Item: Blackbaud Luminate Online
Rating: 10
Author: Amy Dana, bCRE

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our advancement team made the switch this summer to TeamRaiser to replace Sphere for peer-to-peer fundraising. We are utilizing it to fundraise for our athletics teams as well as other student clubs.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Provides highly customizable pages
Easy import of constituents and gifts into Raiser's Edge (RE)

Cons

There is a VERY steep learning curve. Because the product is so customizable, there are few "how-to" documents easily available. I have been told that it takes about a year to really learn the system.
The training is extremely high-level; it was like a calculus class when all we needed was basic long division.
Although TR promises you don't need to know coding to use the site, you do need to have someone who is confident enough to make some changes in the coding.

Alternatives Considered

Classy

We looked at everydayhero but were advised it was a poor fit for us. We are reexamining this product and may look into other options.

If you have someone already on staff who understands coding and is willing to take the time to use TeamRaiser (TR) correctly, I recommend it.

For those who need a very simple site to raise funds on behalf of other individuals (instead of having those individuals raise the funds themselves), TR may not be it. We were clear that we would be handling the individual pages for each student athlete, and this turned out to be extremely difficult and time-consuming. When we asked later if there was a better way, we were told this was not how TR was meant to be used.

Using Luminate

Users and Roles

5 - Annual fund, athletic fundraising, database admin, executive assistant, and alumni director. LO is used for both P2P fundraisers and online event registration.

Configuring Luminate

Product Configurability

Luminate Support

Support Rating

Luminate Online is an absolutely amazing constituent management tool. The only issue we have with support is they assume that we are well-versed in things like HTML and web page construction. So sometimes we have to ask them to back up four steps to get us where we want to be.

Luminate Reliability

Scalability

We've only used a small portion of Luminate but I can see we are using a Formula 1 race car for picking up groceries. I hope we can expand our use in the future.

Comments

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TeamRaiser is a Porche - we just wanted a bike

Modules Used