Luminate - easy online email marketing
Updated May 22, 2018

Luminate - easy online email marketing

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Luminate Online
  • Luminate TeamRaiser

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate

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.
  • artez and frontstream
We have used Artez/Frontstream for donation pages and peer to peer but it doesn't seem to offer the flexibility and donor experience as well as Luminate Online does. Emailing is limited and user experience for peer to peer is basic. Not as much support or interest in helping to make your organization as successful as it can be.
If you're a very small organization I'm not sure if it's well suited, but for any medium or large organization who emails often, tracks peer-to-peer fundraising or could use advocacy work - Luminate is a great option. Especially if you use Raiser's Edge or other BlackBaud products. It helps to tie all of your information together to make more informed decisions, a better experience for your donors, and more tailored communications and experiences for them with you.

Using Luminate

5 - Main users: database admin and digital officer. Additional users: gift processor, admin, direct response officer. We are adding TeamRaiser soon, so then our peer-to-peer person will be using it a lot as well. The main power users are in it almost daily, while the additional users are only in the system maybe a couple of times a week.

Evaluating Luminate and Competitors

Yes - We replaced another third party/peer-to-peer system and our online donation pages with Luminate. It's much better usability for end users and backend internal users, integrates better with Raiser's Edge and other BlackBaud products which we already had, and just made more sense to reduce time, fees, data, and systems overall.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
Ultimately we did a map to see what our ROI would be on this including implementation fees/set up time etc... and the staff time saved alone made it worth it. Our database, email builder, finance staff, fundraising staff etc, all would be saving hours and hours of work by simplifying the data and the systems used.
I wouldn't change how we did it - I'd just do it earlier! We should have made the move years ago. When I got here I was baffled why we only had certain systems and not everything under one roof. It saves so much more time, money, patience.... And having one view on all of our online data just makes sense.

Luminate Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
Easy to use, online classes on your own time,can pay extra for more training resources. Lots of videos, articles and a forum for customers to interact and ask other users questions/ask for suggestions. Your rep can also recommend certain classes tailored to your organizations' needs. There are also in person training courses you can sign up for.
Fairly intuitive and easy to use in laid out steps. Support is easy to access for any help if you get stuck, but it's only when I need to do more complicated things that I find I need their help. I find the menus and how to find things makes sense, and once you're in a section the sidebar step by step walks you through everything you need to do to complete whatever it is you need to do.

Luminate Support

Very good on chat support, our rep is great at touching base or answering questions om the fly. If something isn't working they will change it and make it work. They want your business and want you to be happy and will do whatever needs to be done to help you get to your goal.
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
No - Not sure that it's available, but not needed. There is chat support available during business hours, phone number, or my own dedicated rep I can email anytime who answers quickly and gets me the answers i need if need be. Love the chat support especially - easy way to get connected, have a transcript of the discussion, solution, or links to more resources.
Yes - Yes, they gave me a workaround to use until it was solved, which was fairly quick. They gave an update and best solution to work around the bug in the mean time, and helped explain it so I could easily continue my work until the bug was worked out. They were aware of it already when I reported it too so it was nice to know they're on top of things.
We recently were trying to get an email invitation out to a group of donors when we realized our event rsvp button wasn't working all of a sudden - even though it had been working fine in the past. Quickly hopped on chat support, they popped into our event to take a look and discovered the issue was because we had a developer working on a new page wrapper which was the same one being used for events. Even though it was out of their scope, they pointed us in the right direction and we were able to have our developer go in and fix the error they had created and got our email out on time!

Using Luminate

Very intuitive and easy to use. Lots of support and help access if need be. Lots of great tools within to use for customization and personalization. Easy to add images, links, custom stationery for header and footer etc. Easy to add groups to email to and keep track of open rates, click through rates etc. Multi lingual possible as well!

Luminate Reliability

We've gone from sending 35,000 emails in a month to 241,000 in a month; 49 PageBuilder Pages to 117; 38,000 constituents to 233,000....all with ease and efficiency. The product is easy to grow and use in conjunction with Raiser's Edge. Reps and Support are all fantastic at supporting the organization in it's growth with any questions, help with best practices etc.
It's a very rare occurrence if the system isn't available when I want it. I can easily log in from home after hours if need be, and the security is enforced, but simple when you're legit! They are very good about sending email reminders and updates when system maintenance will be performed, and it's always during middle of the night hours when you likely wouldn't be using it anyways.
I never have any issues with load time, with integration, data upload times etc. Sometimes data is big and takes time, but nothing unreasonable or what I wouldn't expect. I flip between html and plain text sometimes when coding emails and as long as you don't flip back and forth too often confusing the system it's fine.