Network for Good in Washington DC offers their non-profit fundraising suite of applications, with donor management features like intelligent tracking of donor readiness and targeted messaging.
DonorPerfect is a solution in fundraising that helps nonprofits grow. It helps teams manage donations, contacts, receipting, reporting, email, and fundraising initiatives from a single system. Features for organizations of all size include automatic monthly giving, integrated online donation forms,…
Luminate CRM and Analytics is being used to manage our donor database functions and donor tracking functions. It allows for simplified gift processing and receipting, campaign tracking as well as our donor pipeline. In addition to that, it houses individual donor information, everything from phone number to address to date of birth.
It does great with donor cultivation processes and the workflow feature is top-notch for automating processes. Where it does a less than stellar job is getting it to work more specifically for your organization. Often times building that kind of special feature costs a significant time and money investment and it is something that is hard to transfer when it's time to move to a new database.
I recently started using EveryAction, it is much more robust and nimble and does not need a lot of customization. The only big feature I miss is the acknowledgment process for Luminate CRM and Analytics: it was much more robust, but overall it doesn't have the cumbersomeness of Luminate CRM. I don't think I would ever switch back.
Support for the product is horrible; often support will have you bouncing between Blackbaud support and Salesforce support and it's very rare either are able to find simple solutions. Most of the time the solutions almost always cost money and hiring consultants which, for a smaller organization, means not being able to achieve proper solutions.
Luminate CRM is used by both our fund development department and our programs department to log contacts, track donation and registration income, measure reach of programming, and store contact information.
Luminate takes some of the legwork out of setting up NSPS for nonprofit use of salesforce.
In my experience, the Blackbaud team is a nightmare to work with, and customization of Luminate CRM (or basic updates) will cost an arm and a leg.
Luminate imperfectly lays over the Salesforce platform, so if you use certain Salesforce functions you can really compromise the integrity of your data.
The layout and user experience is pretty subpar. The reporting feature is also not as robust as other databases.
It works okay if you have a large budget and don't have the technical experience on your staff to set up NSPS appropriately. It probably also works better as a purely development-driven database; trying to track multiple departments with very different goals in the same database is challenging.
Of the databases I have used, Luminate CRM is my least favorite. However, it is powerful and large enough to function adequately for a large nonprofit; I couldn't say the same for some of Blackbaud's smaller products. We definitely need the full Luminate Suite (Luminate Online, Team Raiser, etc.,) to make it work, though - and we're constantly disappointed by the clumsiness of the way all the pieces interact.