Likelihood to Recommend I love that I can integrate with Donor Search to learn about a person's past giving history to learn more about their interests. DonorPerfect also lets us upload a photo of our donors so we can easily identify them when they visit us or
Attend a function. I wish the photo upload offered a larger image and multiple images, some donors send me pics of their visits and pets and it would be great to also store those right in their DP account.
Read full review Blackbaud Luminate Online is an excellent solution for online giving, providing a wealth of tools for producing donation forms. It also is outstanding for peer-to-peer fundraising, such as event-based efforts like walks, cycling tours, and so forth. The Email module is outstanding if you need an internal solution for communicating with your donors and supporters. It provides a wealth of tools for crafting emails, and for reporting on the results.
Read full review Pros DonorPerfect is extremely customizable in every possible way. I love that you can customize what you see when you view a donor's record and how you see it. Fields can be active or hidden, and arranged in any way you choose. In addition, you can create custom fields and parameters, which can be used to enter text freely, as a drop-down box, or as selections with check boxes. The other awesome thing about the options for customization is that you can add, remove, or change fields at ANY time. My organization has used DonorPerfect for over 10 years, but just a few days ago, I added a field to the main screen in our donor records that is now relevant and helpful to my colleague and me as we work together. I feel like the possibilities are limitless in making it DonorPerfect your specific needs. DonorPerfect reports are extremely versatile, and can literally be created to produce any data set imaginable. You can create, name, rename, save, and delete any reports in your profile. You can run very broad, lengthy reports, (which generate surprisingly quickly!), or very specific, detailed reports. You can create and save filters for quick use, or start from scratch each time you run a report. Read full review House Donor Information. Easy report pulling. Queries and lists. I like how everything is housed on one platform. Webpages, emails and donor profiles. User friendly. It works nicely with other blackbaud products such as Raiser's Edge. Easy importing and exporting options. Read full review Cons It could provide some of the standard reports fundraisers need as canned reports It could provide optional salutations so you could mail to only one person - not both It could enable us to set up monthly giving categories without using their donation program Read full review Reporting needs some work, this is being worked on in their new BETA program. The eCommerce module needs some work. It would be great to have more ability to customize parts of it without having to rewrite the code. The Events module could use some improvements as well. The Personal Fundraising module needs a lot of work. It really cannot work as needed right now. We started using TeamRaiser to handle this, but it could be great. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is by far the most cost-effective
Read full review We’ve decided to leave Luminate and are moving to a system that better caters to our and our users needs. Luminate has proven difficult to use and has limited abilities when it comes to data management, events, and peer-to-peer functionality. Reporting is also very complicated and requires a great deal of time to utilize properly.
Read full review Usability Poor cash batch interface. Almost half of our receipts are generated by cash and this interface does not support our needs very well.
Richard House Technical Director / Applications Manager for Faith Based Non-Profit
Read full review You have to be very tech savvy to use Luminate to its fullest potential. You can get buy with the training, but there is a steep learning curve and you almost need 6 months to 1 year of in-person training to really be able to anything substantial. The online training lessons are not going to cut it while learning this program.
Read full review Reliability and Availability It's always up when we need it. There are some errors that happen and are not reproducible and cannot be resolved. But [they are] very few and none that cause disruption for the organization.
Richard House Technical Director / Applications Manager for Faith Based Non-Profit
Read full review It's a very rare occurrence if the system isn't available when I want it. I can easily log in from home after hours if need be, and the security is enforced, but simple when you're legit! They are very good about sending email reminders and updates when system maintenance will be performed, and it's always during middle of the night hours when you likely wouldn't be using it anyways
Read full review Performance DonorPerfect is as reliable as your internet connection. It is a cloud based application and therefore you cannot pinpoint where the bottleneck is should you have one. But for the most part the app runs quickly.
Richard House Technical Director / Applications Manager for Faith Based Non-Profit
Read full review Pages load fast and 98% of the reports do run in a matter of secons/minutes. There is this one report I have that can take hours to run, but this is due to the amount of transactions being requested for one of our biggest online fundraising events (Transaction report)
Read full review Support Rating Support is so easy. We use chat most often - as we can get someone quickly. The support folks know the product and get answers quickly. If they need to escalate an issue, they do so quickly. The training is great and easily accessible. You can take classes over and over until you completely understand concepts
Read full review Support staff are usually incredibly helpful and responsive. There are several ways to contact them (chat, logging a ticket, phone) which makes it easy to get help when you need it. Once in a while I get a support staff member who isn't quite as helpful, which is why I gave it a 9 instead of a 10, but that is rare and if I follow up with someone else, I get what I need.
Read full review In-Person Training I was able to utilize the support team to train me in areas where I could not figure out how to use the application.
Richard House Technical Director / Applications Manager for Faith Based Non-Profit
Read full review Initial training was great and the instructor was very patient and helpful during the set up process. Blackbaud has a variety on online self-paced classes that supplement the training you receive. The only downfall is after training is complete. I've found the support for Luminate to be a tad lackluster. We often encounter issues that aren't on Luminate's development road map and have had a series of cases be opened.
Read full review Online Training It was decent.
Read full review When I used the training, I had actually been using Luminate Online but figured it might help me learn to use the tools more effectively. And it did. The sessions were helpful and even as a current user I felt like I learned how to use the tools more effectively.
Read full review Implementation Rating DonorPerfect provides an extremely easy to use importing tool and the support team was awesome. You don't have to do it in house; for a reasonable fee you can get it done by them.
Richard House Technical Director / Applications Manager for Faith Based Non-Profit
Read full review Implementation of Luminate itself was rather smooth, but the process involved for TeamRaiser was very difficult. Even after implementation we relied on support to help with various aspects of TeamRaiser from page design to reporting and front end user issues. The support offered for issues with Luminate was very good, but again TeamRaiser support was lacking.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I have only ever used DonorPerfect, but I have looked into two or three other options over time. I apologize that I cannot recall all their names at this time. What I found was that even though they typically brought more to the table at that time, the cost jump was huge and I couldn't justify the ROI to myself. But DonorPerfect has continued to add to what they offer and I was glad I never changed platforms.
Read full review The only other product I have used for this type of fundraising work is NetCommunity and it hasn't been as scalable or versatile. It doesn't really offer the peer to peer fundraising of Luminate or the constituent management, web page development and considered donation forms. NetCommunity didn't even come close which is why we replaced it with Luminate.
Read full review Scalability [There have been] only two outages since we have started using it and they were extremely information proactive. This should scale easily based on your internet connection.
Richard House Technical Director / Applications Manager for Faith Based Non-Profit
Read full review Luminate Online is a great scalable product as it provides various price points dependent on your quantity of email addresses. This allows both small and large organizations to utilize the product, which has strong email capabilities. It also means smaller organizations aren't forced to pay astronomical fees in order to have access to a quality product.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive - using a standard Donor management system across a wide geographic area has reduced our infrastructure costs and training requirements Negative - We are not realizing the full potential of our donors because we are missing opportunities for engagement, and missing connections and opportunities because DonorPerfect's limitations. Negative - Limited/poorly implemented API has significantly increased our development costs as we struggle to implement DonorPerfect data with other internal systems. Read full review We've increased our online giving +200% although this is due in part to our focus on the channel and not entirely on the product. We've been able to increase employee efficiency by selecting email lists per message within Luminate Online. With our prior solution we needed to request data be pulled from our database for event email. We've really done a great job of growing our online tribute and memorial giving through the use of custom links and the pre-populated information has really helped with the back end processing. Read full review ScreenShots Blackbaud Luminate Online Screenshots