Blackbaud Luminate Online

Score5.8 out of 10

157 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Blackbaud Luminate Online are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Ease of Use: Reviewers have found the TeamRaiser module simple and easy to personalize, making peer-to-peer fundraising straightforward for participants.

Robust Feature Set: Customers appreciate the Donation Form module's diverse features, allowing for customized branding and styling tailored to their organization.

Detailed Reporting Capabilities: Users value the Constituent 360 module for its comprehensive information gathering tools and seamless data exchange with other systems like CRM platforms.

Versatility: Users have praised the platform for its online donation page management features, analytics for tracking campaign success, templates for donation pages and newsletters, donor profiles specificity, managing recurring giving options, online donor management system functionality, impressive email marketing capabilities with advanced analytics equal to or surpassing previous platforms, ease of event creation post-learning curve, and overall comprehensiveness covering various aspects effectively.

Reviews

87 Reviews

Robust and Complete System, Highly Complicated, Somewhat Outdated

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

January 14, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We recently left Blackbaud Luminate Online but had been using it for most online giving, sustaining donor management and processing, a large P2P event, and all digital marketing. We used the RELO connector to manage data flow mostly from Blackbaud Luminate Online into Raiser's Edge, but also could build email lists in Raiser's Edge that would easily upload into Blackbaud Luminate Online as the audience.

Pros

Most robust peer to peer capabilities that we've found in any software
Sustainer gift management and processing
Ease of creating email audiences via query in Raiser's Edge and linking to email blasts
System integration using RELO connector

Cons

It's just too complex for less experienced users to learn; our marketing team wanted something very simple to create and send emails
Our events team often had to utilize third party support to update our largest peer to peer platform each year because again the software is so complex and complicated
It's an old interface and not intuitive and it didn't seem that Blackbaud planned to refresh the whole product anytime soon

Likelihood to Recommend

It's really robust for all the things it was designed to do (online donation forms, email marketing, peer to peer event management, sustainer donations). But it's complexity and interface made it too challenging for our organization to continue using it and to continue justifying the cost.

Verified User

Professional in Professional Services (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Luminate

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

January 1, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In my job role we used Blackbaud Luminate primarily for credit cards processing and although it is a Blackbaud product it didn't talk to Raisers Edge. We had to pull separate reports and batch the donations into Raisers Edge. We also did not use this platform for email campaigns, it was not the easiest thing to use and we opted to use Give lively for all of our campaigns.

Pros

Report for credit cards were easy to pull

Cons

Ease of moving through and creating campaigns
Connecting to other Blackbaud products

Likelihood to Recommend

Not suited well for what we needed.

Verified User

Manager (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Blackbaud Luminate Online

Rating: 8 out of 10

December 30, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Luminate Online - Benefits for donation pages, receipting, and email templates

Rating: 7 out of 10

October 25, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Online donation page management
Analytics for page performance
Templates (donation pages, newsletters) for E-blasts

Cons

Clunky at times
Report builder could use some improvement

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Manager in Professional Services (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Very, very powerful. More than a little complicated.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 19, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Recurring/Sustaining Giving Management
Online Donation Forms
Email Marketing

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Amy Barker

Database Administrator at Pine Street Inn (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

16 years of experience

Essential for Non-profits!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

October 28, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Donor profiles specific to the donor
Online donor management system
Analytics to track campaign success

Cons

Would prefer a cleaner looking UX on mobile

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

DeAndre Bellows

Marketing and Development Coordinator in Marketing at The Eye Cancer Foundation (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Moving on from Luminate Online

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

November 25, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Donation forms
Variety of built-in features

Cons

Email marketing
eCommerce
Data management & manipulation
Reporting & analytics
Automation
Documentation & user support

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

It does a lot, if you can afford it.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 23, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Administrator in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Luminate for Marketing!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 23, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Sydney Graczyk

Interim CEO & Chief Development Officer in Sales at Make-A-Wish New Mexico (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Frustrated with Luminate Online

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

May 15, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Luminate specifically for the TeamRaiser peer-to-peer product. We run two large run/walk events through it and have an instance of TeamRaiser where people can set up in honor/in memoriam fundraising pages. We have been on the product for about 4 years with decent success. The product is managed by the department of development and promoting our fundraising materials. The business problem is addresses is the need to increase peer-to-peer fundraising at our institution and capitalize on the revenue generated from our fundraising events through the additional of peer-to-peer fundraising.

Pros

Ad-hoc reporting.
Basic event setup instructions.
Robust participant center capabilities to encourage people to fundraise.

Cons

Too many customizations to select. Becomes very cumbersome.
Difficulty with UX. Event participants often struggle with registering and accessing their fundraising tools. It isn't intuitive.
Workflow with other Blackbaud products. As an institution that uses Blackbaud CRM, these two products do not "talk" which makes gift processing and data syncronization cumbersome.

Likelihood to Recommend

We use Luminate as it is one of few peer-to-peer platforms out in the market and has Blackbaud support behind it. Outside of that, I would have difficulty referring this product but often do because competing platforms are not as robust or are more costly. While we have access to the events module and email modules, we do not use them as the back-end user experience is very difficult and does not produce a product worthy of sharing with our constituents.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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Blackbaud Luminate Online

Rating: 8 out of 10

December 30, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience