Item: Blackbaud Luminate Online
Rating: 5
Author: Eric Kippel

Overall Satisfaction with Luminate Online

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it across multiple departments to deliver our mass emails to our various lists. It is a major component of our online fundraising strategy. The donation forms and recurring transactions bring in a significant amount of revenue.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It is able to deliver lots of emails very quickly. List maintenance is fully automated.
It has some great features on creating queries to work with the data in the system.
The support team is fast and easy to work with.

Cons

API is hard to use and the company wasn't able to support our attempts at using it. They couldn't direct us to anyone who could help us.
Integration with our donor management system has been very problematic.
From our perspective, the software hasn't had any major updates to it in all the years we have been using it. I'd like to see more marketing automation tools.

Alternatives Considered

I looked at a product by Salsa Labs that was fairly similar. Now i'm looking at a marketing automation system called Act-On for delivering emails and product from our donor management system vendor for the online donation forms.

Other Software Used

Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Dynamics GP, 3CX Phone System

Likelihood to Recommend

It is suited for small ministries who have simple email lists to manage to conduct online fundraising. If you are looking to integrate with a donor management system that is not owned by Blackbaud expect to have sync issues.

Comments

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Kathryn Hall
commented 8 years ago
Thank you for your thoughtful and frank review of Luminate Online. A few things that I hope will come as good news to you. First, Blackbaud has invested in a major effort to build out a new API infrastructure (SKY API) designed to facilitate development of independent applications using Luminate data – as well as custom integrations. You should start to see the results of this work soon. Next, major updates to the system will roll out in 2017. Our product team has been focusing on rebuilding the system from the ground up while you are still using it. You’ll start to see more and more of these enhancements in the new year. If you want to contact me at kathryn.hall@blackbaud.com, I can share a recording of our most recent technical product roadmap discussion and link to the next live “roadmap” webinar put on by our Product Management team. We're starting with our user interface, reporting, API, email and campaign functionality, and we'll gradually roll enhancements out through all of the modules. 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. I can connect you with your Customer Success Manager who has been working with other individuals at your organization. To comment on or suggest specific enhancements to Luminate Online, please visit our Luminate Ideas portal (you can access this portal through the Luminate Community (https://community.blackbaud.com/products/luminate). Our Product Development team reviews these user-generated suggestions frequently, and customer voting on "ideas" contributes to prioritization of new features and functionality.

Solid performer that gets results, but if you must integrate you may begin to hate

Modules Used