Item: Blackbaud Luminate Online
Rating: 9
Author: Pam Rutter

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate Online

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Luminate Online to handle all our online donations from our supporters, advocacy, event management, and reporting for our development and finance departments. It is being used all the time for all programs in our organization.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The "idea" behind what Luminate is supposed to do is really great! Providing a platform for easy online donation access is a real plus.
Having the capacity to have all of modules that we need in one platform is really terrific.

Cons

There's a lot of room for improvement. Things can be a little clunky sometimes and not so intuitive. Wishing that when Luminate integrates with its sibling platforms like CMS and CRM... I wish there was more smoothness to those transitions.
I wish that advocacy was smoother and faster. It seems like when we need to get an action done we know we can't be nimble and that's gonna take some time because there are so many moving parts. Sometimes changing legislative police needs faster action and we have to abandon using our advocacy tool and only use social media because there's not a stripped down fast way to get actions out.
In Online with our donors, one thing we've always wished for was that 1 person could choose to have an email sent to 2 different email accounts. We have many many people who want to receive our news at home and at work. Keeping track of duplicate records that we have to keep vs. duplicate records we don't want is tedious. We also wish that when we have people totally unsubscribe and take themselves out of our system that we could add them back when they call us telling us they goofed and they don't receive our email anymore. This happens all the time.

Other Software Used

Luminate CRM and Analytics, Luminate Advocacy

Likelihood to Recommend

I think Luminate Online is a good solution for so many of our needs - I think some of the projected improvements that I've heard of will make things a lot easier and more streamlined. I'm very excited for those updates to roll out.

I also think there is a level of customer service if you will that has dropped off in the last couple years. I wish sometimes that area of the company was better. Our missions are important... we don't have the same size teams, money or other resources that for profit corporations might have to do their work. It would be nice to feel like our work is important to Blackbaud.

Comments

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Even with some hiccups I'd still choose Luminate again!

Modules Used