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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- Setup fee required
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.blackbaud.com/online…
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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
(154)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(26-50 of 85)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
December 18, 2017
Loving Luminate
- 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
- 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.
November 10, 2017
A stable suite of tools that needs to get competitive soon
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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 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 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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!
- 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
- 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.
June 24, 2017
Experienced LO User Review
- 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.
- 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
- 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?