TrustRadius
https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/U4/zu/AFMDO648C9T0.JPEGLuminate Online - worth the investmentThe most recent organization I helped implement Luminate Online has used it for their entire organization. The whole point of turning to LO was to have all communications/interactions-type data in one place, which is exactly what LO provided. All constituent information is housed in LO, where information is collected about donations, registrations, fundraising, survey responses and email communications. Having all information in one place allows all departments to better report and communicate with constituents.,LO is a great one-stop-shop for registration/fundraising events. Allowing users to register and then fundraise using the same tool (i.e. the same login) is a great way to enhance fundraising results. Also having this information be a part of the main database is incredibly helpful for an organization. LO is great for email campaigns - the system allows you to create different groups and queries of your database and then target constituents with messages that are appropriate to them. LO's donation forms are pretty simple to set up and are an easy way to track both online and offline donations.,LO's TeamRaiser can be a bit tricky to use. It's a great tool, but to make it look really nice and be user friendly, it needs someone with some coding expertise to set it up. Parts of the LO system are still not mobile responsive (the participant center in particular). I know LO is working on this, but until it's done, this is going to be a frustration for some users. While Blackbaud has really invested in tutorials and help/support areas, LO can still be incredibly overwhelming for an organization that is new to the system and doesn't have the money to pay someone to help set it up, or doesn't have someone on staff who has used it before.,9,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Reactivation from lapsed donors Improved effectiveness of email marketing,This particular organization has only been actively using LO for less than a year, so we have yet to launch a large fundraising campaign. Previously, constituents weren't communicated with properly. While switching to LO, we have also made the investment in better communicating with constituents to further engage them. Once we have done more communications and gotten to know our database better, we'll plan on launching a fundraising campaign with multiple components directed to different segments of our audience. One area we have had great luck with so far is with our fundraising event series. By pulling registration and fundraising into one system and giving the users simple fundraising tools, we have had a huge increase in fundraising revenue.,,The Raisers Edge, Raiser's Edge NXT, Classy, Constant Contact, Luminate TeamRaiser,5,1,Managing constituents Accepting and tracking online donations Event registration Peer-to-peer fundraising Email communication,Creating surveys to poll/engage constituents Provide fundraising pages for individual, non-event fundraisers to raise money on behalf of the organization,More email communication Collect additional data on constituents and segment/conditionalize content appropriately,10,provided an easy way to collect online donations, event participants and all online interactions,Online training Self-taught,9,It depends on what you're trying to do. Certain aspects like browsing constituent records and pulling reports are pretty easy to figure out on your own, and also hard to "break" and mess anything up. Other aspects like creating emails or teamraiser events are much more complicated and would not be worthwhile to do without training.,7,9,8,9Ruminate about LuminateHonestly, no. We still write reports in Luminate. I go into BETA once every three months just to see if there is anything new.,We have not at this time I think once some modules are in BETA, usage will increase. At this time you have to login again to access BETA. Just a bit cumbersome.,For all the talk about the things coming with BETA, it has been very slow roll out. Even some of the releases, like organization records are not fully flushed out and still need work to be usable.,We use Luminate for all our foundation fundraising. From donation forms to TeamRaiser to eCommerce, we are using Luminate across our foundation and the hospital we support. Luminate makes it easy for us to accept donations and is starting to accept more payment methods. We just implemented PayPal in the last year and will be implementing Apple Pay and Visa Checkout this year. We use the eCommerce module to handle all of our event registrations and ticket purchases. We use TeamRaiser for our 5Ks and peer-to-peer always up fundraising events. Additionally, we use the Email module extensively. It is easy to setup an e-mail to send, note, we hand-code 95% of our e-mails. The statistics you get are the main ones that you would need to make decisions going forward. It is easy to setup an A/B test or a 10/10/80 test.,The donation forms are easy to set up to start collecting donations instantly. Getting an e-mail out the door is fairly straightforward. The TeamRaiser module is great for fundraising for big events with multiple registration levels and allowing participants to fundraise on your behalf. Constituent management is fairly easy.,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.,7,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,We ran our Heroes for Life campaign to fund the construction of our new hospital, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago using Luminate. We had our Heroes for Life website hosted on Luminate and all our donation forms here as well. The outcome was we raised over $650 million to build the new hospital. Not all of this was through Luminate, but using Luminate gave us the ability to accept donations easily and communicate to our donor base.,Blackbaud NetCommunity and MailChimp,Adobe Photoshop,30,5,Email TeamRaiser Donation Forms Event websites,We use API donation forms and surveys that gives us total control of page layouts. We have turned the eCommerce piece into a ticketed events operation. We have customized TeamRaiser to meet our needs,Advocacy. This is growing in today’s day and age and we will most likely add this module. Events. I added this module about two years ago, but it wasn’t robust enough to do what we needed. We updated how Luminate talks to Raiders Edge and we can now manipulate the Events module To do what we need. This will happen in the fall of 2018.,7,We definitely make money, but the fees and contract costs are getting higher every year.,No,Price Product Features Product Usability Existing Relationship with the Vendor,There isn’t a lot of competition as Blackbaud buys any competition. So it’s hard to evaluate or even have the opportunity to evaluate other options.,6,Yes,The one time was when I was implementing PayPal as a payment method. Of course I was dealing with someone not from he support team. The rep was very helpful and responsive. She helped me work through my questions and it has been working great since implementation. The different teams of Blackbaud all operate differently with some being better than others.,Sending an email Creating an out-of-the-box donation form.,Setting up an eCommerce store Setting up TeamRaiser,No,7Luminate: Great for the correctly sized operationLuminate is used as a donor interface within our development department. We are currently the only department with direct involvement with the program. We currently use Luminate to manage our email lists, send e-blasts, set up online donation forms as well as events and surveys. Luminate acts as an intermediary between our donors and our Raiser's Edge database.,Donation form creation is easy and user-friendly. They are also easily organizable within the system. It's great for creating surveys when forms don't necessarily have the flexibility we desire. Content is easily created and uploaded to our website.,Email management is limited. Constituents are only able to have a primary email address and a secondary address which is only mailed to when using the CC function. Sending to the correct and preferred email address is difficult to discern and effective use in Luminate requires extensive data cleanup. Reports are not as user-friendly as in other programs. It has occurred multiple times where users are unsure how to get specific fields to pull in reports. TeamRaiser is a challenging addition to Luminate. Campaigns within it require extensive work and management.,5,Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing,We haven't fully utilized the campaign structure in Luminate due to time and work constraints. We have created limited campaigns such as a welcome series of emails for new donors and prospects that has seen some positive results. It is nice to have responsive emails that can be triggered to send based off of donor interaction with the system.,The Raisers Edge, Raiser's Edge NXT, Constant Contact and MailChimp,The Raisers Edge, Raiser's Edge NXT, Constant Contact,2,3,8,7,7Shining a Light through LuminateWe currently use Luminate for our annual fundraising walk (peer to peer fundraising).,Clean and fresh look Mobile friendly Great support team when questions arise,Copying an event from year to year you have to go into multiple areas to make all the changes - having a more streamlined process would be helpful. It doesn't fully integrate with our database (Raiser's Edge) which is also a Blackbaud product.,9,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Reactivation from lapsed donors Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,We use the "reply yes" email campaign which is when we email possible walkers that if they respond to the email with a yes we will register them - since they registered in past years it makes it easy to connect their record to this year's event.,Blackbaud NetCommunity,The Raisers Edge, WordPress, Blackbaud NetCommunity,3,1Luminate Online - Great for team-based fundraising and email marketingWe use Luminate Online for team-based fundraising events, special events (galas, ticketed events, etc.), email marketing, and personal fundraising. It is implemented by the marketing communications department but also utilized by the development department. It's a full suite of tools for fundraising and communicating with your constituents.,Online fundraising Email Marketing Integration with other systems (Raiser's Edge, Salesforce, etc),Advocacy module is weak Blackbaud support has struggled for some time Lack of product updates (though we hear they are coming soon),8,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Reactivation from lapsed donors Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause Other,We have a number of large walk events that utilize the team-based fundraising model. Luminate Online has been very effective for these type of events. We also use LO for personal fundraising pages and special events.,,Salesforce.com,9,Not Sure,Product Features Product Reputation Prior Experience with the Product,We did a very thorough evaluation in 2014, using three other platforms each for one of our major events. This gave us real first-hand experience with each, so I feel like when we made the decision to stay with Luminate we had all the information possible. We are planning to do something similar later this year, as the digital fundraising landscape has changed and competitors have implemented innovative new tools.,7,6,Teamraiser Email Express Constituent Management,Reports Events Cross-referencing with LCRM,No,8,8Luminate Online ReviewYes, it has helped visually show the growth since the implementation of overall revenue and email conversions.,I have played around with Beta Lists segmentation, but we have not used these insights yet.,No,Luminate Online is our main fundraising platform used for sending email communications, donation forms and campaign landing pages, as well as event registrations.,Luminate Online is great at keeping forms simple. You are able to make email sign-ups really easy for constituents. They can also manage their email preferences very easily. Segmentation is also a strength. Luminate Online allows organizations to segment their constituents into groups or interests, making it easier to send targeted communications. Raiser's Edge integration is also a big plus. Luminate Online is able to "talk" to Raiser's Edge to ensure that constituent records are up to date with their online giving. Raiser's Edge is also able to send information back to Luminate Online to make sure that any changes that are made in Raisers Edge are reflected on the record in Luminate Online.,Luminate Online's Raiser's Edge integration can still use further development. Specifically, allowing donation form comment/notes to be mapped into fields in Raiser's Edge for donors to add any notes regarding such gifts.,9,Increased revenue from new donors Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing,The most effective campaign is our Giving Tuesday 2017 campaign. We were able to raise over $30,000 for Giving Tuesday efforts, most of which was raised in a single day. Donors were allowed to donate online during an early giving window, but that amount was minimal compared to the day of. This campaign consisted of a matching grant of up to $10,000 which incentivized donors to give during the early window or on Giving Tuesday. It was a 35% growth rate from previous year.,Blackbaud NetCommunity,WordPress, Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins,2,1,Online Donations Email Marketing Event Registration Fundraising Appeal Landing Pages Peer-to-peer fundraising,To create landing pages for fundraising appeals that aesthetically match the direct mail piece.,Further flush out peer-to-peer fundraising,10,Higher conversion rates Increased metrics Higher newsletter sign ups,Yes,Product Features Existing Relationship with the Vendor,We wouldn't.,8,No,Can't think of anything at this time.,Donation form creation HTML emails Event Registrations,Peer-to-peer fundraising landing pages for campaigns,No,7Luminate Online - Your Fundraising HubLuminate is such a big machine that different departments are using it across our organization. From advocacy to direct response to prevention we all benefit from its vast choices and offerings. It helps us to better serve our supporters and to manage our fundraising events as well as to set parameters to allow supporters to host their own events and use the platform. It is a great platform to host our events, handle registration fees, upsells, discounts, e-commerce, TeamRaiser and team creation within TeamRaiser, and donation forms for TeamRaiser, etc. One of the main factors is that you can start small and as you grow the platform will grow with your organization.,Team raisers: If your organization has team raisers, Luminate is the one you should be using. The whole arsenal of tools to use arond TeamRaisers is really unmatchable. You can even set the Event Manager Center to grant your event managers to some or all of the management options of the system. You decide the degree of delegation you give to your event managers. Email. Do you need to communicate with your supporters? Email will be your tool of choice, do it with the rich text editor or go old school with the plain editor and add your HTML directly. Do A/B testing to pick your best design and measure message performance. Pick your target and see a detailed report of your target audience before sending the email. Once the email is sent, keep track of the results with the information on the panel and the performance report of your email together with a bounce email report, etc. Need to recruit volunteers? The survey module will help you create your form for them to fill. What the system may not offer you can achieve with its flexibility and the great support for custom Java scripts.,Personal events, ticketed events, and the Ecommerce module could use some updating. But they are workable. Multi-locale is sometimes a hit and miss but for the most part works pretty well.,9,Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,Microsoft Office 2016, Skype for Business, OneDrive, Smartsheet, MS SharePoint,,,Fundraisers Prevention & Awareness Donations,Mixed environment between MS Azure and Donation Campaigns Development of an in house tool based on Azure and Luminate OpenAPI to automate some tasks that used to take a lot of time for staff to complete,9,Yes,Product Usability Product Reputation,I will add more up to date parameters on my research. Such as: Scalability, stability, language support, technologies support,Online training,7,9,Yes,10,10,9Luminate Online-Great tool for email marketingLuminate Online is being used by both the development and the marketing departments of our organization. We also use it for special events, property news and events, and a host of other things. It makes online giving and ticket sales easy and integrated. Gift entry and customer entry are easy and accurate.,Email marketing Suppression of opt-outs Online giving,The support could use some improvement. It is getting much, much better now that they are owned by Blackbaud, but there are still some areas that need work. The integration with Raiser's Edge is fantastic, but has been unstable as of late. This is adding a lot of down time to gift entry, where gifts can not come down through the connector. But the RE/LO integration feature is a huge improvement! Querying and reporting within Luminate is a little clunky.,7,,The Raisers Edge,10,3,Integration with Raiser's Edge The ability to make email groups directly from RE Queries Tracking of email results,10,Since the RE/LO integration our gift entry team has been able to enter gifts as they come in. It's instant. Prior to integration, we were hand entering gifts and there was a two week backlog. Since we can now build Luminate email groups directly from queries in Raiser's Edge, it has saved hours of time uploading and creating groups. And groups are much quicker to create! We are able to send a variety of targeted emails to different groups with relative ease.,No,Searching for Constituents Seeing open rates viewing groups,Queries Reports Creating emails,Yes, but I don't use it,6ilLuminating our PotentialLuminate online has helped my organization for years to get our message out there. We have been able to reach our donors with many emails that have led to major donations or turned a sale on our site to a total win. It has been a big help for me since joining MV to have Luminate.,Many coding options Allows for creative displays Easy to schedule appeals,Not adaptive to mobile Adds phantom coding on occasion,9,Increased revenue from existing donors Reactivation from lapsed donors Improved effectiveness of email marketing,We ran a sale that went for an entire week in the middle of August. In previous years, we would send only 2-3 emails for the entire week and have a decent amount of success. This past year we sent an email each day of the sale and each day we at least doubled the sales from previous years. **Update: This pattern has continued for a second year in the Summer as well as for our Black Friday Sale. It has helped so much we've now expanded to include a Spring Sale beginning in 2018.,Adobe Photoshop, WordPress, Facebook for Business,10,Not Sure,9,Recently, we had issues with Luminate communicating with our ACH provider. The cost of what we would have lost was substantial so we needed this issue resolved quickly. We reached out to our support at Luminate and he was the one to offer us our new solution to the issue (which was using a new ACH provider for all new ACH transactions and waiting for the older ACH provider to fix their issue.),Transaction Reports Email Messages Content Management Reports,Stationary Updates Donation Forms,No,7Happy Team Raiser userWe have been using TeamRaiser for the last 3 + years. All departments of the organization use it. It is used for peer-to-peer fundraising, sending coaching emails, generating reports.,Peer to peer fundraising Coaching emails Tax receipting,Organizational records Organizational gifts Integration with RE - not all LO information gets recorded in RE,9,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Reactivation from lapsed donors Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Increased awareness of our cause,We run annual walks throughout the country and use TeamRaiser for peer-to-peer fundraising. We also use TeamRaiser for third party event fundraising. It is an integral part of our organization.,,Blackbaud NetCommunity, The Raisers Edge,7,9Luminate for Marketing!Luminate is used by our Marketing, Operations, and Development team. Through Luminate Online, we are able to send out mass emails to targeted groups, track the analytics surrounding the emails, and see donations that come through our online portal. We are also able to add and subtract groups or individual users on an as needed basis.,Luminate does a great job of giving detailed information of online donors and sending them automated emails in return for their donation. Luminate also has easy step-by-step guidelines for the email creation. Luminate provides multiple ways to analyze and track data.,I would like to be able to customize more of the font and word placement in the email creations. As of now, you can not insert a video into the email, only a photo with a hyperlink to the online video. I would like to be able to embed the video into the actual email. I would like to be able to see the last time that I ran queries for my online donors so that I am not overlapping donors or missing donors because of dates.,9,Increased revenue from new donors Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,We recently ran a campaign called “Wishes that Last a Lifetime”. The purpose of this campaign was to show the long-term impact that a Wish has on a child and their family. We had beautiful photos, the child’s story, and a link to donate to continue helping impact lives. The campaign drew in new donors to the website, helped us to gain an additional gift from existing donors, and engaged people in our mission.Luminate Online - The sky's the limit!We use Luminate Online for our online communications and fundraising. All of our email lists and emails live in Luminate Online, and we set up all of our online donation forms through Luminate Online. We use it just within our Development Department, and it provides a one-stop solution for the majority of our online endeavors.,Luminate Online is a comprehensive program that lets you manage email lists, sell event tickets, collect survey information and host donation pages all in one. Luminate Online has a direct connector to our Raiser's Edge database, which is a huge help to ensure that our data matches within both systems and saves time with data entry. Luminate Online is very customizable.,One issue we came across is that the event module is not very functional for what we need to sell event tickets. There is no way to ask for each registrant's name, and there is no way to send notification emails when someone registers for an event. These are 2 things that are absolutely necessary for us so we are not able to use Luminate Online for our events, and I am disappointed such a robust system is missing such key functionality. Luminate Online can be a bit cumbersome to navigate. I feel you need someone with deep technical and coding skills to truly utilize Luminate Online to its fullest potential. While the connector to the Raiser's Edge database is great, there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure it functions well.,6,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Reactivation from lapsed donors Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,Each year our End of Year campaign always does well. We run a series of 3 emails in December. The first email goes to our whole list. The second email has 2 versions - one for non-donors to ask them to give, and one for donors that thanks them for their gift and asks them to tell a friend. The third email goes out on December 30 or 31 as a last chance reminder, and then we send a fourth email on New Year's Day thanking our community for their support throughout the year.,Blackbaud NetCommunity,1,The email function is fairly robust and easy to use. Reporting is mostly easy to use, with a few glitches. It is very comprehensive and there is a lot of data you can pull.,TeamRaiser is absolutely horrible. You need a full time coder on staff to be able to even begin to build anything in it. The donation pages are ok, but still very cumbersome and not that easy to update.,No,2,10Luminate Online will illuminate your business processes and make them brighter!We use the multi-center version of Luminate Online nationwide for our entire organization. We use it to manage all email communications, peer to peer fundraising events, advocacy, and online fundraising.,Advanced permissions Tight integration with Blackbaud CMS Great system performance,Consistency of user interface across modules Increased functionality of Organization records across modules,10,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Reactivation from lapsed donors Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,We conduct many campaigns, especially through advocacy, which have brought many constituents to act on our behalf and communicate to their lawmakers to get laws passed which we support. Effective peer to peer management has helped out events grow in participants and fundraising.,,Microsoft Office 2016, Chrome Remote Desktop,Surveys and Personal Fundraising,Report builder, email campaigns and audience selection, Ecommerce,Yes,7New to LuminateLuminate Online is being used by our organization for online donation form capabilities - monthly, one-time, in celebration, in memoriam. It will also allow us to set up event registrations when or if we host events. TeamRaiser is being used by our organization for DIY fundraising - so allowing our constituents to create fundraising pages in support of our organization.,Tracks constituent preferences and interests Many options for form customization Reports on online giving trends,Options in the back-end of the system can be overwhelming - too many options in multiple layered lists Organization gifts cannot transfer from Luminate to Raiser's Edge - the connector does not allow this type of gift to flow, so a manual process is required,6,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Reactivation from lapsed donors Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,In general, email campaigns have performed quite well, with an overall 40% open rate across all email campaigns over last fiscal year. The way Luminate enables the content to be personalized creates a higher than average open rate.,Blackbaud NetCommunity and The Raisers Edge,The Raisers Edge,3,2,Email marketing Online donation management Do it yourself fundraising capabilities,Personalized email campaigns Do it yourself platform,Better management of communication preferences Increased communication with constituents,10,Ability to communicate more frequently and effectively with online donors No increase in acquiring new email addresses Time-consuming to learn and navigate system,8,8,8Luminate - easy online email marketingLuminate is used mostly among the fundraising and communications teams. It gives us an easy way to email groups of people our newsletters, job alerts, event invitations etc., allowing us to customize the group, reuse lists, update lists etc. At my current organization, we don't use Luminate for donation pages or TeamRaiser yet -- that's coming - but at an older organization we used it all and it was so handy to have a complete picture without having to go into Raiser's Edge. I can't wait to have all of that set up at my current organization too. If you're already a user of Raiser's Edge it makes it all the more seamless to import/export data, email groups, track open and click rates, check on their peer-to-peer or third party fundraising etc.,Track email open rates, click through rates, donations associated etc. Peer to peer fundraising tracking and emails. Emailing groups is easy and intuitive - in multiple languages too.,A few things in events aren't multi-language by default. Team Raiser out of the box isn't pretty - best to have redesigned skin. US customers tend to get improvements first - but that's typical of anything for us Canadian customers.,8,Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing,At a previous organization, we used TeamRaiser to run a custom third party peer-to-peer virtual fundraising event. It allowed us to give participants coaching emails, encouragement emails, templated emails to request support, donation tracking, team tracking, order fulfillment for participant welcome kits and more. It's very intuitive and easy to use. It helped us focus on the event itself without having to worry about the technology behind it - meaning the event could be the best it could be.,artez and frontstream,Raiser's Edge NXT,5,Yes,Price Product Features Product Usability Prior Experience with the Product,I wouldn't change how we did it - I'd just do it earlier! We should have made the move years ago. When I got here I was baffled why we only had certain systems and not everything under one roof. It saves so much more time, money, patience.... And having one view on all of our online data just makes sense.,Online training Self-taught,10,Fairly intuitive and easy to use in laid out steps. Support is easy to access for any help if you get stuck, but it's only when I need to do more complicated things that I find I need their help. I find the menus and how to find things makes sense, and once you're in a section the sidebar step by step walks you through everything you need to do to complete whatever it is you need to do.,No,10,Yes,We recently were trying to get an email invitation out to a group of donors when we realized our event rsvp button wasn't working all of a sudden - even though it had been working fine in the past. Quickly hopped on chat support, they popped into our event to take a look and discovered the issue was because we had a developer working on a new page wrapper which was the same one being used for events. Even though it was out of their scope, they pointed us in the right direction and we were able to have our developer go in and fix the error they had created and got our email out on time!,10,10,10,10Luminate Online ReviewPeople seem to really like how they look and are excited to start using them more in depth for sharing with donors and Board.,We have taken a look at Wealth Ratings and Social Insights and everyone seems really excited about using them more on a regular basis.,I don't have a good answer at this time.,We currently use Luminate for our email marketing and online donations and also for our Team Raiser events.,Clean, professional looking emails. Wide variety of reports. Personal Fundraising and TeamRaiser functionality for events.,Reporting on sustaining gift. General internal user experience for gathering data. eCommerce is clunky.,7,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Reactivation from lapsed donors Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,Year end campaign seems to run very well through Luminate.,,The Raisers Edge,12,2,Emailing donors Taking online donations Growing our email list Team Raiser for peer to peer fundraising,Customizing TeamRaiser to use it as a fully functional peer-to-peer platform,Unsure at this time.,8,Helping us grow our peer-to-peer network,No,Price Product Features Product Usability Product Reputation,We had a very in depth process with a committee.,7,Not to my knowledge - this would be handled more through a co-worker.,Merging duplicates is nice with a side by side comparison Building reports is smooth Importing data is easy,Finding reports that work well on the first try Data on sustaining donors is hard to find and report Mass clean up of bad data (old record or bad email accounts) is difficult,Yes, but I don't use it,7Celebrating a Decade with Luminate OnlineWe use Luminate Online to host and manage our website, for all our online fundraising and correspondence with donors and readers. The system is used mainly by our media department, which includes content and communications with our readers and donors. It provides everything we need to communicate with donors and get them from the process of getting information about our ministry and presenting them with our projects and opportunities to donate.,Managing email campaigns is something we really appreciate about Luminate. Though people who do this at our organization have technical knowledge, it really is not required with an easy WYSIWYG tool and sending out mass targeted emails is something we do on a regular basis. All our donation forms are hosted in Luminate, and they, too, are easy to manage and set up for various projects. It's also easy to get the needed data and reports in order to analyze our progress.,Today most websites are built in open code and provide easy access to clients in case changes are needed in the CSS etc. Luminate somewhat limits this access as not all the files are accessible through the online management areas. This can be improved upon. As far as we know, Luminate Online does not support blogs, and so when we did have a blog, we had to host it outside Luminate.,8,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause Other,Our year-end campaigns have been quite successful. We have four specially designed emails we send out over the course of December featuring hard asks for those who have not yet given and special adjustments for those who have already participated in the campaign. In one of the campaign emails we feature a year-end summary video, showcasing what our organization has done throughout the year. In another - a personal thank you from our co-founders. Again, the campaign has been very successful, and this year we are planning to make it even better by completely re-designing it to a more tight ask.,,WordPress,4,9Luminate great in theory and has potential - but it needs some investment quickly to be cutting edge & user friendlyWe use LO for e-commerce (we have 3 stores using it), as well as for surveys, and some donations/fundraising pages. We are learning the product and hoping to use it for email blasts in the future, as well as for peer to peer fundraising via TeamRaiser. We also want to set up events and use the LO calendar in the future.,E-commerce. Our stores are easy to navigate, mobile friendly and it is fairly easy to manage products in the stores. Donation pages. We can modify the look and feel of the pages and have different donation campaigns that we can send out. The single sign-on functionality works decently well for us, between LO and our web developer. We use it for our member network/portal.,Reporting. It is cumbersome to pull or assemble reports out of LO. It doesn't seem user-friendly and should be updated to more current functionality. Surveys. Survey are ok, but if we want to customize beyond the approx 15 survey question template, we are stuck. Integration with Raiser's Edge. There is limitations on the integration, and this could improve immensely so that clients don't have to do an export/import process as a workaround. API integration. This is complex and has its limits as well. The API integration seems hard to use.,6,Increased revenue from new donors Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,We ran a Bibles for China campaign where the email blasts were a teaser to a mailing we did. Each time we blasted the group (from the initial one to follow up reminders), we were seeing new donations come in that we may not have received by mail from these donors, or who may have not given online has we not sent a follow up remainder email to them.,Constant Contact, PayPal Payments and SurveyMonkey,Blackbaud CRM,To handle all online event logistics, from start to finish. Using analytics to communicate with our supporters more automatically and smartly. For our email campaigns and our DIY fundraising campaigns.,6Advocate with LuminateWe are using Luminate Online for our advocacy action alerts sent to our constituents on legislative issues impacting the cystic fibrosis community.,The system is exceptionally easy to use once you've been trained by the Luminate staff. The ability to allow the constituent to personalize our letter to their legislator is quite important, and also easy for them to do. It is essential that the system automatically sends the action alert letter responses from the constituent to their correct legislator, and it does. There is no need for the constituent to find their legislators' email addresses -- the system does it for them.,I would like to see easier access to metrics analyzing the delivery and follow through by respondents to our email action alerts.,10,Increased revenue from new donors Increased awareness of our cause,We have not run a fundraising campaign. We have run an advocacy campaign, sending out 13 advocacy Action Alerts within a 5 month period. We are seeking to turn constituents into activists and engaging them to send letters of action items to their legislators. The feedback has been promising, and this will be an ongoing program.,,Blackbaud NetCommunity, The Raisers Edge, Luminate Advocacy,2Luminate Online ReviewWe use Luminate Online to send mass emails utilizing dynamic and static groups and opt-in audiences. Luminate Online is used across the whole organization for events, solicitations, newsletters, informational emails, recognition and other miscellaneous correspondence.,Dynamic and static group creation. Luminate Online allows for the building, addition and removal of records in groups. Email campaign management. Online donation form creation and management.,Constituent profile management, especially related to the capability of deleting erroneous or non-valid records. Creation and modification of customized acknowledgement and receipts. The capability of having organization records that are tied with RE7 records, currently the system does not include an email, MemberId or ConstituentId field.,4,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Improved effectiveness of email marketing,Our Knight Cancer Challenge was incredibly successful as we used multiple channels, including Luminate Online, to message our donors and direct them to online giving options, both one-time and sustaining donations. The campaign concept was to specifically target Cancer Research and Early Detection and focused on our Director, Brian Druker and his innovation of Gleevac. Overall, the Knight Cancer Challenge raised $500 million dollars.,The Raisers Edge, SmartSearch, SQL Server Business Intelligence ManagerCould be Better, Could be WorseIt is currently being used by the whole organization to manage our contacts, send emails, put events on the web calendar, track email campaigns, build surveys and donation forms, and utilize ticketing for the institution. Some business problems it covers is not having a compatible CRM and CMS - we also use the Luminate CMS for our website and can connect the two easily.,Email campaigns Donation forms Filterable event calendar Image library,Tech help Clunky system can be tricky for new admins Difficult to create responsive site pages without technical help,6,Increased revenue from existing donors Improved effectiveness of email marketing,We did a "35 Days of Giving" for our end of year giving/35th anniversary. We could send multiple emails to a variety of audiences, track how well each email did with each variant, and tailor the messages to better fit donors throughout the campaign. The reporting tools helped us make decisions as well.,Emma, MailChimp, WordPress, DonorPerfect and Sprout Social,WordPress, Sprout Social, DonorPerfect,20,6,6,5,5,7A True Data Minded Individual would love thisIt is being using by the Development Department to handle all of our online needs. We use it to send emails, build webpages, handle donor transactions and run reports.,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.,I would say the layout of emails [is an area for improvement]. It isn't awful but I feel it could be upgraded and more user friendly. Making text and picture boxes as well as formatting text can be a bit of a pain.,10,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,We wanted to bring back a community service that cut in our organization so we used Luminate to make people aware of what is going on and make them donors. We made dedicated donor webpages that displayed our campaign. We funneled people to these webpages through direct mail, social media and word of mouth. We saw a bump in donations and a bump in emails. Just having a platform that can house everything in one is critical. I don't need to transfer any emails gathered through transactions or signups, they are automatically put into a group where I can segment and report on in the future. By having such a user friendly platform, it is easy to track and report to senior staff on how well the campaign is doing.,Raiser's Edge, Paypal and Mailchimp,MailChimp, The Raisers Edge, PayPal Payments,10,Performing transactions whether inhouse or using the donation pages. Producing reports. Very user friendly in creating queries, reports and exports. Designing donation webpages and surveys.,Creating emails is a bit of a pain. The system is very finicky. But it is worth it to have everything linked to one in one portal.,8,9Loving LuminateWe are using Luminate in the following ways: - Online Constituent Mgmt - Email Communications - Online Fundraising Campaigns - Monthly Giving - Event Calendar - manage organization wide events - Light use of E-Commerce - Teamraiser for our Walks and Peer 2 Peer Fundraising We are potentially going [to be]migrating our website back to Luminate over the next year and we are looking at using the Advocacy Module.,Solid email platform. Fairly easy to use. Great place to manage online donations and monthly giving.,Survey function is clunky and needs to be modernized. Calendar function is clunky. Wish you could edit the look and feel of it. TeamRaiser needs to be modernized. The participant center is being used less and less by constituents because it is not that user-friendly. More people are turning to mobile.,10,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Reactivation from lapsed donors Holistic view of constituent behavior through integration with Raiser's Edge Improved effectiveness of email marketing Increased awareness of our cause,We have run several campaigns utilizing Luminate. In January, we ran a campaign to communicate a dog hoarding situation in which we rescued over 100 Yorkies (ultimately 160). We used Luminate to set up special donation forms and sent out a series of emails that kept our constituents informed about the case, as well as requested donations. The fundraising appeal raised over $35,000. What is significant about this, is that there was not a matching challenge and this campaign launched mid-January, just after the close of our year-end campaign. Our Online Giving Program has grown leaps and bounds over the last 5 years. I don't think it would be possible without utilizing the tools in Luminate.,,Raiser's Edge NXT, Financial Edge NXTTo Luminate or NotLuminate is used by the fundraising (aka development/advancement) department only. We started using it solely for the ability to manage the online registrations and donations for a large "Run/Walk" we have each year. Now, it is our platform for all online gifts. It eliminates a lot of manual or duplicate entries by the run/walk manager and the gift administrator (me).,Syncing to Raiser's Edge database,Could be better at not allowing duplicate records for the same person. Cynthia Smith registers but the next year she registers as Cindy Smith. Same email, same address. Luminate should have a "pop-up" that says (e.g.) We have found a similar record. Is this you? Need to be able to sort gifts by the Batch number.,10,Increased revenue from new donors Increased revenue from existing donors Improved effectiveness of email marketingTeamRaiser is a Porche - we just wanted a bikeOur advancement team made the switch this summer to TeamRaiser to replace Sphere for peer-to-peer fundraising. We are utilizing it to fundraise for our athletics teams as well as other student clubs.,Provides highly customizable pages Easy import of constituents and gifts into Raiser's Edge (RE),There is a VERY steep learning curve. Because the product is so customizable, there are few "how-to" documents easily available. I have been told that it takes about a year to really learn the system. The training is extremely high-level; it was like a calculus class when all we needed was basic long division. Although TR promises you don't need to know coding to use the site, you do need to have someone who is confident enough to make some changes in the coding.,10,Increased revenue from new donors Other,Classy,The Raisers Edge,5,8,7,9
  3. Luminate Reviews
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Luminate
130 Ratings
Score 7.8 out of 101
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Luminate Reviews

Luminate
130 Ratings
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Score 7.8 out of 101
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Daniella Dowiak profile photo
May 22, 2018

User Review: "Luminate Online - worth the investment"

Daniella Dowiak
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
The most recent organization I helped implement Luminate Online has used it for their entire organization. The whole point of turning to LO was to have all communications/interactions-type data in one place, which is exactly what LO provided. All constituent information is housed in LO, where information is collected about donations, registrations, fundraising, survey responses and email communications. Having all information in one place allows all departments to better report and communicate with constituents.
  • LO is a great one-stop-shop for registration/fundraising events. Allowing users to register and then fundraise using the same tool (i.e. the same login) is a great way to enhance fundraising results. Also having this information be a part of the main database is incredibly helpful for an organization.
  • LO is great for email campaigns - the system allows you to create different groups and queries of your database and then target constituents with messages that are appropriate to them.
  • LO's donation forms are pretty simple to set up and are an easy way to track both online and offline donations.
  • LO's TeamRaiser can be a bit tricky to use. It's a great tool, but to make it look really nice and be user friendly, it needs someone with some coding expertise to set it up.
  • Parts of the LO system are still not mobile responsive (the participant center in particular). I know LO is working on this, but until it's done, this is going to be a frustration for some users.
  • While Blackbaud has really invested in tutorials and help/support areas, LO can still be incredibly overwhelming for an organization that is new to the system and doesn't have the money to pay someone to help set it up, or doesn't have someone on staff who has used it before.
Luminate Online (LO) is great for any organization that wants to be able to collect interaction data from constituents and communicate with them. If an organization does (or would like to do) the following, I would generally say LO is well suited for them: collects donations, has an e-newsletter, sends out e-communications, hosts events (fundraising and non-fundraising), sells merchandise online, or is involved in advocacy. An organization less suited for LO would be one that doesn't have the resources to invest in LO - it's not cheap and does take man power to set up, but once the tools are implemented, the results are worth it if you're able to set things up right.
Read Daniella Dowiak's full review
Philip Nawrocki profile photo
May 22, 2018

User Review: "Ruminate about Luminate"

Philip Nawrocki
Score 7 out of 10
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We use Luminate for all our foundation fundraising. From donation forms to TeamRaiser to eCommerce, we are using Luminate across our foundation and the hospital we support. Luminate makes it easy for us to accept donations and is starting to accept more payment methods. We just implemented PayPal in the last year and will be implementing Apple Pay and Visa Checkout this year. We use the eCommerce module to handle all of our event registrations and ticket purchases. We use TeamRaiser for our 5Ks and peer-to-peer always up fundraising events. Additionally, we use the Email module extensively. It is easy to setup an e-mail to send, note, we hand-code 95% of our e-mails. The statistics you get are the main ones that you would need to make decisions going forward. It is easy to setup an A/B test or a 10/10/80 test.
  • The donation forms are easy to set up to start collecting donations instantly.
  • Getting an e-mail out the door is fairly straightforward.
  • The TeamRaiser module is great for fundraising for big events with multiple registration levels and allowing participants to fundraise on your behalf.
  • Constituent management is fairly easy.
  • 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.
Luminate is great to get your fundraising off the ground and running. A customer would easily be able to start taking donations and sending e-mails. It might take a minute to understand all the TeamRaiser options, but once a little more knowledge is learned, it is a great tool for constituents to fundraise on your behalf.
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Lawrence Willim profile photo
April 16, 2018

Review: "Luminate: Great for the correctly sized operation"

Lawrence Willim
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Luminate is used as a donor interface within our development department. We are currently the only department with direct involvement with the program. We currently use Luminate to manage our email lists, send e-blasts, set up online donation forms as well as events and surveys. Luminate acts as an intermediary between our donors and our Raiser's Edge database.
  • Donation form creation is easy and user-friendly. They are also easily organizable within the system.
  • It's great for creating surveys when forms don't necessarily have the flexibility we desire.
  • Content is easily created and uploaded to our website.
  • Email management is limited. Constituents are only able to have a primary email address and a secondary address which is only mailed to when using the CC function. Sending to the correct and preferred email address is difficult to discern and effective use in Luminate requires extensive data cleanup.
  • Reports are not as user-friendly as in other programs. It has occurred multiple times where users are unsure how to get specific fields to pull in reports.
  • TeamRaiser is a challenging addition to Luminate. Campaigns within it require extensive work and management.
Luminate excels in its ability to interface with your donors for you and updates are easily processed through the LO/RE connector. A dedicated user who has ample time to dedicate to the product would be preferred. Luminate has extensive abilities, however, we have found that due to our database size and volume of special events and e-blasts, a less sophisticated program may work equally as well.
Read Lawrence Willim's full review
Nathan B. Smith profile photo
June 04, 2018

User Review: "Shining a Light through Luminate"

Nathan B. Smith
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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We currently use Luminate for our annual fundraising walk (peer to peer fundraising).
  • Clean and fresh look
  • Mobile friendly
  • Great support team when questions arise
  • Copying an event from year to year you have to go into multiple areas to make all the changes - having a more streamlined process would be helpful.
  • It doesn't fully integrate with our database (Raiser's Edge) which is also a Blackbaud product.
Read Nathan B. Smith's full review
Robert Stowe profile photo
June 02, 2018

Review: "Luminate Online - Great for team-based fundraising and email marketing"

Robert Stowe
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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We use Luminate Online for team-based fundraising events, special events (galas, ticketed events, etc.), email marketing, and personal fundraising. It is implemented by the marketing communications department but also utilized by the development department. It's a full suite of tools for fundraising and communicating with your constituents.
  • Online fundraising
  • Email Marketing
  • Integration with other systems (Raiser's Edge, Salesforce, etc)
  • Advocacy module is weak
  • Blackbaud support has struggled for some time
  • Lack of product updates (though we hear they are coming soon)
I have implemented and/or worked in Luminate Online for several nonprofit organizations with great success. While scalable it seems to work best for medium to large organizations. It offers solutions for ticketed events, personal fundraising, advocacy, and more, but is really best for team-based fundraising events - it lacks flexibility elsewhere.
Read Robert Stowe's full review
Jennifer Mejia, MPA profile photo
May 31, 2018

"Luminate Online Review"

Jennifer Mejia, MPA
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Luminate Online is our main fundraising platform used for sending email communications, donation forms and campaign landing pages, as well as event registrations.
  • Luminate Online is great at keeping forms simple. You are able to make email sign-ups really easy for constituents. They can also manage their email preferences very easily.
  • Segmentation is also a strength. Luminate Online allows organizations to segment their constituents into groups or interests, making it easier to send targeted communications.
  • Raiser's Edge integration is also a big plus. Luminate Online is able to "talk" to Raiser's Edge to ensure that constituent records are up to date with their online giving. Raiser's Edge is also able to send information back to Luminate Online to make sure that any changes that are made in Raisers Edge are reflected on the record in Luminate Online.
  • Luminate Online's Raiser's Edge integration can still use further development. Specifically, allowing donation form comment/notes to be mapped into fields in Raiser's Edge for donors to add any notes regarding such gifts.
Luminate Online is not appropriate with volunteer constituents. It is great for basic donation forms and event registrations.
Read Jennifer Mejia, MPA's full review
Samuel Gomez Recuero profile photo
May 29, 2018

User Review: "Luminate Online - Your Fundraising Hub"

Samuel Gomez Recuero
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Luminate is such a big machine that different departments are using it across our organization. From advocacy to direct response to prevention we all benefit from its vast choices and offerings. It helps us to better serve our supporters and to manage our fundraising events as well as to set parameters to allow supporters to host their own events and use the platform. It is a great platform to host our events, handle registration fees, upsells, discounts, e-commerce, TeamRaiser and team creation within TeamRaiser, and donation forms for TeamRaiser, etc.

One of the main factors is that you can start small and as you grow the platform will grow with your organization.
  • Team raisers: If your organization has team raisers, Luminate is the one you should be using. The whole arsenal of tools to use arond TeamRaisers is really unmatchable. You can even set the Event Manager Center to grant your event managers to some or all of the management options of the system. You decide the degree of delegation you give to your event managers.
  • Email. Do you need to communicate with your supporters? Email will be your tool of choice, do it with the rich text editor or go old school with the plain editor and add your HTML directly. Do A/B testing to pick your best design and measure message performance. Pick your target and see a detailed report of your target audience before sending the email. Once the email is sent, keep track of the results with the information on the panel and the performance report of your email together with a bounce email report, etc.
  • Need to recruit volunteers? The survey module will help you create your form for them to fill. What the system may not offer you can achieve with its flexibility and the great support for custom Java scripts.
  • Personal events, ticketed events, and the Ecommerce module could use some updating. But they are workable.
  • Multi-locale is sometimes a hit and miss but for the most part works pretty well.
Luminate is great for any organization doing fundraisers and peer to peer due to its social media integration. Users can post their fundraising efforts or personal page to Facebook directing traffic from their Facebook page directly to the participant page or team page. They have access to a variety of tools via their participant center which keeps track of the donations received by the participant to remind them to thank their donors as well as the possibility of a contact list to invite friends and family to join you, or make a pledge on your behalf. You can communicate with teammates and update your goals.
Read Samuel Gomez Recuero's full review
Amy Barker, bCRE profile photo
May 29, 2018

Review: "Luminate Online-Great tool for email marketing"

Amy Barker, bCRE
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Luminate Online is being used by both the development and the marketing departments of our organization. We also use it for special events, property news and events, and a host of other things. It makes online giving and ticket sales easy and integrated. Gift entry and customer entry are easy and accurate.
  • Email marketing
  • Suppression of opt-outs
  • Online giving
  • The support could use some improvement. It is getting much, much better now that they are owned by Blackbaud, but there are still some areas that need work.
  • The integration with Raiser's Edge is fantastic, but has been unstable as of late. This is adding a lot of down time to gift entry, where gifts can not come down through the connector. But the RE/LO integration feature is a huge improvement!
  • Querying and reporting within Luminate is a little clunky.
It is fantastic if you send out a lot of emails. We have a very active email program, and are sending emails left and right. It's been a great tool to help us manage these emails. I would think if you worked at a smaller shop it may just be too robust, and something like MailChimp would be better.
Read Amy Barker, bCRE's full review
Daniel Ballard profile photo
May 22, 2018

Luminate Review: "ilLuminating our Potential"

Daniel Ballard
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Luminate online has helped my organization for years to get our message out there. We have been able to reach our donors with many emails that have led to major donations or turned a sale on our site to a total win. It has been a big help for me since joining MV to have Luminate.
  • Many coding options
  • Allows for creative displays
  • Easy to schedule appeals
  • Not adaptive to mobile
  • Adds phantom coding on occasion
Luminate Online is great at reaching our donors by easily breaking donors into many categories to reach an appropriate audience. This allows us to focus on a proper audience every time we send out an email appeal letter. Where it becomes a little more complicated is when phantom coding sneaks in.
Read Daniel Ballard's full review
Lena Trubnikova profile photo
May 22, 2018

Luminate Review: "Happy Team Raiser user"

Lena Trubnikova
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We have been using TeamRaiser for the last 3 + years. All departments of the organization use it. It is used for peer-to-peer fundraising, sending coaching emails, generating reports.
  • Peer to peer fundraising
  • Coaching emails
  • Tax receipting
  • Organizational records
  • Organizational gifts
  • Integration with RE - not all LO information gets recorded in RE
We find Luminate Online robust and it serves our needs well. Integration with RE needs more work as sometimes some gifts are dropped during integration which makes reconciliation difficult. Adding a better organizational gift functionality would also help a lot. In general, TeamRaiser is a great peer-to-peer fundraising tool.
Read Lena Trubnikova's full review
Sydney Graczyk profile photo
January 23, 2018

User Review: "Luminate for Marketing!"

Sydney Graczyk
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Luminate is used by our Marketing, Operations, and Development team. Through Luminate Online, we are able to send out mass emails to targeted groups, track the analytics surrounding the emails, and see donations that come through our online portal. We are also able to add and subtract groups or individual users on an as needed basis.
  • Luminate does a great job of giving detailed information of online donors and sending them automated emails in return for their donation.
  • Luminate also has easy step-by-step guidelines for the email creation.
  • Luminate provides multiple ways to analyze and track data.
  • I would like to be able to customize more of the font and word placement in the email creations.
  • As of now, you can not insert a video into the email, only a photo with a hyperlink to the online video. I would like to be able to embed the video into the actual email.
  • I would like to be able to see the last time that I ran queries for my online donors so that I am not overlapping donors or missing donors because of dates.
Luminate is well suited for companies that have a mass audience to send out information as well as targeted groups. However, Luminate does require a decent amount of training, so if a company does not have the capacity to learn how to fully use Luminate, it would not be ideal to sign up for this technology.
Read Sydney Graczyk's full review
No photo available
May 31, 2018

User Review: "Luminate Online - The sky's the limit!"

Verified User
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Luminate Online for our online communications and fundraising. All of our email lists and emails live in Luminate Online, and we set up all of our online donation forms through Luminate Online. We use it just within our Development Department, and it provides a one-stop solution for the majority of our online endeavors.
  • Luminate Online is a comprehensive program that lets you manage email lists, sell event tickets, collect survey information and host donation pages all in one.
  • Luminate Online has a direct connector to our Raiser's Edge database, which is a huge help to ensure that our data matches within both systems and saves time with data entry.
  • Luminate Online is very customizable.
  • One issue we came across is that the event module is not very functional for what we need to sell event tickets. There is no way to ask for each registrant's name, and there is no way to send notification emails when someone registers for an event. These are 2 things that are absolutely necessary for us so we are not able to use Luminate Online for our events, and I am disappointed such a robust system is missing such key functionality.
  • Luminate Online can be a bit cumbersome to navigate. I feel you need someone with deep technical and coding skills to truly utilize Luminate Online to its fullest potential.
  • While the connector to the Raiser's Edge database is great, there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure it functions well.
I would highly recommend Luminate if you have the technical staff available to manage the system. I consider myself pretty technically savvy and can work my way around the system, but there are still many things I need support help to figure out. No one on our team has been able to figure out TeamRaiser, despite multiple trainings and hours on the phone. If you have staff that knows coding, there are no bounds to what Luminate can do.
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No photo available
May 29, 2018

Review: "Luminate Online will illuminate your business processes and make them brighter!"

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use the multi-center version of Luminate Online nationwide for our entire organization. We use it to manage all email communications, peer to peer fundraising events, advocacy, and online fundraising.
  • Advanced permissions
  • Tight integration with Blackbaud CMS
  • Great system performance
  • Consistency of user interface across modules
  • Increased functionality of Organization records across modules
TeamRaiser is built specifically for peer to peer fundraising. Best in class. Social network integration is good, but think it will get better soon. Advocacy management is built and performs well. Email communication is great and is easy for novice users with Luminate Express. Great audience segmentation capabilities.
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No photo available
May 29, 2018

User Review: "New to Luminate"

Verified User
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Luminate Online is being used by our organization for online donation form capabilities - monthly, one-time, in celebration, in memoriam. It will also allow us to set up event registrations when or if we host events. TeamRaiser is being used by our organization for DIY fundraising - so allowing our constituents to create fundraising pages in support of our organization.
  • Tracks constituent preferences and interests
  • Many options for form customization
  • Reports on online giving trends
  • Options in the back-end of the system can be overwhelming - too many options in multiple layered lists
  • Organization gifts cannot transfer from Luminate to Raiser's Edge - the connector does not allow this type of gift to flow, so a manual process is required
The reason for a lower recommendation rating is that Luminate Online is lacking a user-friendly interface in terms of straightforward options.
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No photo available
May 22, 2018

User Review: "Luminate - easy online email marketing"

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Luminate is used mostly among the fundraising and communications teams. It gives us an easy way to email groups of people our newsletters, job alerts, event invitations etc., allowing us to customize the group, reuse lists, update lists etc. At my current organization, we don't use Luminate for donation pages or TeamRaiser yet -- that's coming - but at an older organization we used it all and it was so handy to have a complete picture without having to go into Raiser's Edge. I can't wait to have all of that set up at my current organization too. If you're already a user of Raiser's Edge it makes it all the more seamless to import/export data, email groups, track open and click rates, check on their peer-to-peer or third party fundraising etc.
  • Track email open rates, click through rates, donations associated etc.
  • Peer to peer fundraising tracking and emails.
  • Emailing groups is easy and intuitive - in multiple languages too.
  • A few things in events aren't multi-language by default.
  • Team Raiser out of the box isn't pretty - best to have redesigned skin.
  • US customers tend to get improvements first - but that's typical of anything for us Canadian customers.
If you're a very small organization I'm not sure if it's well suited, but for any medium or large organization who emails often, tracks peer-to-peer fundraising or could use advocacy work - Luminate is a great option. Especially if you use Raiser's Edge or other BlackBaud products. It helps to tie all of your information together to make more informed decisions, a better experience for your donors, and more tailored communications and experiences for them with you.
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No photo available
May 22, 2018

"Luminate Online Review"

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We currently use Luminate for our email marketing and online donations and also for our Team Raiser events.
  • Clean, professional looking emails.
  • Wide variety of reports.
  • Personal Fundraising and TeamRaiser functionality for events.
  • Reporting on sustaining gift.
  • General internal user experience for gathering data.
  • eCommerce is clunky.
It's sort of the best out there right now for our needs. We have had difficulties with being able to pull reports to fill our needs in bringing data to RE.
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Katy Sorsher Smith profile photo
October 12, 2017

"Celebrating a Decade with Luminate Online"

Katy Sorsher Smith
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Luminate Online to host and manage our website, for all our online fundraising and correspondence with donors and readers. The system is used mainly by our media department, which includes content and communications with our readers and donors.

It provides everything we need to communicate with donors and get them from the process of getting information about our ministry and presenting them with our projects and opportunities to donate.
  • Managing email campaigns is something we really appreciate about Luminate. Though people who do this at our organization have technical knowledge, it really is not required with an easy WYSIWYG tool and sending out mass targeted emails is something we do on a regular basis.
  • All our donation forms are hosted in Luminate, and they, too, are easy to manage and set up for various projects. It's also easy to get the needed data and reports in order to analyze our progress.
  • Today most websites are built in open code and provide easy access to clients in case changes are needed in the CSS etc. Luminate somewhat limits this access as not all the files are accessible through the online management areas. This can be improved upon.
  • As far as we know, Luminate Online does not support blogs, and so when we did have a blog, we had to host it outside Luminate.
Because I'm familiar with the system and have a lot of experience, I would recommend it for sure. Organizations who are looking for all-in-one systems to manage their online presence and also those who have limited personnel available will definitely benefit from this. However, Luminate is costly so probably not every organization will be able to afford it. Luminate is not an open code website managing system, so it would be better suited for organizations which do not have top-level-professional webmasters. They will enjoy 24/7 professional support for all their tech needs to compensate for lack of knowledge of HTML/CSS.
Read Katy Sorsher Smith's full review
Kevin Cawthra, CA, CPA profile photo
January 11, 2018

Review: "Luminate great in theory and has potential - but it needs some investment quickly to be cutting edge & user friendly"

Kevin Cawthra, CA, CPA
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use LO for e-commerce (we have 3 stores using it), as well as for surveys, and some donations/fundraising pages. We are learning the product and hoping to use it for email blasts in the future, as well as for peer to peer fundraising via TeamRaiser. We also want to set up events and use the LO calendar in the future.
  • E-commerce. Our stores are easy to navigate, mobile friendly and it is fairly easy to manage products in the stores.
  • Donation pages. We can modify the look and feel of the pages and have different donation campaigns that we can send out.
  • The single sign-on functionality works decently well for us, between LO and our web developer. We use it for our member network/portal.
  • Reporting. It is cumbersome to pull or assemble reports out of LO. It doesn't seem user-friendly and should be updated to more current functionality.
  • Surveys. Survey are ok, but if we want to customize beyond the approx 15 survey question template, we are stuck.
  • Integration with Raiser's Edge. There is limitations on the integration, and this could improve immensely so that clients don't have to do an export/import process as a workaround.
  • API integration. This is complex and has its limits as well. The API integration seems hard to use.
There are other vendors out there who do really well at certain things: email blasting, surveys, and calendars. I think Luminate Online (LO) would do well to catch up in these areas and take the good parts of what those products offer, and implement them. TeamRaiser is the market leader so that's a huge positive, and e-commerce is done pretty well in the product as well. So there are parts that are leading the way, but there is room for improvement (quickly) in other functions of LO.
Read Kevin Cawthra, CA, CPA's full review
Sue Landgraf profile photo
August 31, 2017

User Review: "Advocate with Luminate"

Sue Landgraf
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We are using Luminate Online for our advocacy action alerts sent to our constituents on legislative issues impacting the cystic fibrosis community.
  • The system is exceptionally easy to use once you've been trained by the Luminate staff.
  • The ability to allow the constituent to personalize our letter to their legislator is quite important, and also easy for them to do.
  • It is essential that the system automatically sends the action alert letter responses from the constituent to their correct legislator, and it does. There is no need for the constituent to find their legislators' email addresses -- the system does it for them.
  • I would like to see easier access to metrics analyzing the delivery and follow through by respondents to our email action alerts.
Luminate Online is perfectly suited to our advocacy work nationwide, and I could see it being used for internal messaging to constituents that does not require a follow through action.
Read Sue Landgraf's full review
Tammi Burkhardt profile photo
December 21, 2017

"Luminate Online Review"

Tammi Burkhardt
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Luminate Online to send mass emails utilizing dynamic and static groups and opt-in audiences. Luminate Online is used across the whole organization for events, solicitations, newsletters, informational emails, recognition and other miscellaneous correspondence.
  • Dynamic and static group creation. Luminate Online allows for the building, addition and removal of records in groups.
  • Email campaign management.
  • Online donation form creation and management.
  • Constituent profile management, especially related to the capability of deleting erroneous or non-valid records.
  • Creation and modification of customized acknowledgement and receipts.
  • The capability of having organization records that are tied with RE7 records, currently the system does not include an email, MemberId or ConstituentId field.
Luminate is well suited for a small organization whose correspondence is not segmented in complex methods, unfortunately for us, we have highly complex segmentation and A/B testing requirements that are difficult to manage in Luminate Online.
Read Tammi Burkhardt's full review
Rose Grant profile photo
December 21, 2017

Luminate Review: "Could be Better, Could be Worse"

Rose Grant
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
It is currently being used by the whole organization to manage our contacts, send emails, put events on the web calendar, track email campaigns, build surveys and donation forms, and utilize ticketing for the institution. Some business problems it covers is not having a compatible CRM and CMS - we also use the Luminate CMS for our website and can connect the two easily.
  • Email campaigns
  • Donation forms
  • Filterable event calendar
  • Image library
  • Tech help
  • Clunky system can be tricky for new admins
  • Difficult to create responsive site pages without technical help
A pro is that it is an all in 1 system- it has a large variety of tools both for event management, reports, donations, and ecommerce.
The con is that the end result is not always sleek and the system requires a decent amount of technical understanding to create a good product at the end.
Read Rose Grant's full review
Kelly Norris profile photo
August 25, 2017

Luminate Review: "A True Data Minded Individual would love this"

Kelly Norris
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
It is being using by the Development Department to handle all of our online needs. We use it to send emails, build webpages, handle donor transactions and run reports.
  • 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.
  • I would say the layout of emails [is an area for improvement]. It isn't awful but I feel it could be upgraded and more user friendly. Making text and picture boxes as well as formatting text can be a bit of a pain.
I feel the way Luminate handles donor information is very organized and full. I am a database/reports person so I love how easy it is to find and process information. Some portals don't allow that much information into donor's profiles but Luminate provides a lot of room for history and bio information that is great for reports.
Read Kelly Norris's full review
Jennifer Grantham profile photo
December 18, 2017

User Review: "Loving Luminate"

Jennifer Grantham
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We are using Luminate in the following ways:
- Online Constituent Mgmt
- Email Communications
- Online Fundraising Campaigns
- Monthly Giving
- Event Calendar - manage organization wide events
- Light use of E-Commerce
- Teamraiser for our Walks and Peer 2 Peer Fundraising


We are potentially going [to be]migrating our website back to Luminate over the next year and we are looking at using the Advocacy Module.
  • Solid email platform. Fairly easy to use.
  • Great place to manage online donations and monthly giving.
  • Survey function is clunky and needs to be modernized.
  • Calendar function is clunky. Wish you could edit the look and feel of it.
  • TeamRaiser needs to be modernized. The participant center is being used less and less by constituents because it is not that user-friendly. More people are turning to mobile.
Luminate is well suited for larger organizations that have an active online constituency and raise a decent amount of funds online. I love that it now integrates with Raiser's Edge.

We heavily utilize the calendar for ticketed events and non-ticketed events. I wish there was more functionality and ability to customize the calendar function.
Read Jennifer Grantham's full review
Cindy Avery profile photo
December 18, 2017

User Review: "To Luminate or Not"

Cindy Avery
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Luminate is used by the fundraising (aka development/advancement) department only. We started using it solely for the ability to manage the online registrations and donations for a large "Run/Walk" we have each year. Now, it is our platform for all online gifts. It eliminates a lot of manual or duplicate entries by the run/walk manager and the gift administrator (me).
  • Syncing to Raiser's Edge database
  • Could be better at not allowing duplicate records for the same person. Cynthia Smith registers but the next year she registers as Cindy Smith. Same email, same address. Luminate should have a "pop-up" that says (e.g.) We have found a similar record. Is this you?
  • Need to be able to sort gifts by the Batch number.
Great for online donations and great for me to enter gifts on the back-end so clients with an email address can receive an e-receipt saving me hours of gift processing/letter writing time.
Read Cindy Avery's full review
Amy Dana, bCRE profile photo
November 02, 2017

Luminate Review: "TeamRaiser is a Porche - we just wanted a bike"

Amy Dana, bCRE
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Our advancement team made the switch this summer to TeamRaiser to replace Sphere for peer-to-peer fundraising. We are utilizing it to fundraise for our athletics teams as well as other student clubs.
  • Provides highly customizable pages
  • Easy import of constituents and gifts into Raiser's Edge (RE)
  • There is a VERY steep learning curve. Because the product is so customizable, there are few "how-to" documents easily available. I have been told that it takes about a year to really learn the system.
  • The training is extremely high-level; it was like a calculus class when all we needed was basic long division.
  • Although TR promises you don't need to know coding to use the site, you do need to have someone who is confident enough to make some changes in the coding.
If you have someone already on staff who understands coding and is willing to take the time to use TeamRaiser (TR) correctly, I recommend it.

For those who need a very simple site to raise funds on behalf of other individuals (instead of having those individuals raise the funds themselves), TR may not be it. We were clear that we would be handling the individual pages for each student athlete, and this turned out to be extremely difficult and time-consuming. When we asked later if there was a better way, we were told this was not how TR was meant to be used.
Read Amy Dana, bCRE's full review

Luminate Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (130)
7.8
Likelihood to Renew (20)
7.8
Usability (26)
6.2
Availability (3)
10.0
Performance (9)
8.6
Support (31)
7.4
In-Person Training (2)
8.0
Online Training (15)
7.4
Implementation (4)
3.1
Product Scalability (12)
9.1

About Luminate

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 appeals. Smart online and mobile donation forms dynamically tailor the ask and provide flexible options like recurring, matching and tribute gifts to optimize conversion and maximize giving.

Passions, preferences and giving history trigger additional campaigns building stewardship through more relevant interactions and opportunities to engage. The company also aims to offer top notch support and numerous free resources. All clients receive a personal Customer Success Manager to offer best practices and resources to succeed.
Categories:  Nonprofit Advocacy,  Nonprofit Fundraising

Luminate Features

Has featureDynamic Email Campaigns
Has featureOnline Fundraising with Smart Donation Forms
Has featureDonation Processing
Has featureFundraising Analytics & Reporting
Has featureCalendar Events
Has featureeCommerce Capabiltiies
Has featureEngagement Factors
Has featureLuminate Advocacy
Has featurePeer to Peer Fundraising with Luminate TeamRaiser

Luminate Screenshots

Luminate Integrations

Luminate Competitors

Pricing

Does not have featureFree Trial Available?No
Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
Has featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?Yes
Entry-level set up fee?Required

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.

Luminate Customer Size Distribution

Consumers
0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
30%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)
50%
Enterprises (> 500 employees)
20%

Luminate Support Options

 Paid Version
Phone
Live Chat
Email
Forum/Community
FAQ/Knowledgebase
Social Media
Video Tutorials / Webinar

Luminate Technical Details

Deployment Types:SaaS
Operating Systems: Unspecified
Mobile Application:No
Supported Countries:Canada, United States, Some European Countries
Supported Languages: English