Blackbaud Luminate Online vs. Blackbaud TeamRaiser vs. Windfall

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.

TeamRaiser is well suited for peer-to-peer fundraising activities, such as large pledge-based events like walks and runs or DIY fundraisers of many different types.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Offers the ability to really customize a campaign on TeamRaiser.
• Provides milestones/badges that can be earned for participants.
• Provides custom pages that can be easily linked to a campaign.
• Gives the ability to send coaching emails to participants and for participants to send emails through the TeamRaiser system.
• Has a big support community.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Too many options so it can be hard to navigate.
• Requires a deeper HTML understanding to really get the most out of it.
• Would be better if the interface was similar to other original Blackbaud products.

• In my experience, horrible customer service
• Hidden renewal clause

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.

Incentivized

Continued use will ensure an ongoing increase in this type of revenue and provides an alternative way of raising funds for our supporters.

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.

Incentivized

It can be overly complex and requires a deeper HTML understanding than most outside of IT have.

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

Incentivized

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)

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Great and easy to access to get support to resolve issues immediately.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Having a better understanding of product and objectives prior to implementation would lead to more success.

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.

Incentivized

While everydayheroPro and CrowdRise are easy to set up, already mobile friendly, have great interfaces, and are customizable, they lack some base capabilities that come with TeamRaiser, such as the ability to control the donation form, email capability, database syncing, badges/milestones, and custom pages. The everydayheroPro system has great potential, and we use it for our smaller DIY campaigns, but its support knowledge bank and customization is still so limited and can be frustrating to use because of it.

Incentivized

We were recommended Windfall by our fundraising counsel. I have since informed this person that he should not recommend the company to other clients

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Introduced our constituents to DIY fundraising.
• Provided another revenue stream that provides nearly $100,000 extra a year.
• Gets our constituents involved in the cause in another way.
• We've found a niche by using TeamRaiser in companies.
• Has provided more donor interaction for lower-tier giving groups that might otherwise receive little communication and stewardship from us.
• Seen returning participants raise more money year-after-year.

Incentivized