Likelihood to Recommend 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 I would definitely recommend Adobe Marketo Engage to other large or medium organisations such as ourselves, who have a number of users from different offices around the globe. It is well suited to those who have large email marketing contact databases and need to do sophisticated segmentation. It has a lot of functionality for integration with Salesforce and lead scoring models.
Read full review Pros 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 Adobe Marketo Engage is a great platform for custom email design. The user interface is simple and easy to navigate. With Campaign Optimization, Adobe Marketo Engage allows for real-time adjustments, ensuring my campaigns remain relevant and effective. With Advanced Analytics, Adobe Marketo Engage provides robust marketing data analysis, helping us better understand our campaigns' effectiveness. Read full review Cons 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 Marketo's email editor is basic in comparison to other cheaper alternatives out there. Marketo doesn't work as well in B2C scenarios as it does in B2B. One of the painpoints of this is it's difficult to showcase a selection of product recommendations based on purchase behaviour without a very time consuming workaround. It's manageable if you're only selling a handful of products, but it's inefficient when dealing with a large catalogue. Marketo's form and landing page builder are also behind the times. Perhaps not as bad as the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, but for an enterprise company the product should be much better. Greg Beazley Senior Marketing Automation Manager (EMEA & APAC)
Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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 We're likely to renew for several reasons:
Now that it's been implemented, I can't imagine not having marketing automation and the easy interface that Marketo provides to run our campaigns Marketo's community and customer service is fantastic; I know that when I need help, I'll get it Marketo continues to improve the product, so I know that I can expect it to be even more useful in the future Read full review Usability 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 In some aspects, the tool can feel quite clunky in parts. But with the rich feature set it has, it's understandable. There is a lot of room for improvement for the user interface. The system itself doesn't have a slick or modern feel, so the usability could feel nicer to use with these areas considered.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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 Marketo provides different way and abilities to connect. If you are having product support or unexplained errors you can get someone on Marketo support 24 hours a day. One of Marketo's greatest assets in my opinion however would be the community. Often times our company is just looking for case success stories from someone else. In the community you can search for problems you are currently facing and see others having the same issue and solutions for those issues. If not, you can pose a question to the whole community and champions of the product and others can chime in to provide suggestions to fix your needs. The community is truly a 24/7 place to get your answers quickly.
Read full review Performance 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 There are times when it is slightly slow for us, where we sit on a screen waiting for it to load. This could be our internet since we have had the same issue occasionally with other systems, but it is enough to make you crazy.
Read full review Support Rating 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 On multiple occasions we've had Marketo support (technical and license based) issues. Technical issues were minor and resolved within a day. License based issues (even things encouraged by Marketo for partners, like provisioning another license) took WEEKS. They actually took so long to respond that the client we were working with withdrew from the contract because they were no longer convinced Marketo was capable of supporting their business. As an agency trying to sell the software, you can only explain away so much before they just made us look silly.
Read full review In-Person Training 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 Our account rep stopped out in Lincoln, NE to ensure we were properly set up and running. This was very much appreciated. I was very, very new at this point, so I can't comment very much on the extent of what was taught because I was still brand new to the company and the system
Read full review Online Training 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 I had never used Marketo prior to taking this job so online training was my starting point. I was able to follow along, it was interesting and quickly and efficiently taught me what I needed to know without a lot of fluff. It was far from boring and really helped me get my hands dirty with Marketo.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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 1. Have a content marketing plan to run in parallel with the marketing automation installation--you'll need a lot of content to make full use of Marketo's capabilities. 2. Work with sales (and ISRs) to define and document a workflow--build your Marketo installation around how you do business--not figure out how to apply your business to the tools 3. Spend time of data cleaning--both an initial project as well as a strategy for ongoing data management. We found some change manaement issues (no more appending ZZZ to the first name to identify contacts who have left the company, for example, or prohibiting the entry of "info@company.com" email addresses). 4. Find some champions in the sales and ISR teams. You'll have both fans and detractors--work with the fans to build some success stories
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 Marketo helps us to show our customers we understand them by delivering personalized content, delivered at the right time, every time. Also gives the sales and marketing teams the ability to create more coordinated journeys. From emails to landing pages, Marketo Engage uses in-depth, real-time behavioural and demographic data, and AI to personalize users experience, even for the anonymous visitors.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model The total cost is a little bit higher than we expected.
Read full review Scalability 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 We look at scaleability in a few different ways. First, the speed while using Marketo has remained relatively the same as our database has grown. Though I would say Marketo is slow at times, it has not gotten slower over the last few years. If anything, it has improved, and they are working to improve it. Second, the amount of programs we have developed in Marketo has exponentially grown as well. Marketo has allowed us to drastically increase our output without having to drastically increase our headcount.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Generated a 35% higher return on investment (ROI) in demand generation in the company. The focus on the accounts that presented a greater sales potential, allowed us to prioritize and reduce costs by 20 Million USD. Being personal and optimized. reduced efforts towards a more personalized customer experience, in working hours by almost 100 h. Read full review ScreenShots Blackbaud Luminate Online Screenshots Adobe Marketo Engage Screenshots