Blackbaud Luminate Online

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ad-hoc reporting.

Basic event setup instructions.

Robust participant center capabilities to encourage people to fundraise.

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.

Engineering and system uptime, along with smooth roll-out of upgrades used to be a major strength. Since buyout by Blackbaud, there has been some noticeable degradation in this area.

I'm sorry -- again I used to be able to roll off quite a few things here, but in the current social web environment, it's more difficult.

The recent upgrading of the integration with Luminate CRM, retiring the Common Ground connector has been a vast improvement in data management between online and CRM systems based on Salesforce platform. And with that the dreaded Duplicate Management work flow is now smooth as glass, but that is a Salesforce-based function now in Luminate CRM not Luminate Online.

Areas that are built to integrate user-generated content still do not get the attention they need in product roadmap.

Email publishing unless you have an in-house design shop continues to more difficult for smaller NPOs where other email providers excel in this area.

Convio CMS is vital to really making the product work well today, but is not accessible in price, especially when open-source WordPress and Drupal and Joomla offer superior CMS platforms by anyone's definitions. Should be free and bundled as part of Content module. Pagebuilder alone is unworkable.

Trying to adapt LO systems to mobile and tablet platforms requires much work and expense we don't feel we should have to spend. Mobile Donate forms is a big challenge. Many other systems have this built in from the beginning.

Integrating with social media platforms for building house file, donating, answering surveys is very, very glitchy. We consequently are using 3rd party providers increasingly that sync directly with SF side of Luminate CRM to compensate with extra expense.

Our organization also used The Raisers Edge and Financial Edge, other Blackbaud products, and they were able to be integrated with each other so the process of receiving donations used less manual entry.

Event information was easy to pull and store, see how many people registered, how many spots left open, etc.

Email blasts were able to be catered to specific topics individuals were interested in, allowing us to narrow down a more specific target audience for e-News.

While integration with other Blackbaud products is available, it isn't always very user friendly. If there isn't an exact match between the systems, sometimes it's a lot more work to have to manipulate it to be entered correctly.

Support for LO felt limited, a number of questions were not properly addressed or we couldn't get answers in a sufficient amount of time.

Powerful functionality

Love segmentation ability

Pagebuilder tool is UNWORKABLE

Terrible customer service

Not user friendly - you cannot use it with any success if you are not willing to invest in a lot of staff time and extra training. It is not possible to learn to use this tool without a lot of training from Blackbaud, and that is incredibly costly.

Pricey. Very pricey (see above -- whatever price you are quoted please be prepared to add 20 percent at least to be able to learn how to use the tool effectively and efficiently).

Integrates and streamlines offline and online donor communications.

Tracks donors and their giving history, making increasing donations easier.

Easily creates donor segementations for email fundraising/marketing.

The learning curve is steep. It would be difficult for the product to be [utilized] if nonprofits don't also invest in training.

The role out of the product is slow. When working for impatient CEOs, they want to see changes overnight and the entire roll out, with suggested training, can take up to one year.

Tracking donations & interactions with donors and supporters

Great customer service - fast and reliable

The email capabilities are atrocious and haven't changed or improved much in the 10 years I've used it. MailChimp and even Constant Contact are much better options, but we don't want to manage multiple platforms.

Likewise, the events capabilities are awful and also haven't improved much in the 10 years I've used it. We've had to to resort to other platforms (Eventbrite, Boomset & FirstGiving) for most of our events because of constituent complaints.

Luminate isn't user friendly or intuitive from the back or front ends. It can be hard to figure out basic tasks and the event module isn't mobile responsive.

Their email message building tool is very user friendly.

TeamRaiser is a top-class peer-to-peer fundraising tool. In our switch from a previous tool (Blackbaud Sphere Friends-Asking-Friends) we've had remarkably few questions/complaints from long-time participants. These forms are also nicely structured and modern-looking.

In general, all their forms are modern looking and offer a fair amount of flexibility.

Calendar Event forms, the basic event form in Luminate, have been a struggle for us. They are currently not mobile responsive, are structured to sell tickets rather than register people for events and, unfortunately, these are the only forms other than Team Raiser that accept monetary transactions. If you are looking at using Calendar Events, look closely and do a lot of investigation. This is a step down from our previous tool (Blackbaud Sphere)

The lack of ability to batch/globally update groups of records from inside the tool is annoying. Currently, one must export a list and then import the list back into batch update a group of records. This is a step down from our previous tool (Blackbaud Sphere).

There is no zip code radius pull in the email tool in Luminate. We do a lot of local events and programs and this is something we absolutely must use. Our previous tool (Blackbaud Sphere) had a radius tool that we relied upon quite heavily.

It integrates with Raisers Edge, our offline database management platform. This makes our offline and online fundraising seamless.

The reporting functions work well. We can generate detailed reporting from our online fundraising emails, DIY, donation pages, etc. Reporting can be as top-line, or as bottom line detailed as we require.

The email function is user-friendly and quick to use. The end result is also very professional. There are a lot of graphic options available within it.

You really need HTML experience to use the email function without a lot of frustration. It changes fonts, sizes, spacing without any user modification - on its own. If you know HTML, you can fix it from there. But there is no way to fix some of the issues it creates on its own without this experience.

Just found out that while LO data syncs back into RE, RE offline data does not sync into LO. Therefore, it is difficult to easily communicate with our offline donors online through LO. This is particularly a detriment because multi-channel donors have a much higher LTV, and we would like to begin converting our direct mail donors to online also. RE data should sync into LO seamlessly.

You should be able to easily copy and save emails from one campaign into another. You can easily do this within the same campaign, but not into a different one. While you can do this with the copy/paste function, it takes longer and has changed some of the email elements during the transition.

Surveys work well and are probably the most straight-forward object I've used (out of email, donation forms, TeamRaiser, queries). I really appreciate having the functionality for a user to request contact via a survey and for that to be automatically emailed to a designated staff member. Similarly, I love how you can export survey results for analysis.

Queries work well. We haven't used them much yet but are gearing up to do more and see lots of potential.

Training and knowledge base can be helpful (though we've only had to use it so much because Blackbaud support is not very responsive).

TeamRaiser is one giant con, as far as I'm concerned. It is so clunky and not at all streamlined. I know it very well - have set up functioning teamraisers on my own after years of administering the object, so am confident in saying that 1) The participant center is WAY too complicated 2) There are far too many limitations around formatting pages (having to do with pictures, videos, etc) 3) There are inconsistencies, depending on what browser the user in using (and we shouldn't have to say "I'm sorry, you can't really use this website in IE" 4) Even though it doesn't seem that complex to a tech-savvy person, the importing of email addresses is too difficult for an average user, so we lose the functionality/analysis that that would enable because most people give up and just copy and paste the URL into an email from their regular provider. 5) The WYSIWYG for the landing page is confusing, especially concerning the primary thermometers. 6) We've had consistent problems with major fundraisers not being able to see all their donors in the scroll. Honestly, there are lots of other problems we've encountered that I've documented over the years, but it's been more than a year since I've had to do heavy admin support so these are all I can remember off the top of my head.

In email and TeamRaiser, it's really frustrating how there are sometimes secondary left-hand menu options inside the Edit function, that you can only see if you scroll all the way to the bottom. It's easy to waste time looking for the functionality you need, when it's just hiding below the fold.

The integration between the events module calendaring and donation form isn't as robust as we would expect. Because we have parent and sub-campaigns set up in our Salesforce LCRM database of record (that synchs with Luminate), we cannot sell tickets to our annual gala on CLO because we are limited to ONE campaign (and it makes most sense, in our Salesforce instance, to have our different ticket/table price points set up as sub-campaigns under one parent campaign for the event). In other words, if we ONLY sold single tickets, we'd be able to have online sales. Since we sell 1) Tickets, 2) Tables, and 3) VIP tables, Luminate has not provided a good workaround that coordinates with our Salesforce instance.

Custom report creation is incredibly convoluted. I have used it, successfully, but it takes you through way too many steps. I would use it much more often if the process was streamlined (for instance, you have to verify all the criteria you've just entered before running the report. Whereas, it seems to me you should just run it and, then if you see a problem, revisit the criteria). The page where you can select fields for outputs is completely overwhelming, too. It's not that it doesn't make sense, it's just that the aesthetic of the way it's organized is kind of a disaster.