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…
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Tiltify Catalyst
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Tiltify Catalyst is a community-driven peer-to-peer fundraising platform designed to help nonprofits turn supporters into active fundraisers and expand donor reach. Built for modern fundraising strategies, Catalyst supports DIY fundraising, team campaigns, fitness challenges, corporate engagement initiatives, livestream fundraising, and large-scale peer-to-peer events. Catalyst prioritizes the volunteer fundraiser experience with built-in engagement tools that…
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Pricing
Blackbaud Luminate Online
Tiltify Catalyst
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Luminate Online
Tiltify Catalyst
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
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.
I mean, I love having any and all non-profits use Tiltify! From a fundraising standpoint —having all my favorite orgs easily accessible for fundraising across my platforms is SO NICE. That said, I've also worked with orgs that are just getting into the space, and they really struggled with getting set up due to a lack of resources. Yes, I can walk them through everything and encourage the use of all of Tiltify's features, but there isn't a readily available/accessible source to learn what's available to them and how it works.
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.
(1) How Tos for the charity, please! Donors/fundraisers have them available, which we LOVE, but not having a "How Set Up An Event" or "How To Use Your Reporting" for the non-profits, I feel, is a bit of an oversight, as, you know, they're users too!
(2) Event Page Design: Under the Fundraiser Rewards section, there is a tiny corner of pixels that pokes out from behind the "Top 100" or "Raise $200.00" labels, and it BOTHERS ME TO NO END. I understand the labels over the rewards images have curved corners, and the rewards have the hard 90-degree corners, which is why it happened. It's just like when someone goes to erase what's on a whiteboard but leaves a single line in the middle. My current solution has been to just cut that corner off my rewards images prior to upload —anyways, super tiny and just a pet peeve.
(3) Event Page Design: You've given us so many customization options, and I'm not taking those for granted. I would love the option to change the color of the buttons, just as we can change the color of each individual section.
(4) Branding, Social Links: Two things. "Twitter" is still on there (I know it's annoying, but "X"). Would love a "Bluesky" option.
(5) Event Options, Lifetime donor rewards: Is there something we could get for Lifetime Fundraiser rewards?
(6) Reports: When I download the Donations report is has the Date & Time of donation in a single column. I don't know how other people use this report, but I usually have to download the donations, create a new column, delineate the data for date/time, then pivot table from there. Plus, the "time" data we receive is delivered in a way that's borderline unusable. Example: 2023-12-31 07:46:07.667963Z -- *I* know to read this as December 31, 2023 @ 7:46:07 AM , but do we *really* need the ".667963Z" ? All it does is mess up any automated data analysis.
(7) Repots: Could we get a disclaimer at the top of the page that says if you don't toggle the UTC, the reports pulled will be from the time zone of the user pulling them? It took *way* too long to figure out why the report pulled by my colleague in Pacific time was different than the report pulled in Central time.
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.
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.
Again, as someone who has been on this platform for a very long time, I find it easy to use. Where I find myself mostly having issues: Navigation. I have built out 40+ events & campaigns over the years (both on the fundraiser & charity side) and still find myself getting lost in the language hierarchy and difference between Setup/Event detail/Brand & marketing/Options (like those all feel semantically the same??).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
