Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. Muster

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

Muster works really well for policy needs. It surprisingly worked great for us at a state level. I wasn't sure going into it how well it would do since we are a small state and I expect that some of these tools might only work for DC. I was surprised at how well this worked at a local level. I think it would be good for just about any advocacy campaign

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Super easy to use and their customer service is very responsive. I had people with all kinds of different backgrounds using the tool and they didn't have any issues understanding or finding the information. I also thought it was great that multiple people could log into it. We did have a developer add some custom CSS when embedding it onto our site so that it looked even nicer.

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

I cannot recall which Quorum tool we researched - we just got an initial quote from them. Their estimate was easily twice of what we paid for Muster. Without using a tool like this before or using Quorum, I wasn't sure what we were missing out on for the cost trade off. But, I can tell you that we never really felt like we were missing out on any special parts of Muster that we wouldn't of had otherwise.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized