Not for the Faint of Heart
Updated July 25, 2017

Not for the Faint of Heart

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

Modules Used

  • Luminate Online
  • Luminate TeamRaiser

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate

We use Luminate to enable online donations through our website, for event registration, TeamRaiser and in support of our email marketing program. It is used by the organization's web team, which is within the marketing department. We serve departments across our organization.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.
We used Blue State Digital prior to using Luminate. Similar to Luminate we used it for advocacy, email, online donations and event registration.
For a small team setting where one person has to assume multiple rolls, Luminate was not the easiest product to use. The TeamRaiser function is great but works best in an environment where someone can devote the time to learning the ins and outs, or where an outside firm manages the site on your behalf. It is nice to have a lot of features in a single tool but there are trade-offs, and while it can be used out of the box it helps to have the technical resources to help customize it and smooth out any kinks.

Luminate Training

When I used the training, I had actually been using Luminate Online but figured it might help me learn to use the tools more effectively. And it did. The sessions were helpful and even as a current user I felt like I learned how to use the tools more effectively.

Luminate Support

Using Luminate

One of the biggest challenges we had with Luminate was getting it to work in our IS security environment. As an example - though not limited to Luminate - we could not follow recommendations like whitelisting, which resulted in deliverability problems to our employee audiences.

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