Item: Blackbaud Luminate Online
Rating: 2
Author: Jon Williams

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

CBM uses Luminate to process donations, allow individuals to raise funds with TeamRaiser, and distribute e-communications through weekly and monthly newsletters.

Pros and Cons

Pros

I appreciate the steps made to include a notification system via email, reports and e-communications statuses.
The Constituent 360 is somewhat easy to navigate. It is, in fact, the easiest to navigate part of the system.
The automated reports system is nice when you have less-than-savvy members of your team.

Cons

The system feels fragmented. Like several different products were sewn together.
The menu system is overly complicated and I find myself not always sure how I navigated to the page I need.
The documentation is so extensive. I often find myself searching for the answers I need, only to have a BB chat, and find out it was "right there" all along.
The email system is not user friendly. I have had to learn a lot of HTML to use it successfully.
The Team Raiser system requires us to run a 15-20 minute "how to" section of our orientation for our teams. Team members are discouraged from just signing up and getting started because of this.
A lot of the defaults in the system lead to reoccurring problems. For example the TeamRaiser default for new members is to set their page to "Private", meaning that a member of our team has to go into the system every time to change this setting manually.

I used MailChimp and Campaign Monitor to build e-communications pieces. They are both easier to use. The user interfaces are more non-technical user friendly. I use Wordpress to build my sites. Luminate's "mobile" compatibility is minimal and no where near dynamic.

Likelihood to Recommend

Luminate online is an okay system. It does what you want it to most of the time. You will, however, need experience with HTML and CSS to change your content.

Luminate Support

Support Rating

We have had multiple issues with luminate over the last 4 years. Support has been slow to respond (not always but often) or a reference to a knowledge base article (which often only solves part of the problem).

Using Luminate

Usability

Comments

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Kathryn Hall
commented 8 years ago
Thank you for your feedback about Luminate Online. I'm sorry you've had a less-than stellar We do have some meaningful updates to Luminate Online in the works that you will begin to see evidence of in the software soon. In fact, you could have been sitting next to our Product Development team giving them your ideas, because we're addressing: Uniformity of design, layout and functionality. Luminate Online will use the Blackbaud SKY UX - https://skyux.developer.blackbaud.com/ - for a consistent, intuitive user interface. Context-sensitive help, so there's no searching through reams of support content to find what you need. Help documentation will be available where you need it, when you need it. Redesigned, flexible, friendly email editor that'll let you drag and drop components into fully mobile-responsive templates. No more need to go "under the hood" in the HTML unless you want to. We're starting with our user interface, reporting, email and campaign functionality, and we'll gradually roll enhancements out through all of the modules, including TeamRaiser. So please, stay tuned! We've also introduced a team of product-savvy Customer Success managers to assist customers in using the software as effectively as possible. It may be that a (free) TeamRaiser audit could reveal ways to tune up your site(s) to reduce the teams orientation work that you've been doing. If you'd like to comment on or suggest specific enhancements, please visit our Luminate Ideas portal - https://luminateonline.ideas.aha.io/ideas. Our Product Development team reviews these user-generated suggestions frequently, and customer voting on "ideas" contributes to prioritization of new features and functionality. You can also contact me personally at kathryn.hall@blackbaud.com.

Luminate Online

Modules Used