Mobilize to interface directly with that system via API.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• My audience is more aware of upcoming schedule.
• We get pin pointed feedback on our events.
• Reduced the TAT to schedule events.