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Blackbaud Luminate Online

Score3.9 out of 10

155 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Blackbaud Luminate Online?

Luminate Online aims to help non-profits engage more effectively with supporters and raise more money by enabling integrated campaigns for digital, social and mobile channels.

According to the vendor, Luminate Online helps non-profits:
  • Better understand online supporters
  • Make the right ask at the right time
  • Launch creative fundraising campaigns
Automated campaigns stimulate engagement and action through targeted welcome messages with personalized appeals. Smart online and mobile donation forms dynamically tailor the ask and provide flexible options like recurring, matching and tribute gifts to optimize conversion and maximize giving.

Passions, preferences and giving history trigger additional campaigns building stewardship through more relevant interactions and opportunities to engage. The company also aims to offer top notch support and numerous free resources. All clients receive a personal Customer Success Manager to offer best practices and resources to succeed.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of Email Overview Dashboard
Screenshot of Luminate allows you to enable multiple types of giving - from recurring to matching and everything between.
Screenshot of Luminate enables you to reach out to supporters in multiple ways
Screenshot of Luminate Peer to Peer fundraising with DIY events, also enables your supporters to fundraising on their behalf.

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Screenshot of Email Overview Dashboard

Reviews

What users are saying about Blackbaud Luminate Online.
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Robust and Complete System, Highly Complicated, Somewhat Outdated

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Professional Services (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We recently left Blackbaud Luminate Online but had been using it for most online giving, sustaining donor management and processing, a large P2P event, and all digital marketing. We used the RELO connector to manage data flow mostly from Blackbaud Luminate Online into Raiser's Edge, but also could build email lists in Raiser's Edge that would easily upload into Blackbaud Luminate Online as the audience.

Pros

  • Most robust peer to peer capabilities that we've found in any software
  • Sustainer gift management and processing
  • Ease of creating email audiences via query in Raiser's Edge and linking to email blasts
  • System integration using RELO connector

Cons

  • It's just too complex for less experienced users to learn; our marketing team wanted something very simple to create and send emails
  • Our events team often had to utilize third party support to update our largest peer to peer platform each year because again the software is so complex and complicated
  • It's an old interface and not intuitive and it didn't seem that Blackbaud planned to refresh the whole product anytime soon

Return on Investment

  • It allowed us great efficiency in managing our monthly donor program
  • The cost was inclusive of as many emails as we wanted to send

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Classy

Other Software Used

Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT, Classy, Omatic Cloud

Luminate

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In my job role we used Blackbaud Luminate primarily for credit cards processing and although it is a Blackbaud product it didn't talk to Raisers Edge. We had to pull separate reports and batch the donations into Raisers Edge. We also did not use this platform for email campaigns, it was not the easiest thing to use and we opted to use Give lively for all of our campaigns.

Pros

  • Report for credit cards were easy to pull

Cons

  • Ease of moving through and creating campaigns
  • Connecting to other Blackbaud products

Return on Investment

  • Not good time management

Usability

Very, very powerful. More than a little complicated.

Incentivized
Amy Barker
Database Administrator at Pine Street Inn (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use Blackbaud Luminate Online as our online giving platform, as well as for eNews emails and marketing emails. We have a healthy sustainer program, and Blackbaud Luminate Online handle our sustaining gifts with ease.

Pros

  • Recurring/Sustaining Giving Management
  • Online Donation Forms
  • Email Marketing

Cons

  • Blackbaud Luminate Online is a big, complex, sometimes overwhelming system.
  • Takes a lot of training to get to a comfortable point with it.
  • Has not changed much for UE in the past decade.

Most Important Features

  • Sustaining Giving
  • Email Marketing
  • Online Giving

Return on Investment

  • It allows us to maintain and grow our recurring donors
  • It allows us to stay in touch with donors
  • It allows us to segment emails to send to donors

Alternatives Considered

Raiser's Edge

Usability

Essential for Non-profits!

Incentivized
DeAndre Bellows
Marketing and Development Coordinator in Marketing at The Eye Cancer Foundation (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Blackbaud Luminate Online is an all inclusive platform and essential for a lot of non-profits. If you want a system that not only manages donors and donor relations, but also keeps track of analytics, frequency of donations and all major gifts in one place, then this is the right application to use. We have used other services in the past and none compare to everything Blackbaud Luminate Online has to offer.

Pros

  • Donor profiles specific to the donor
  • Online donor management system
  • Analytics to track campaign success

Cons

  • Would prefer a cleaner looking UX on mobile

Most Important Features

  • Donor Management
  • Analytics and Reports

Return on Investment

  • The cost of the platform is superseded by what we make in donations (positive)

Alternatives Considered

Flipcause

Other Software Used

Flipcause, Mailchimp, Google Analytics

Blackbaud Luminate Online

Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DFCI Philanthropy uses Blackbaud Luminate Online for our online fundraising efforts, including but not limited to directed and unrestricted giving, event registration, and peer-to-peer fundraising via the TeamRaiser module. We are also able to utilize features such as the Survey module to gather information regarding our current and potential supporters. Blackbaud Luminate Online also allows us to provide web-based content for many of the DFCI initiatives.

Pros

  • Peer-to-peer fundraising via the TeamRaiser module is simple and easy to personalize for every participant.
  • Online giving can be done via the Donation Form module with a robust feature set allowing for branding and styling specific to your organization.
  • The Constituent 360 modules allows us to gather detailed information about our visitors. This module also has a variety of tools for exchanging this data with other systems such as a CRM.

Cons

  • The modules within Blackbaud Luminate Online could be more uniform and robust for back-end users.
  • The API and Web Services features for Blackbaud Luminate Online are easy to use but could be more extensive so that more data is accessible to customers for tasks such as ad-hoc reporting.
  • Access to view (and possibly edit) templates used in producing the Blackbaud Luminate Onlinecontent would be a wonderful addition.

Return on Investment

  • Blackbaud Luminate Online has allowed us to increase our online fundraising every year since our adoption of the platform in 2019 (2020's Covid impact not withstanding, of course).

Alternatives Considered

Classy

Other Software Used

Drupal, WordPress

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