Tradeoffs
January 27, 2017

Tradeoffs

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Luminate Online
  • Luminate TeamRaiser

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate

Luminate Online is used throughout our organization. We use it for email marketing for our education programs as well as our fundraising efforts. We use online forms for donations, education program registrations, email signups, and training program applications. We use TeamRaiser for our large peer-to-peer fundraising events. It allows us to have a centralized place to collect data on our email and forms activity and associate that activity with our constituents; we then export this data into our archival database (Raiser's Edge).
  • 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.

We have used Blackbaud Sphere.

I have also used in previous positions: LocalVoice, GetActive, Convio, Eventbrite, Emma (Constant Contact).

Luminate is designed predominantly as a fundraising tool so that is where its strengths lie (email marketing/fundraising, donation forms, peer-to-peer fundraising on a larger scale).

Luminate is not good for other types of programs/activities that fall outside the fundraising area, and is less-than-fabulous for small fundraising events.