Luminate Online - Your Fundraising Hub
Updated May 29, 2018

Luminate Online - Your Fundraising Hub

Samuel Gomez Recuero | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Luminate Online
  • Luminate TeamRaiser
  • Pagebuilder,Surveys,Email, Donation Managements, Constituent360, image library

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate

Luminate is such a big machine that different departments are using it across our organization. From advocacy to direct response to prevention we all benefit from its vast choices and offerings. It helps us to better serve our supporters and to manage our fundraising events as well as to set parameters to allow supporters to host their own events and use the platform. It is a great platform to host our events, handle registration fees, upsells, discounts, e-commerce, TeamRaiser and team creation within TeamRaiser, and donation forms for TeamRaiser, etc.

One of the main factors is that you can start small and as you grow the platform will grow with your organization.
  • Team raisers: If your organization has team raisers, Luminate is the one you should be using. The whole arsenal of tools to use arond TeamRaisers is really unmatchable. You can even set the Event Manager Center to grant your event managers to some or all of the management options of the system. You decide the degree of delegation you give to your event managers.
  • Email. Do you need to communicate with your supporters? Email will be your tool of choice, do it with the rich text editor or go old school with the plain editor and add your HTML directly. Do A/B testing to pick your best design and measure message performance. Pick your target and see a detailed report of your target audience before sending the email. Once the email is sent, keep track of the results with the information on the panel and the performance report of your email together with a bounce email report, etc.
  • Need to recruit volunteers? The survey module will help you create your form for them to fill. What the system may not offer you can achieve with its flexibility and the great support for custom Java scripts.
  • Personal events, ticketed events, and the Ecommerce module could use some updating. But they are workable.
  • Multi-locale is sometimes a hit and miss but for the most part works pretty well.
Luminate is great for any organization doing fundraisers and peer to peer due to its social media integration. Users can post their fundraising efforts or personal page to Facebook directing traffic from their Facebook page directly to the participant page or team page. They have access to a variety of tools via their participant center which keeps track of the donations received by the participant to remind them to thank their donors as well as the possibility of a contact list to invite friends and family to join you, or make a pledge on your behalf. You can communicate with teammates and update your goals.

Using Luminate

Financial, Support, web development, Mision, Prevention, Community Relations, Operations
Web developpers, social media specialist, support specialist,
  • Fundraisers
  • Prevention & Awareness
  • Donations
  • Mixed environment between MS Azure and Donation Campaigns
  • Development of an in house tool based on Azure and Luminate OpenAPI to automate some tasks that used to take a lot of time for staff to complete
Luminate is a very sophisticated yet flexible platform. Yet some of the modules lack some of the features available in the most used part of the platform. Email could use some tools to integrate social media options for posting and the some of the modules could use an update to support multilanguage locale.

Evaluating Luminate and Competitors

Yes - CornerStone, Flexibility and customization capabilities
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
I will add more up to date parameters on my research. Such as: Scalability, stability, language support, technologies support

Luminate Training

The learning curve is a bit steep

Luminate Support

Support team is reachable and their support portal is accesible and cases are resolved for the most part under 48hrs
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes - some have been resolved and some has been marked as defects and will be corrected or addressed down the road according to their priorities and road map.

Luminate Reliability

I will have to say that it is not 100% up time but I will put it at around 99% and when that odd time they had a hardware failure. Their support team kept us updated very frequently until the matter was resolved as well as afterwards on step to prevent the issue from repeating again and to improve response times.
Pages load fast and 98% of the reports do run in a matter of secons/minutes. There is this one report I have that can take hours to run, but this is due to the amount of transactions being requested for one of our biggest online fundraising events (Transaction report)