Luminate Online aims to help non-profits engage more effectively with supporters and raise more money by enabling integrated campaigns for digital, social and mobile channels. According to the vendor, Luminate Online helps non-profits: Better understand online supporters Make the right ask at the right time Launch creative fundraising campaigns Automated campaigns stimulate engagement and action through targeted welcome messages with personalized…
N/A
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
OneCause supports fundraising with online and event fundraising solutions that help nonprofits reach more and raise more. Since 2008, OneCause states they have helped 14,000 cause-driven organizations to raise over $8B through more than 90,000 fundraising events and campaigns.
$200
per year
Pricing
Blackbaud Luminate Online
OneCause
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Luminate Online
OneCause
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
Luminate Online is priced based on the number of email addresses on file, modules used and service plan. Our peer to peer offering, TeamRaiser, has a transactional, shared success pricing model.
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.
After having used Greater Giving before switching to OneCause, I'd highly recommend OneCause for any event or fundraising management. The ability to see a company's support over multiple events is great for a snapshot or quick numbers for reporting. It's easier to navigate than most systems, and truly is a one-stop shop for your needs. I look forward to using OneCause for all our future events.
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.
Auto-numbering items in auctions need to be editable. Right now, when you add items, they are numbered consecutively, and you can't edit them. I want all of my items to be numbered together by item type. We always have last-minute additions, but there is no ability to renumber.
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.
We are a very small non-profit and are actually looking to use another service just to cut costs, but we may not stay with them and will coming running back to OneCause if we can't make the other option work! The ONLY reason to move would be to reduce the over-head cost of the platform.
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.
Use of the software is generally fine, but the setup and implementation are not always intuitive. Though the knowledgebase is robust and covers a lot of areas (and the support team is pleasant and knowledgeable), the event setup process (particularly when setting up payment and bank information) can be a bit cumbersome and should really be streamlined
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
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)
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.
OneCause has the BEST customer support I have ever experienced. They are patient, and knowledgeable and always help me when I contact them. Whenever I have inquired how to use a feature or asked about how to do something, they give me the answer but also go above and beyond with additional info that I ended up also using.
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.
We hired OneCause to guide us through our first event after we signed up with them. The staff they sent were pros. They gave us professional guidance and support. Once we had been shown the ropes, we knew we could take the reins and confidently run our next event
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.
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.
I don't know if my insights are key but I can say that implementation was done in-house without any outside support for the solution. The staff influencing the solution had very little technical expertise and ability as well which showed just how easily the software was to implement.
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.
We used Auction Star one time. It was not as user-friendly for our donors. Prior to that, we planned event logistics and auction components without any specialized software. Everything was done in Excel and Word. OneCause allowed us to organize tables, registration and auction packages a lot faster and more effectively.
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.
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.
Definitely saved us a fair amount of time in terms of individual ticket sales and managing guests on the back end. Did not save us that much time for sponsored tables as most of our guests did not purchase their sponsorships through the site.
OneCause doesn't seem to have a function for entering a "Reserve Value" for auction items--i.e., while it allows for a minimum bid, it doesn't allow for having a minimum sale value, which meant that a few of our auction items sold for far lower than their value, which was unfortunate.
Having the support package on the night of was critical for our organization, particularly as ALL of the full-time staff had very limited experience working with OneCause/Bidpal. Knowing that there were experts there to help liaise with the auctioneer and to troubleshoot with any guests experiencing issues was really essential.
