Luminate CRM and Analytics vs Salsa CRM

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

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Dustin Alexander

Associate Director of Indvidual Giving

WildCarePublic Policy, 11-50 employees

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Well suited for sending mass emails or emails to certain groups, sending automated emails, collecting donations, and peer-to-peer communication. They have a good support team. I'm still figuring out how to best manage supporters, it's not as intuitive as I would like. I used to just manage all donor information on Google Sheets, and I still prefer Google Sheets.

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Austin Johnson

Development Director

Ghana Make a DifferencePhilanthropy, 1-10 employees

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Pros

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

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Verified User

Administrator in Marketing

Non-Profit Organization Management Company, 11-50 employees

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User-Friendly. As a user, it is an intuitive product. When you are working, it is easy to navigate.
Fundraising Pages: Salsa Engage allows you to easily and quickly make fundraising pages that can be pushed out to your community of donors.
CRM: Easy to manage the constituents. When someone signs up for our fundraising pages, the software captures the demographics and either matches up to the existing donor or creates a new constituent.
Salsa CRM listens to their customers and works well with the user base. Most ideas are listened to and can see that requests are pushed out in updates.

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Doris Parker

Executive Director

The PMD FoundationNonprofit Organization Management, 11-50 employees

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Cons

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

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Dustin Alexander

Associate Director of Indvidual Giving

WildCarePublic Policy, 11-50 employees

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When we started with Salsa, not every option was available online, some were desktop specific. As it has been some time since I worked with Salsa these have probably been resolved.
The ability to communicate between Salsa CRM and other Salsa software options. Sometimes the crossover was not as efficient as was needed.
Tagging and setting up rules for particular donors was somewhat confusing - meaning, therefore, that the amount of training needed to implement the software was somewhat intensive.

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Verified User

Manager in Customer Service

Individual & Family Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

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General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

Optional

Starting Price

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Salsa CRM 10.0

Based on 1 answer

It suits all of our needs.

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Verified User

Vice-President in Other

Individual & Family Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Salsa CRM 10.0

Based on 1 answer

You do not have to be a tech-savvy person to be able to use the CRM. Reporting is easy to do.

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Verified User

Vice-President in Other

Individual & Family Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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Support Rating

Luminate CRM and Analytics 1.0

Based on 2 answers

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.

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Dustin Alexander

Associate Director of Indvidual Giving

WildCarePublic Policy, 11-50 employees

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Salsa CRM 10.0

Based on 2 answers

Their tech support is very good and I am very pleased with it. They speak in non-techie lingo for my non-techie staff just as easily as they speak techie to me (a techie). I appreciate their quick turn around in time to answer our questions and the follow up to make sure their answer(s) helped.

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Verified User

Vice-President in Other

Individual & Family Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

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.

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Verified User

Administrator in Marketing

Non-Profit Organization Management Company, 11-50 employees

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I have reviewed Salsa Engage and perhaps after our transition has taken place it might be a viable option versus using Constant Contact for internal and external correspondence.

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Verified User

Professional in Corporate

Non-Profit Organization Management Company, 1-10 employees

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Return on Investment

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

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Verified User

Administrator in Marketing

Non-Profit Organization Management Company, 11-50 employees

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Has helped increase our donor retention as we are able to track all communications with donors ensuring that they remain connected.
The improved emailing (with fewer bounce rate) has helped increase our website and donation page visibility.
We've sold more tickets to our fundraising events with an improved event management system.

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Kalyn Hoffman

Program Manager

Western Michigan UniversityNon-Profit Organization Management, 1-10 employees

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Luminate CRM and Analytics vs Salsa CRM