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Blackbaud Luminate Online

Blackbaud Luminate Online

Overview

What is Blackbaud Luminate Online?

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 supportersMake the right ask at…

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Recent Reviews

Blackbaud Luminate Online

8 out of 10
December 30, 2023
DFCI Philanthropy uses Blackbaud Luminate Online for our online fundraising efforts, including but not limited to directed and …
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New to Luminate

6 out of 10
May 29, 2018
Incentivized
Luminate Online is being used by our organization for online donation form capabilities - monthly, one-time, in celebration, in memoriam. …
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Pricing

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What is Blackbaud Luminate Online?

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…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee required
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.blackbaud.com/online…

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  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

What is Blackbaud Luminate Online?

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.

Blackbaud Luminate Online Features

  • Supported: Dynamic Email Campaigns
  • Supported: Online Fundraising with Smart Donation Forms
  • Supported: Donation Processing
  • Supported: Fundraising Analytics & Reporting
  • Supported: Calendar Events
  • Supported: eCommerce Capabiltiies
  • Supported: Engagement Factors
  • Supported: Luminate Advocacy
  • Supported: Peer to Peer Fundraising with Luminate TeamRaiser

Blackbaud Luminate Online Screenshots

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

Blackbaud Luminate Online Video

National Center for Lesbian Rights has Love for Luminate Online™ and Raiser’s Edge NXT™

Blackbaud Luminate Online Competitors

Blackbaud Luminate Online Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesCanada, United States, Some European Countries
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Frequently Asked Questions

Salsa Engage, Classy, and Bonterra Development + Digital are common alternatives for Blackbaud Luminate Online.

Reviewers rate Availability highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Blackbaud Luminate Online are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).

Blackbaud Luminate Online Customer Size Distribution

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)30%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)50%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)20%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(154)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 85)
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December 30, 2023

Blackbaud Luminate Online

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
DFCI Philanthropy uses Blackbaud Luminate Online for our online fundraising efforts, including but not limited to directed and unrestricted giving, event registration, and peer-to-peer fundraising via the TeamRaiser module. We are also able to utilize features such as the Survey module to gather information regarding our current and potential supporters. Blackbaud Luminate Online also allows us to provide web-based content for many of the DFCI initiatives.
  • Peer-to-peer fundraising via the TeamRaiser module is simple and easy to personalize for every participant.
  • Online giving can be done via the Donation Form module with a robust feature set allowing for branding and styling specific to your organization.
  • The Constituent 360 modules allows us to gather detailed information about our visitors. This module also has a variety of tools for exchanging this data with other systems such as a CRM.
  • The modules within Blackbaud Luminate Online could be more uniform and robust for back-end users.
  • The API and Web Services features for Blackbaud Luminate Online are easy to use but could be more extensive so that more data is accessible to customers for tasks such as ad-hoc reporting.
  • Access to view (and possibly edit) templates used in producing the Blackbaud Luminate Onlinecontent would be a wonderful addition.
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Blackbaud Luminate Online for email blasts, online giving, email suppressions, list management for communications, donation form creation, email templates, and more. This product allows us to manage our large communication e -blasts as well as allows us to manage the online donation page creation pretty smoothly. It also allows us to see some of the analytics behind page performance as well as online donation performance.
  • Online donation page management
  • Analytics for page performance
  • Templates (donation pages, newsletters) for E-blasts
  • Clunky at times
  • Report builder could use some improvement
If your nonprofit organization is already using Blackbaud products this is an easy integrated add on that will seamlessly manage your E-blasts and online donation forms. The analytics piece is a nice benefit for the functionality. However, it is a pretty expensive add on and for small organizations thus may not make sense to add this product into your bundle.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use Blackbaud Luminate Online as our online giving platform, as well as for eNews emails and marketing emails. We have a healthy sustainer program, and Blackbaud Luminate Online handle our sustaining gifts with ease.
  • Recurring/Sustaining Giving Management
  • Online Donation Forms
  • Email Marketing
  • Blackbaud Luminate Online is a big, complex, sometimes overwhelming system.
  • Takes a lot of training to get to a comfortable point with it.
  • Has not changed much for UE in the past decade.
Well suited for: Healthy sustainer program, with a need to grow. Heavy email senders. Heavy online donation form usage. (many forms, complex forms)
Not great for: Very small shops, it takes a lot of training to set it up well, and may be too much for some.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Blackbaud Luminate Online is an all inclusive platform and essential for a lot of non-profits. If you want a system that not only manages donors and donor relations, but also keeps track of analytics, frequency of donations and all major gifts in one place, then this is the right application to use. We have used other services in the past and none compare to everything Blackbaud Luminate Online has to offer.
  • Donor profiles specific to the donor
  • Online donor management system
  • Analytics to track campaign success
  • Would prefer a cleaner looking UX on mobile
Blackbaud Luminate Online is essential for non-profits who want to streamline the donor management process. Instead of manually keeping track of donors, significant donors and other things we need to manage, Blackbaud Luminate Online puts everything in one place so it is easy to keep track and see the information as soon as its input. If you are looking for an automatic type of mailing system or a way to automate your campaigns to donors or something like that, this is not that application.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Luminate online for peer-to-peer fundraising, direct digital marketing and fundraising, and eCommerce. We do not use Luminate for gift processing and reconciliation [but] instead rely on a one-way data flow to Raiser's Edge via Omatic's Importomatic.
  • Donation forms
  • Variety of built-in features
  • Email marketing
  • eCommerce
  • Data management & manipulation
  • Reporting & analytics
  • Automation
  • Documentation & user support
Luminate online is no longer a product I could recommend, as [in my opinion] it has been wholly surpassed by competitors and is missing key features that would be expected for any purchase decision.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Luminate Online (LO) is primarily used for email marketing/communications, both in national e-blasts and localized e-vites and announcements. LO is also used for Calendar of Events updates, Surveys/forms, online donation campaign management in both Communications/Marketing and Development but also to promote and facilitate any of our programs and services that have an online component.
  • Effectively monitor the engagement stats for email campaigns
  • Responsive & mobile-friendly donation and survey forms
  • Run reports on a variety of online metrics
  • Out-of-the-box reports are not robust enough for many national nonprofits' needs
  • Customization is needed for many campaign components; not everything is point-and-click / drag-and-drop for a novice user
  • Auto-notifications are good, but don't always perform as expected
If you want to get the most detailed metrics on how multiple email campaigns/messages perform across many variables and audiences, Luminate Online is one of the best products out there. While the platform can connect/sync with other platforms, there is some customization required (even between two products owned by parent company Blackbaud), which may turn off smaller organizations.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization does about three dozen walks during the year, and a number of ticket events, and Luminate was the platform used for all of them. We used Luminate to manage these events, create donation forms, and send emails to our event registrants and constituents. We also used Luminate to create segmented lists for our marketing efforts.
  • Luminate has what I think is an excellent email marketing component, with analytics and tracking capabilities equal to or better than the product our organization chose to replace it.
  • Event creation is easy, once past the learning curve.
  • Luminate is a comprehensive platform that covers many bases.
  • Luminate is a deep platform, and requires a very skilled administrator conversant with a number of areas: design, coding, finance, etc., in order to give a professional-looking appearance. There are many expensive consultants that provide this service.
  • When we last used Luminate, the "Participant Center," used by event registrants, was pretty clunky.
  • Lack of accessibility was a problem.
Luminate is well suited to those organizations looking for a single platform to handle event management, event website creation, constituent management, email marketing, and the entire spectrum on non-profit fundraising. Luminate is a Blackbaud product, and there are a number of support products that integrate seamlessly with the Luminate platform.
Nathan B. Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Jennifer Mejia, MPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Samuel Gomez Recuero | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
May 29, 2018

New to Luminate

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Amy Barker, bCRE | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Daniel Ballard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Daniella Dowiak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Philip Nawrocki | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Lena Trubnikova | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Lawrence Willim | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
January 23, 2018

Luminate for Marketing!

Sydney Graczyk | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Kevin Cawthra, CA, CPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
December 21, 2017

Luminate Online Review

Tammi Burkhardt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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