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Luminate Online - essential tool for nonprofit email marketing
Updated February 04, 2020

Luminate Online - essential tool for nonprofit email marketing

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Luminate Online
  • Luminate TeamRaiser

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate

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
  • Better more responsive donation forms may have led to increased EOY online donations/totals
  • Increasing costs could prohibit positive ROI
CrowdRise and it's peer-to-peer fundraising model is much more out of the box user-friendly, in areas like the following: setup / dashboards / page creation / registration for participants or donors. However, in the end, their integration with a CRM is limited to CSV file uploads of imports / exports (at least in our experience).
If you want to get the most detailed metrics on how multiple email campaigns/messages perform across many variables and audiences, Luminate Online is one of the best products out there. While the platform can connect/sync with other platforms, there is some customization required (even between two products owned by parent company Blackbaud), which may turn off smaller organizations.

Evaluating Luminate and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Years back, when we first evaluated products having to do primarily with email marketing, online donations, and peer-to-peer fundraising, our single most important factor was most likely making sure all of the features we wanted were in one single product - and that this product's features would integrate with any existing solutions as best as possible.
At the time years ago, when we were reviewing all possible solutions for email marketing / online donations / peer-to-peer fundraising, we were already an existing client of Luminate's previous parent company. Having that prior relationship with the business and its products made it more of an easy choice. Perhaps, if more comparable solutions were around at the time, we may have looked elsewhere.