Item: Blackbaud Luminate Online
Rating: 6
Author: Laura Bruss

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Luminate Online to send emails to our constituents, run queries and create groups, create donation forms, action alerts, surveys, among other things. I personally am on the production side of things, so I build all our emails, action alerts, emails, and pages using Convio (Luminate Online). Through Convio, we are able to reach out to our donors and members.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The layout and organization is pretty good. It's easy for me to find what I'm looking for.
It's easy to build HTML emails, donation forms and action alerts that are pretty customizable. Takes you through the steps so it's not that difficult to learn.
Reliable sends - since the debacle a couple years ago at year end where all our emails went out super late, they have updated things and we haven't had any issues with send times.

Cons

WYSIWYG editor breaks everything.
Wish there was a batch image uploader - makes uploading multiple images at a time cumbersome and time consuming.
The survey is not very customizable. Hard to get formatting and options beyond the 15 or so they provide.
Reports are located in different places and are cumbersome to pull - should be more user-friendly.

Likelihood to Recommend

Luminate Online is great for building donation forms, emails and action alerts. You can customize it very well, and these things are very easy to manage. I have never used a competitor tool so I have nothing to compare it to, but I found it intuitive to use, and I had no trouble learning the tool or finding what I am looking for.

Configuring Luminate

Product Configurability

Luminate's configurability is too limited. For example, the tweet your rep tool that they roled out has very limited functionality on it's own. You have to do so much work with JS and styling to get it to function in any real usable way. Another example is the surveys. They aren't even mobile responsive. You have to do a really annoying hack where you finish the survey, then copy/paste the survey code into your pagebuilder page, and then adjust the survey code manually to make it mobile responsive. Everything is just a lot of unnecessary work if you want to style something or change something in any way.

Comments

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Decent Option for Non-Profits

Modules Used