Blackbaud Luminate Online vs. Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Blackbaud Luminate Online
Score 5.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
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
Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce for Nonprofits, the Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud, is a nonprofit constituent relationship management platform from Salesforce, which supports constituent engagement, fundraising, and grants. Nonprofit editions contain Salesforce Lightning Edition along with the former Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) combined.
$36
per month per user
Pricing
Blackbaud Luminate OnlineSalesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Sales Cloud - EE
$36
per month per user
Sales + Service Cloud - EE
$48
per month (billed annually) per user
Nonprofit Cloud - EE
$60
per month (billed annually) per user
Nonprofit Cloud - UE
Contact
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Luminate OnlineSalesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeRequiredNo setup fee
Additional DetailsLuminate 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.—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Blackbaud Luminate OnlineSalesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Considered Both Products
Blackbaud Luminate Online

No answer on this topic

Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Chose Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Salesforce for Nonprofits is much more flexible than other tools I've used in the past. You aren't limited to staying with one company's suite of products - you have the ability to build out your database / fundraising solution using best in class applications. It also has a …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Blackbaud Luminate OnlineSalesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Small Businesses
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Bloomerang
Bloomerang
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Bloomerang
Bloomerang
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud CRM
Score 7.5 out of 10
Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud CRM
Score 7.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Blackbaud Luminate OnlineSalesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
7.6
(85 ratings)
8.4
(29 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(21 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
6.0
(26 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.2
(9 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.0
(32 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.3
(14 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
3.0
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
6.6
(9 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.8
(11 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Blackbaud Luminate OnlineSalesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
Blackbaud
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.
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Salesforce
If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.
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Pros
Blackbaud
  • 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.
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Salesforce
  • NPSP is designed to help with donor management.
  • There are free add-ons for volunteer management.
  • There is a new Program Management Module to better manage program participation and attendance.
  • Campaigns help organize and report on marketing efforts though we use a third-party solution to send out marketing materials.
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Cons
Blackbaud
  • 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.
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Salesforce
  • Learning curve - very powerful, but takes time to learn
  • Batch processing - takes time and advanced skills to reach efficiency for data entry and certain operations which you want to do in batch
  • Mass email is extremely limited - must choose a third party tool which adds complexity and cost to the system
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Likelihood to Renew
Blackbaud
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.
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Salesforce
There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!
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Usability
Blackbaud
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.
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Salesforce
I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out
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Reliability and Availability
Blackbaud
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
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Performance
Blackbaud
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)
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Blackbaud
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.
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Salesforce
I have never had bad conversations with any support people with Salesforce but we also have not used them very much. I put it a little less because we are struggling to switch to lightning (some of our custom features do not migrate well) and it feels like the help and support for a little organization is not incredibly helpful unless we want to spend a lot of money.
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In-Person Training
Blackbaud
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.
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Blackbaud
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.
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Blackbaud
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.
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Blackbaud
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.
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Salesforce
As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.
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Scalability
Blackbaud
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.
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Blackbaud
  • 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.
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Salesforce
  • Salesforce has allowed us to easily track donor communications in one area, which I believe has improved our donor communication overall.
  • Salesforce for Nonprofits has made it easier on my org to track and pull donation-related information and has reduced the amount of time we need to do these regular tasks.
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ScreenShots

Blackbaud Luminate Online Screenshots

Screenshot of Email Overview DashboardScreenshot of Luminate allows you to enable multiple types of giving - from recurring to matching and everything between.Screenshot of Luminate enables you to reach out to supporters in multiple waysScreenshot of Luminate Peer to Peer fundraising with DIY events, also enables your supporters to fundraising on their behalf.

Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Case ManagementScreenshot of Contact RecordScreenshot of Home DashboardScreenshot of Management ModuleScreenshot of Marketing Cloud for Nonprofits