Item: Blackbaud Luminate Online
Rating: 7
Author: Ellen Broudy, MBA

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Luminate Online (LO) was used by the organization I worked with in the marketing and development departments. It enabled the marketing department to develop our web presence and allowed our donors to get information, donate, and register for events online.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Our organization also used The Raisers Edge and Financial Edge, other Blackbaud products, and they were able to be integrated with each other so the process of receiving donations used less manual entry.
Event information was easy to pull and store, see how many people registered, how many spots left open, etc.
Email blasts were able to be catered to specific topics individuals were interested in, allowing us to narrow down a more specific target audience for e-News.

Cons

While integration with other Blackbaud products is available, it isn't always very user friendly. If there isn't an exact match between the systems, sometimes it's a lot more work to have to manipulate it to be entered correctly.
Support for LO felt limited, a number of questions were not properly addressed or we couldn't get answers in a sufficient amount of time.

Other Software Used

The Raisers Edge

Likelihood to Recommend

Luminate Online works best with organizations that have good internal support in IT/IS/Data Management so that the staff can work to troubleshoot their own issues. While it's great for large organizations, I'm not sure smaller organizations will have the capacity (or need) for Luminate Online and all the features it offers. Also, I recommend to look closely at whether integration with other Blackbaud products will cause more or less work for staff, as it is a lot of initial set up and the process isn't as streamlined as it could be in the end.

Using Luminate

Return on Investment

Better ability to target donors specifically and maintain complete profiles.
Saves considerably on data entry time.
Allows donors and others to access information, donate, and communicate, on a 24-hour basis.

Luminate Support

Support Rating

Comments

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Luminate Online Suffices for a mid-sized Local Nonprofit

Modules Used