Blackbaud Luminate Online
DFCI Philanthropy uses Blackbaud Luminate Online for our online fundraising efforts, including but not limited to directed and …
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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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…
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Product Details
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- Competitors
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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:
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.
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
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
Blackbaud Luminate Online Video
National Center for Lesbian Rights has Love for Luminate Online™ and Raiser’s Edge NXT™
Blackbaud Luminate Online Integrations
Blackbaud Luminate Online Competitors
- Salsa Engage
- Classy
- Bonterra Development + Digital
- Engaging Networks
Blackbaud Luminate Online Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Countries | Canada, United States, Some European Countries |
| Supported Languages | English |
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
| Consumers | 0% |
|---|---|
| Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 30% |
| Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 50% |
| Enterprises (more than 500 employees) | 20% |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
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Reviews
(26-50 of 85)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
December 18, 2017
Loving Luminate
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.
- 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.
December 18, 2017
To Luminate or Not
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.
Luminate Online was used as a platform for an annual cause marketing campaign, which was previously hosted on the Blackbaud NetCommunity CMS. It was also later used to replace the "Friends asking friends" functionality of a previous BlackBaud product that wasn't working as well. The Luminate Online platform was only used by the annual giving department in our organization, although our finance had access to the program for financial and database reconciliation. Initially it addressed the problem of creating a storefront, but was also later used to run event-specific fundraising.
- Community tools were well implemented, allowing people to join or create teams with relative ease for event-related fundraising campaigns.
- Compared to other fundraising CMS software, the product was easy to use, once it had been set up by an external consultant.
- The flexibility with design allowed for a more modern look and feel than previous fundraising-based CMS products.
- Design still requires an external consultant familiar with the product to create viable templates. Creating a template is rather confusing due to several layers that comprise a page.
- Event management section is a bit cumbersome to use on the back-end. There are hundreds of different settings, many of which seemed redundant, or were organized poorly.
- Connecting to Raiser's Edge is still not perfect, despite a Luminate Online connector. Blackbaud NetCommunity had seamless integration in comparison.
November 10, 2017
A stable suite of tools that needs to get competitive soon
Luminate Online is used by all departments across the organization as our primary tool for online donation processing, email marketing, event ticketing, and community fundraisers.
- Email Deliverability - our sender reputation is well protected and emails are always sent promptly regardless of the size.
- Diverse toolset - there are many advantages to having a wide array of tools within a single product.
- TeamRaiser - TeamRaiser is one of the only products on the market right now that accommodates everything we need for a major fundraising event.
- Integration with other Blackbaud tools - integration has always been a problem. Solutions are on the horizon, but are still unproven.
- Product improvement - Luminate has been extremely slow to make major product improvements. Some advancements have been rolled out, but it is still largely the same product it was 5 years ago.
- Pricing - Luminate is starting to get priced out of the market by promising newcomers. They are going to have to get competitive very quickly or we will not have a choice but to explore other options.
November 03, 2017
TeamRaiser is a Porche - we just wanted a bike
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.
October 12, 2017
lumniating Raiser's edge ability to interact with donors
Luminate is being used as our way of interacting with constituents in a virtual way. We have many visitors to our website and this will help us engage those visitors either by survey forms, donations forms, or sending emails that pertain to the interests they have indicated.
Lumniate will also be connected to our digital guestbook located onsite and can best be compared to an enhanced survey.
Lumniate will also be connected to our digital guestbook located onsite and can best be compared to an enhanced survey.
- Links to Raiser's Edge more seamlessly
- Has a better email system to make campaigns that are connected to constituent interests.
- Has a more personalized feeling
- I would have liked for Raiser's Edge to have the same constituent codes instead of creating a second code.
October 12, 2017
Celebrating a Decade with Luminate Online
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.
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.
October 05, 2017
Blackbaud's Luminate
We use Luminate in a TeamRaiser environment. We also use the shopping cart feature. It is used in our organization and in some of our ministries. We would like to explore more of the email system and the other features. Luminate is in the process of rolling out new features.
- Able to integrate with Raiser's Edge
- Shopping Cart features
- 5K TeamRaisers are able to be designed and implemented
- Not as intuitive ore easy to use as other Blackbaud products
- Not updated as often still being labeled as Convivo in some areas
- Not as much knowledge base support
- Seems like coding skills are necessary
September 21, 2017
Luminate - Good for some, but not for all
Luminate is being used primarily by the events department to track gifts for three specific events. It allows them to manage the P2P gifts generated by these events.
- Luminate allows us to easily manage our P2P fundraisers. Since adopting the RELO integration, being able to track who gave towards our P2P events has become much easier.
- Luminate allows us to sync our pages to our gifts so that we easily know where specific gifts came from.
- Luminate allows us to create pages that meet our standards of quality.
- Tracking Organizations that donate is difficult.
- RELO integration does not allow users to select where information goes. Any customization must be done once the gift goes into batch. Being able to set defaults for gifts in processing would save time (such as the defaults for transactions in the EFT module).
- The RELO integration process was frustrating. We felt that there was a major lack of communication and that we were not a high priority for our consultant.
- We would like to be able to add a specific gift date to offline gifts rather than them defaulting to the date that they were entered.
Luminate Online is not meant to be the only database for an organization, but we have used it that way for 4 years. It is focused on providing an email marketing solution for non-profits to be able to segment their data and conditionalize their email messages. TeamRaiser is specifically for peer-to-peer fundraising associated with real or virtual events.
- Luminate can "slice and dice" the constituent database to allow for maximum conditionalizing of online and email content.
- Luminate (Pagebuilder/TeamRaiser) allows for real-time website updates without too much effort.
- Luminate (TeamRaiser) allows users to create their own pages for fundraising with minimal effort from the organization.
- Autoresponder and recurring emails are powerful ways to keep in touch with groups of constituents even as the groups grow.
- There are plans for enhanced connection between email marketing and social media, but these are not implemented yet.
- There are no "out of the box" templates for email, you can have Blackbaud set some up for your organization. (There are upcoming plans for these.).
- A measure of customization is almost always needed and some knowledge of coding and HTML helps.
- Organizational records are now available, but are not simple to integrate from previous years of Luminate.
September 04, 2017
Luminate is not worth the price tag.
Across the whole organization. We use it for e-mail, contacts, interest groups, surveys, online donation. We used to use it for e-commerce but have switched to another platform. We use it primarily to get information out to constituents and to process financial donation transactions.
- Reporting - The report writer allows one a lot of flexability to gather a lot of information.
- Online support chat and phone - Readily available and easy to access.
- Low spam scores on e-mail.
- Clunky interface in most aspects, particularly e-mail. Have to hard code every line to hold a CSS style.
- E-mail and store are not mobile ready right out of the box.
- Costs are very high - much higher than competitors.
- E-commerce is not a focus and the system has many bugs and limitations, but they do not get addressed because it is not a priority for Blackbaud. So many of our issues and needs were not addressed that we abandoned the store and use another system.
Our primary use for it is peer to peer fundraising for our medical center fundraising. We use TeamRaiser and it's greatly increased the efficiency to how we take in donations, and process them into our database of record. We've also been able to leverage standard calendar events for online registration, sponsorship payments, etc. The system allows us to identify the portion of the transaction that is a charity gift vs. premium amounts and issues our tax receipts via email confirmation.
- Peer to peer fundraising. Easily allows individuals to create personal pages for fundraising. Tracks it at an event level. Shows progress, etc.
- Allows integration for donors to solicit their peers for donations, share on social media, etc.
- Great reporting tool. There's a reporting wizard that allowed us to build two custom reports to get all the information we needed.
- If we identify a bug, we submit the ticket, it's received but tends to get lost in the shuffle. We have a reporting bug that's been out there for over a year. I understand priorities, but it's hurt our ability to process efficiently, and there seems to be no sense of urgency to fix some bugs.
- Business process around SLAs. We needed to commit to a large SLA in order to get resources to help built and customize. We wouldn't use hours consistency, so this model just doesn't fit out needs. Having a more flexible support plan would be great.
- Easier to customize templates and skins. It's very complicated to make new designs and templates for our sites.
August 31, 2017
Advocate with Luminate
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.
August 25, 2017
A True Data Minded Individual would love this
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.
August 24, 2017
Jury is still out
Luminate Online is used primarily by the marketing and development departments at my mid-sized nonprofit. We use it to take online donations, manage event registrations, and allow individuals to fundraise for our annual run/walk through TeamRaiser.
- It is an online platform
- It accurately processes donations
- TeamRaiser was especially difficult for us to use for our run/walk. It does not have a very intuitive or updated user interface, and we had many problems with it this year.
August 14, 2017
Luminate Online - its not just software...you get amazing support from the people at Blackbaud
We use Luminate Online to process our online donations, for surveys and of course for emailing our constituents. It is used mainly by our Communications Team and IT/Finance. We also have TeamRaisers, which is used mainly by our Philanthropy and Engagement Team for both internal and third party events. It addresses the problems of allowing our donors a quick easy way to donate to our foundation. It also allows people to easily register for our events. Initially, one of the big problems we were looking to solve was issues we were having with our previous email client. LO is fantastic in this regard.
- The Email functionality! It provides a simple, easy to use interface to create and send out eblasts.
- Donation Form Creation is quick and easy, and with a little HTML knowledge you can create highly customized forms.
- Luminate Online Support and Community - Blackbaud's support people are amazing, and the online communities are super helpful.
- Blackbaud's webinars and training.
- The layout is intuitive. Very easy to find what you need.
- The Security groups can be intimidating and difficult to understand.
- Receipts, though easily created and customized don't allow for logic to be built into them (example, if a business were to request an acknowledgement letter as opposed to a reciept, it would be nice to be able to have an if statement built into the one receipt that would change the content slightly).
- When a receipt is re-issued, it would be nice if it kept the historical receipt and marked it as cancelled.
August 12, 2017
Not Impressed
Our philanthropy department uses Luminate Online for soliciting donations. A few other departments are using it to send email blasts but this is being moved off Luminate Online as it doesn't have the same functionality as our other CRM.
- I don't think it does much really well.
- Integration to its partner product Convio breaks frequently.
- There is no clear support model.
- The email template tool is very limited.
- Tracking and stats are very poor.
July 27, 2017
Decent Option for Non-Profits
We use Luminate Online to send emails to our constituents, run queries and create groups, create donation forms, action alerts, surveys, among other things. I personally am on the production side of things, so I build all our emails, action alerts, emails, and pages using Convio (Luminate Online). Through Convio, we are able to reach out to our donors and members.
- The layout and organization is pretty good. It's easy for me to find what I'm looking for.
- It's easy to build HTML emails, donation forms and action alerts that are pretty customizable. Takes you through the steps so it's not that difficult to learn.
- Reliable sends - since the debacle a couple years ago at year end where all our emails went out super late, they have updated things and we haven't had any issues with send times.
- WYSIWYG editor breaks everything.
- Wish there was a batch image uploader - makes uploading multiple images at a time cumbersome and time consuming.
- The survey is not very customizable. Hard to get formatting and options beyond the 15 or so they provide.
- Reports are located in different places and are cumbersome to pull - should be more user-friendly.
July 25, 2017
Not for the Faint of Heart
We use Luminate to enable online donations through our website, for event registration, TeamRaiser and in support of our email marketing program. It is used by the organization's web team, which is within the marketing department. We serve departments across our organization.
- The integration of so many different capabilities - donations, advocacy, email and registration - makes it possible to engage constituents in a variety of ways in support of our organization's mission.
- The TeamRaiser set up and nuances make it challenging for organizations where one staff person may wear multiple hats. They are time intensive to maintain and if you don't use Luminate as a CMS for your site, it can create complications.
- Reporting isn't the strongest for the tools, especially events. While it is possible to create custom reports it wasn't always intuitive to figure out how to get the [info] we were looking for.
- Email works well in support of events and donations but for maintaining an e-newsletter program it's not as slick as other products available.
July 20, 2017
Modernism Needed!
We use Luminate online as our primary email CRM system and online fundraising platform. It's used by marketing and development on behalf of the entire global organization.
- Integrates well with our financial and fundraising CRM systems (RE and FE).
- Donation forms are highly functional, although extensive customization must be programmed and installed to make it relevant and responsive to meet consumer trends.
- Poor email reporting, deployment, and CRM platform.
- Extremely archaic web coding capability out of the box. All items must be manually modified and altered to be responsive for mobile prior to use.
July 07, 2017
Solid for CRM
We use Luminate Online (LO) for our CRM program. It is used for online fundraising, email marketing, advocacy actions, and less often for events. Two departments (communications and development) within our non-profit use the service; as well as our outside consulting firm. It allows us to manage our CRM database and communicate with constituents.
- Customized donation pages.
- Email marketing.
- Advocacy actions (communications to Congress).
- Mobile friendly event pages are not available currently, from what I understand.
- Multi-language support.
- Customer service could use improvement.
We use Luminate Online to generate weekly e-newsletters. It is used by our communications department but we aggregate content from various departments throughout the Library. We also use it to send out the occasional special news blast. We use it to communicate news about upcoming programs, classes, and events, announce collection news, and advertise upcoming exhibits.
- Attempts to adapt to various browsers and email servers.
- Customer service was sometimes helpful.
- It was easy to end our contract.
- The content management system is extremely glitchy. It does not function as it is supposed to.
- We were charged for exceeding our list limit because 1) no one notified that we were nearing that ceiling and b) all bounces and non-functional email addresses counted towards the total.
- I often had to wait for a very long time to speak to a customer service representative, and occasionally they would end the call and email me a non-helpful PDF from the "help" tab.
- The system is not intuitive.
- If you accidentally click out of the "edit" tab without saving, you are not prompted to save your work and you can lose everything.
June 24, 2017
Experienced LO User Review
We use it for hosting our website, email communications, managing online donors and fundraising.
- It's invaluable in our 3K walk/5k run.
- It has allowed us to increase online fundraising 100% since implementation.
- It's easy to use and has great reorienting.
- They have improved reporting greatly.
- I would like to see more user options for donation form design.
We use Luminate Online for email marketing, event, donation and content management. We also use their RELO product which transfers the data collected in Luminate over to our offline database, Raiser's Edge. Luminate is used across the whole organization. It allows us to communicate with donors and prospective donors (communications/marketing), manage transactions (fundraising/marketing), and cultivation/stewardship (fundraising). Luminate is a good tool to help manage mulit-channel fundraising/marketing campaigns.
- I'm really enjoying the dashboards in the new Luminate Beta.
- I think Luminate does an excellent job in the data/metrics collected around email marketing that have helped us to identify messaging that has worked, what hasn't, etc.
- Somewhat easy process of setting up donation forms.
- Events module is clunky and not the best as far as user experience [goes].
- The query tool is also not intuitive or user friendly. Neither is the Report Writer tool.
- Too much coding required to get emails to look good. I'm looking forward to the new tool in the next gen release.
June 20, 2017
A Newbie to Luminate
We are using the TeamRaiser module of Luminate. We purchased Luminate in December 2016 and we are still in the process of implementing the software. We did use TeamRaiser for our second annual giving day which was held on February 23, 2017. The results were very successful and the alumni were much more engaged in the process because of the features of TeamRaiser - the team competition, the scrolling donor honor roll, etc. We will be using TeamRaiser for a variety of fundraising initiatives across campus. It provides a crowdfunding software solution for the campus.
- TeamRaiser is flexible. We are setting TeamRaiser up in a matrix format for our Reunion Class Challenge. We are using TeamRaiser for a fundraising initiative for our men's and women's rugby teams with individual pages for each rugby player. And we used TeamRaiser for our second annual one-day of giving.
- The donation process is very simple and straightforward for donors.
- I am still very new to Luminate and TeamRaiser so I am still learning where to find things, i.e., is it in PageBuilder or TeamRaiser?