Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. Virtuous CRM

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

Virtuous is a great tool for fundraisers and nonprofit organizations that want to keep all their donor records, gift transactions, donation landing pages, and reporting in one platform. It may not be well suited, though, for for-profit businesses, organizations, and agencies.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• User-friendly CRM.
• Knowledgable support staff.
• Allows for email marketing on a mass level.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Virtuous only keeps track of contacts on forms for a given period of time, not the lifetime of when the form was deployed.
• Virtuous Customer Support can sometimes lag, and you end up waiting days for a response to your inquiry or issue.
• Virtuous reporting, while very detailed and segmented, can sometimes be a little overwhelming, and the terminology does not always translate to what you are looking to accomplish with your reporting outcomes.

Incentivized

In my experience, Virtuous CRM has great self-marketing, talented salespeople, and a half-baked CRM that shows glimmers of competence but the actual experience is more akin the the scene in the Simpson’s when Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on rakes.

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

In my experience, the sales pitch and demos are slick, but upon actual use there is a quick realization that no small or medium charity should touch this software with a 10-ft pole. In my opinion, if you have a large org with lots of cash, and a dedicated database manager who is tech-literate, you can make this work. HubSpot is by far my favorite but lacks the nonprofit features needed to truly manage donor relationships and portfolios.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Better donor management.
• Better predictive analytics on donors and giving numbers.
• Increases were seen in overall revenue since joining with Virtuous.

Incentivized