Luminate Online - 3 years in
August 12, 2016
Luminate Online - 3 years in
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Luminate Online
Overall Satisfaction with Luminate Online
We implemented Luminate Online (LO) primarily b/c of the TeamRaiser function, but also because of the many promises of what it could do. First, I'll say that I love the idea of what it can do, but the honest truth is that we had a rushed implementation/integration with our Raiser's Edge CRM that went wrong somehow (Blackbaud and Cathexis both agree, but neither takes full blame) and sadly, we didn't realize how bad things were until it was too late to fix. Basically, the only fix we have is to wipe it clean and start over. The ONLY things we use LO for are TeamRaiser (works, but we have problems), recurring donors (only a portion, as we are afraid to move the rest from Net Community, as we are hoping that something better than LO will come along and we only want to ask donors to provide their credit card info once) and the donation pages, which (thank God) do work, but gosh they are ugly.
- Donation pages are easy to build with very minimal HTML background. If you DO have the HTML background, it's much easier to make the pages look so much nicer
- TeamRaiser allows for the delayed self pledge, which is great
- The integration with Raiser's Edge could be improved. We have SO many "removed" records in Luminate Online, and we do NOT have duplicates for these removed records in Raiser's Edge.
- Would be nice if Luminate Online synced to all important info from Raiser's Edge, such as giving. We batch gifts into RE, but those don't flow over to LO profiles, so LO profiles only show what people have donated through that online system - not the thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars that are in their Raiser's Edge profile. Very hard to use the e-mail function and base e-mails on giving when Luminate has maybe 5% of gifts.
Prior to Luminate, we used NetCommunity (still use it) and Sphere. Both of these are very outdated and LO was a HUGE improvement. Although I think LO could use some improvement to how pages/forms look, it is much better than those two.