Luminate Online-Great tool for email marketing
Updated May 29, 2018

Luminate Online-Great tool for email marketing

Amy Barker, bCRE | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Luminate Online

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate

Luminate Online is being used by both the development and the marketing departments of our organization. We also use it for special events, property news and events, and a host of other things. It makes online giving and ticket sales easy and integrated. Gift entry and customer entry are easy and accurate.

Pros

  • Email marketing
  • Suppression of opt-outs
  • Online giving

Cons

  • The support could use some improvement. It is getting much, much better now that they are owned by Blackbaud, but there are still some areas that need work.
  • The integration with Raiser's Edge is fantastic, but has been unstable as of late. This is adding a lot of down time to gift entry, where gifts can not come down through the connector. But the RE/LO integration feature is a huge improvement!
  • Querying and reporting within Luminate is a little clunky.
It was always in place.
It is fantastic if you send out a lot of emails. We have a very active email program, and are sending emails left and right. It's been a great tool to help us manage these emails. I would think if you worked at a smaller shop it may just be too robust, and something like MailChimp would be better.

Using Luminate

10 - Development and Marketing
3 - I really wish we had more support. I've been told that support is limited to just a few users. This is unhelpful, as everyone who uses LO should be able to access support.
  • Integration with Raiser's Edge
  • The ability to make email groups directly from RE Queries
  • Tracking of email results
  • Since the RE/LO integration our gift entry team has been able to enter gifts as they come in. It's instant. Prior to integration, we were hand entering gifts and there was a two week backlog.
  • Since we can now build Luminate email groups directly from queries in Raiser's Edge, it has saved hours of time uploading and creating groups. And groups are much quicker to create!
  • We are able to send a variety of targeted emails to different groups with relative ease.

Evaluating Luminate and Competitors

Using Luminate

It is cumbersome and takes a lot of training to use it well. If you make mistakes early on they get compounded.
ProsCons
Technical support not required
Consistent
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Not well integrated
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • Searching for Constituents
  • Seeing open rates
  • viewing groups
  • Queries
  • Reports
  • Creating emails
Yes, but I don't use it

Comments

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