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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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 Small Businesses (1-50 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% |
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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.
November 25, 2021
Moving on from Luminate Online
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
February 04, 2020
Luminate Online - essential tool for nonprofit email marketing
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
June 04, 2018
Shining a Light through Luminate
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.
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
May 29, 2018
New to Luminate
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
May 22, 2018
Luminate - easy online email marketing
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.
May 22, 2018
Luminate Online - worth the investment
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.
May 22, 2018
Ruminate about Luminate
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.
May 22, 2018
Luminate Online Review
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.
May 22, 2018
Happy Team Raiser user
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
April 16, 2018
Luminate: Great for the correctly sized operation
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.
January 23, 2018
Luminate for Marketing!
Luminate is used by our Marketing, Operations, and Development team. Through Luminate Online, we are able to send out mass emails to targeted groups, track the analytics surrounding the emails, and see donations that come through our online portal. We are also able to add and subtract groups or individual users on an as needed basis.
- Luminate does a great job of giving detailed information of online donors and sending them automated emails in return for their donation.
- Luminate also has easy step-by-step guidelines for the email creation.
- Luminate provides multiple ways to analyze and track data.
- I would like to be able to customize more of the font and word placement in the email creations.
- As of now, you can not insert a video into the email, only a photo with a hyperlink to the online video. I would like to be able to embed the video into the actual email.
- I would like to be able to see the last time that I ran queries for my online donors so that I am not overlapping donors or missing donors because of dates.
January 11, 2018
Luminate great in theory and has potential - but it needs some investment quickly to be cutting edge & user friendly
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.