--- title: Blackbaud Luminate Online Reviews meta_title: 'Blackbaud Luminate Online Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 65 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Blackbaud Luminate Online works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 3.1 review_count: 65 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-13' parent_category: name: Nonprofit url: https://www.g2.com/categories/nonprofit --- # Blackbaud Luminate Online Reviews **Vendor:** Blackbaud **Category:** [Nonprofit CRM Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/nonprofit-crm) **Average Rating:** 3.1/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 65 ## About Blackbaud Luminate Online Luminate executes your online strategy with integrated campaigns for digital, social and mobile channels, so you can engage more effectively with your supporters to raise more money for your mission. ## Blackbaud Luminate Online Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **organization of documents** within Blackbaud Luminate Online, enhancing their overall management experience. (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **clunky interface** of Blackbaud Luminate Online outdated and lacking in user-friendliness. (1 reviews) - Users find the **limited customization** options frustrating, leading to a less adaptable and modern experience. (1 reviews) ## Blackbaud Luminate Online Reviews ### 1. Great for intranet file sharing **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gwheyohn G. | Digital Producer, Non-Profit Organization Management, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 09, 2025 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I like the organization of documents within th ecms. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Outdated. very what see is what you get, but not in a good way. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** It was great for CRM purposes when we used it for email, certificates and ecards. ### 2. We are abandoning Luminate Online soon but should have long ago. **Rating:** 0.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Philanthropy | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 01, 2023 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Very little good to say about Luminate Online. Numerous other products have come into the same space that far outdo LO. LO has changed little since it was acquired by Blackbaud from Convio years ago. (You can still see the ghosts of this through out the site and in the url - secure2.convio.net). And because it was an acquisition, it is largely incomaptible with other BB products and not not been reengineered to work with them. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Has not been updated in years. Is incompatible with other Blackbaud platforms (Raisers' Edge eg.). Data needs to be pulled and mapped through third party products (Omatic for us). In pagebuilder or teamraiser code continues to break when switching to WYSIWYG to source, so much so that BB advises not to use WYSIWYG. Donation forms, which are a key part of the suite, are archaic relative to what is otherwise available. Non best practices are incorporated into the forms. Users have to build them out from scratch and apply significant coding and styling to get them to look have decent and work to improve conversions. Email management is also way behind the industry. Clunky and awkward to design. List managment is all done through queries and imports from CRM to create audiences and supression groups. No internal synch to CRM to facilitate email automation. Support from Blackbaud in general is almost non-existent. They do not seem to care about their customers. Be aware of using Blackbaud Merchant Services and the very high rate of refused transactions. Existing users should run a transx report and compare the valued trasnction against the net transaction to find MANY transx failed for the most part because of BBMS CC validation check against CC address. If the address does not exactly match the billing address of the CC the donation is failed. Charities are losing thousands $$ because of this. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Peer-to -peer fundraising, donatsion forms, surveys (in past), ### 3. Luminate Online is great for donation pages, gift receipting, email templates for E-Blasts **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tatiana T. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 23, 2023 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Blackbaud Luminate Online is great for donation pages, gift receipting, and email templates for E-Blasts. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** It has created lots of duplicate records and is not the best for merging feilds to spot pre-exisiting records. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has capabilities to do the following: - create donation pages - gift receipting for gifts made online - email templates for E-Blasts - recepting for sustaining donors All of the capabilities above are vary valuable to my organization as well as very useful in everyday functionality. ### 4. Very, very powerful. More than a little complicated. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amy B. | Database Administrator, Non-Profit Organization Management, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 30, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I appreciate the incredibly wide variety of options you have for fund raising. It is a very powerful program but there is a LOT going on here. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Luminate is a big, complex, sometimes overwhelming system. Can be way too much to work with. Takes a lot of training to get to a comfortable point with it. The CRM functionality is a little weird, but it is great for email management. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** Learn everything you can about it after you get it. Be prepared to be slightly overwhelmed, and very challenged. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Many of the people I know use Luminate for peer-to-peer fundraising, online giving, email programs, and event tickets. ### 5. Luminate Online Reveiw **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kayla V. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 10, 2023 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Luminate Online has the capabilities to capture and organize our online payments for all of our events in addition to all of our online giving pages. The integration that it has with Raiser's Edge is its greatest strength. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The reporting in Luminate has to be refreshed quite a bit to bring up the report in a downloadable form. This can get a bit time-consuming when you have multiple reports to run. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Luminate Online allows for the creation of multiple web pages and forms for our Online donations that are customizable but also come with easy templates that have proven to work well. Not only does it allow for form customization, keeping all information and records within Blackbaud, and not having to use a third party which eliminates data risks. ### 6. Luminate Online - more than it seems **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 23, 2023 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I like that it's not just a system. It's many modules that can work together and / or independantly. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I dont like the lenght of time Blackbaud takes when you find an issue or oversight and they as for you to submit to the Ideas Portal for voting. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Donor database and duplications. ### 7. learning curve, but works as expected **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2022 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I like the reporting tools to send weekly reports from an event. The ability to turn on and off products in a store and the amount of options to customize the store to best fit the event. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The overall learning curve to create an event. There are a lot of different steps that go into making the store. The interface needs an update, feels a bit older and clunky. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Event registration. ### 8. Gets the job done but not much else **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 14, 2022 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Luminate Online's email capabilities are adequate. Donation forms are alright. That's about it. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Terrible integration with other products, even products also owned by Blackbaud. No real social integration. Terrible customer service. The Events module is shameful. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We can send emails and accept gifts (most of the time). I can't say we're bringing in more money than we would using any other system though. I suspect probably less. ### 9. Blackbaud needs to update its system **Rating:** 0.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 14, 2022 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** There is literally nothing that I like about this product. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Where to begin... this product is straight out of 1998 and they haven't done much to update it since. It's clunky, difficult to use and doesn't easily integrate with other Blackbaud products. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are able to create campaign donation forms. ### 10. Great reporting **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Erica B. | National Manager, Program Excellence, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2021 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I love the reports feature of Luminate Online. It is easy to create custom reports for participant and donor information and to manipulate the data for your needs. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Inputting data can be glitchy at times but usually resolves quickly. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** Take time to explore the reports section! It's really a great feature. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** This system has worked great for tracking fundraising participants and reporting on their performance. ### 11. Luminate online for collecting donations **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 10, 2016 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Easy to create new donation forms and copy old ones. The responsive layouts are a great functionality that work well with our website to create a good user experience . **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Fixing problems seems to take a while and involve several layers of people. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Fundraising through online donation pages, ticketing for events, development of eCards, survey building and story capturing. ### 12. Great for housing email drafts and stacks well with other softwares **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Luminate, specifically Convio, has done a great job updating its product visually. Easy to edit/update front end website for events/campaigns. Great that you can create a bunch of email templates and save them for later/right time of year. Such a great tool to showcase fundraising! **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** While I love that you can fill it up with email templates and categories. It isn't the most user-friendly for creating an actual email template. Many times the user of the back-end is an event manager that needs to communicate or make consistent back-end updates. It can be a bit time consuming! **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** Take your time learning the ins and outs of customization and you will be able to take full advantage! **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mass communication either through emailing or making front-end website updates. ### 13. Luminate Online is user friendly **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lindsay R. | Vice President & Co-Founder, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 21, 2020 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Luminate is easy to use and is great for our friend-raising events, email hosting, etc. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I don't dislike anything so far that I've encountered using Luminate Online. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** No recommendations at this time. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Luminate for email hosting to event participants, friend-raising fundraising events. It's very streamlined for our constituents and users. ### 14. Challenging to learn but gets the job done **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 23, 2019 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I like the email platform the best, especially that you can create a bank of emails and save them as drafts that you can modify. We run email campaigns that we schedule out ahead of time and the turnover is easy year over year when we can go back to old drafts, make copies and modify using new branding, dates, etc. It would be nice to be able to modify multiple messages at once if that feature doesn't already exist. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The donation entry system is complicated and confusing, possibly just because the relationship between Luminate and our other constituent services can be complicated. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using more tedious systems for mass communication like outlook takes much more time and we have realized that using a more uniform branding made possible through email campaign templates allows us to get better rates of opening, action and response. The reports are also changing how we set goals. ### 15. Its more than my expectations. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Muhammad U. | Tradings , Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 07, 2019 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I liked its Fundraising Features more satisfied and have not more trouble in searching inviting for fund raising in. It enhanced the capacity ,capacity of all staff related to marketing ,communication, web searching. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** there are a improvement corner always empty i dint think so many dislikes in this feature but improvement always needed in any software that helps a product to compete in market and a supporting staff should be always there **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** I advise to newbies you should use this software it is more efficient then other competitors by functions price, and support also.But mind it there is always a improvement ahead. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing my credentials ,email handling , fund raising.It helps to increase you operations world wide. ### 16. Challenges increased as BB stopped upgrading and maintaining Luminate Online product **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2019 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Consolidation of critical onlineFR functions, under Luminate Online umbrella. Chat support/case assignment system so much better now. Also, integration with BB database of record is a well oiled system. would require resources and time if ever migrated. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** huge issue is that default products are not mobile responsive out of the box. forces customers to go third party developer for building it on top of LO. complicates any user issue after that. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** does not solve business problem, as much as fills role for function of basic online FR products like email, donations, some auto-responder automation for trigger emails. ### 17. Use this product everyday- love it **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 23, 2019 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Very versatile- website editing and donor database **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Often difficult to not make duplicate accounts- merge feature is not user friendly **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** It's easier to use and more robust than many competitors **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is our donor database as well as website and fundraising (donation) software ### 18. Luminate Online a hidden gem **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sherry K. | Grants Writer, Non-Profit Organization Management, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 29, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I love the analytics, such as rating clients by engagement factors. I also love the seamless integration of email and donation forms and the website. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Query and reporting are not as comprehensive as I would prefer. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** An org must have a dedicated (or at least part time) administrator who can make the most of the robust tools available in LO. Ideally you will also upgrade to LCRM. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ongoing communications with stakeholders. Analytics as far as general engagement. Customization of communications to targeted audiences. ### 19. used daily **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rebecca P. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 26, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** nice looking interface, fairly user friendly after some basic training. great report capabilities. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** sometimes the mass-email function can be a little difficult to manage... so many steps to complete. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** take as many trainings as possible to get the most from this product **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use this for both constituent database management, as well as special events management. ### 20. Almost Seamless Word Pasting - time efficient and user intuitive **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Philanthropy | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 18, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The product required minimal manipulation in html after copying and pasting word doc text (or email text) into the luminate system. Great way to organize multiple campaigns and distribution lists. Easy to added additional recipients to a campaign or a specific email. Emails can be sent to additional distribution lists based on set criteria within the crm function of the platform. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** From time to time when copying and pasting material into the email template not all formatting would transfer over - including text color, font, and font size. Typically an email would require 1-2 additional proof edits to fix the formatting. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Luminate allows for emails to be sent to a larger distribution list in a designed template and keeps track of basic analytics - great way to clear distribution lists and ensure that the right people are receiving the right message for their specific needs. ### 21. It works but might not be your best solution **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Religious Institutions | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** It has many features including things like auto-login when donors click on a link. It's relatively easy to use. and was a stable platform. It did allow us to increase our online donation results. It has some good tools for reporting on email campaigns and their results, who donated to what projects based on the emails we sent them. They were able to work with our existing payment gateways which made setting up payments easy and did not cause us to incur any other fees with implantation. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Integration with our internal systems was not great. It was sometimes difficult to get data out of the system and EFT recurring payments were inconsistent. The email creation tools are there but by and large they are more for people with some type of HTML background. We replaced their email functionality with ActOn and it is a much better "non-technical" platform for email generation/deployment. We switched out to a software package that more completely integrates in with our internal software. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** If this will be your primary mechanism for taking donations it's pretty good. Most of our issues revolved around integrating it in with our internal donor management software. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used it for an on line donation portal and for email marketing. As a tool it did accomplish the goals that we had. However the software itself was clunky and didn't have the finesse of some other platforms. Essentially it was software designed by engineers without the assistance of UI specialist. ### 22. Outdated aspects and an overcomplicated UI **Rating:** 0.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** There’s probably more power under the hood than I’m aware of. I wouldn’t know because our org has our roles pretty well locked down and our consultants have pretty well taken over the global stylesheets and templates and make it difficult to work within the environment. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** - The UI of the site is hard to sort through. Buttons are inconsistently or oddly labeled and often not in a predictable location. The design looks outdated and patched together: the teal-and-bright-green of the front page icons doesn't cohere with the bright blue logo, the dull navy navbar and the various color tints used throughout the site. - Many of the features used for template development are outdated/unnecessary in modern web / email design (body tag attributes? in 2017?). - The WYSIWYG editor used for text formatting in emails and web page builders is *several dozen versions* behind. Code appropriate to modern browsers is best done by hand, which makes it much less useful for non-coder users and means I have to go behind them and clean up their WYSIWYG code. - According to our production manager, pulling reports and updating lists is a painful experience. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** Make sure you implement it correctly and have people who know what they're doing using it and controlling the implementation process. Don't rely on consultants. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We run email campaigns and newsletters, and some donations, through Luminate and are in the process of pulling some CRM functions into it related to another product. (Obviously my team was not given right of veto.) ### 23. Quick time to market but difficult to build enterprise data solution around it. **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 02, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The Luminate platform does allow you to get a donation form up and running very quickly. Platform manages credit card transactions and is a single solution. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Getting data back out from the platform is very difficult. Although there are published APIs they don't seem to work well and it's difficult to get support. Although it may work well for a single entity, trying to get transactional data out to subsidiaries or different departments was extremely difficult. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** Consider the pricing in detail if you want to deliver data to more than a handful of people. There is a hub where your users/stakeholders can grab data from reports but this was cost prohibitive for us. We also had extensive discussions about how the data would come across via the APIs. We intended to keep track of every single transaction but this became very difficult when refunds or changes came into play. If you intend to use their APIs, ensure that you test out different scenarios. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Deploying a single nationwide donation solution for a federated organization. ### 24. Great CRM with Easy Customization **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Luminate Online is a good tool for organizations that want to be able to customize the information they can see and query about their contacts/donors. It is easy to navigate and there are a lot of helpful resources if needed. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** One negative about this system is in regards to creating reports. It comes with standard reports but we often need to create our own in order to be able to pull all the needed fields. For example there is a standard report of donations and households but we also need it to pull fields from contacts so we made our own. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** I have not handled many other databases at the same length of which I've used Luminate so it's hard to say which would be best but I do recommend it. There are definitely other CRMs that are clunkier and with any system there will be things you love and things you find lacking. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are solving the issue of needing a clear way to organize and view donor information and be able to track it as needed. Benefits realized are no longer having any shadow databases that may live offline or in employees personal drives. All information can be accessed in one place. ### 25. Our organization is transitioning to a different tool **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 24, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Luminate Online meets very basic needs. They are able to accommodate some particular things to our organization, like including premiums on our donation forms or the ability to schedule to unpublish and redirect a donation form. I like that they have chat support. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** So many things. Support is lacking. It is so complex to build in their system- for example, just creating a stationary needs to be done in a very specific complicated way. They rolled out a tweet your rep tool that needs so much work and fixing to be even usable. There are lots of little things that annoy me, too- like how it logs you out all the time, or how the WYZYWG breaks everything, or how you can only upload one image at a time. Their surveys are completely non-mobile responsive and require the most gigantic headache to build. Advocacy: there is no click to call and lots of delivery failures. Social sharing is not integrated. I could go on. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Luminate Online allows us to build emails, donation pages, action alerts, manage our audience lists, and collect data for reporting. ### 26. A bit antiquated **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Health, Wellness and Fitness | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 12, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The multiple options. It has a lot to offer but some of the options have additional steps that waste time. For instance, a survey let's everyone view results at the bottom violating people's privacy. You have to create a page and then embed it there to make that disappear. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** It's not intuitive compared to other new, more up to date programs. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** Have someone who's not technically savvy test it out. They should be able to figure out the basics especially when you compare what other companies have to offer now. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Outreach, Digital communication. ### 27. Fantastic Website Management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Complete ease of use. You don't need to understand coding to easily use Luminate to manage your websites both for front end and back end interface. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Honestly there isn't anything I have disliked yet about the system. Sometimes creating reports can be more difficult than usual but it's typically easy enough to navigate through. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** Great tool for managing participants and sending mass emails. Also going in the right direction with reporting and managing financial data. I enjoy being able to manage our accounts as thoroughly as I can with Luminate. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using it to manage websites and customer info. ### 28. Good capabilities but not for an average nonprofit user **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The possibilities are endless - but you have to know how to code and the platform is very sophisticated. While most desired capabilities can be achieved, you have to have an expert on hand to do the work. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** It is way too complicated for an average nonprofit communications user. The events module is useless for ticketed events where you have to gather guest names - basic functionality that should be there. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** We are in the process of looking at Engaging Networks. Donor Drive was another great product we considered. We can't wait to get rid of Luminate Online. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We do our online donations and email marketing through Luminate Online. ### 29. Not great, not horrible **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 15, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Their customer support is actually pretty good and always easy to get in touch with. Their support agents are always friendly and courteous. Their API is helpful in configuring their donations forms above and beyond what their standard form can do, its also rather straightforward and easy to use. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Its rather expensive for what it is. I'm not a fan of how their email system is set up, it seems rather dated and clunky. Their CMS is decent and you can do a lot with it, but its rather expensive for what you get out of if. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are able to connect with our constituents effectively. ### 30. It has great potential **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The products and features are great for any organization that needs a tool that solves more than one problem. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** It's archaic and needs to be modernized to meet today's demands of digital marketers. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** website content hosting, loading & updating; as well as email marketing ### 31. Implementation Woes **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Religious Institutions | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** It integrates with other Blackbaud offerings, specifically the Raiser's Edge. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Development is slow. The training offerings are slim and were not catered to our organization. The current integration with RE is clunky and needs a wholesale update. During the sync process with RE, the Blackbaud team incorrectly linked the two systems which caused the system to spuriously create new ID numbers for each of our constituents. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** Ask more questions than you see as necessary. The Luminate offering over-promised and under-delivered. In addition, their training package (the GO! program) did not adequately meet our needs. It would be the right offering for some, but LO did not care enough to know our organization well enough to advise otherwise. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have seen benefits when it comes to reconciliation between two of our software systems. ### 32. Definitely Could Be Better **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I'm not sure we use Luminate Online the same way that others use it, but I like that the software is totally custom to your needs. Luminate Online provides a lot of options as far as fundraising software goes. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Because the system is custom to our needs, I really don't like that everything seems to cost extra. Because we are a nonprofit, we are constantly looking for better ways to do things and with Luminate Online, all of the better ways cost money. There really isn't a beneficial way for cost-effective solutions. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** It definitely give you the option to customize your needs. What you get is literally what you pay for. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We definitely use this to house a lot of donor information. It's good for tracking donations and such. ### 33. Often the bane of my existence **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Luminate offers a lot of reliable tools to help your org's fundraising efforts. They're just really terribly out of date. Their services are pretty diverse and once you get through the learning curve (which is kinda high), you start to connect the dots in how to use them. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** It's horribly outdated. Oh my god. When is the last time you used Netscape? I'm not talking about `navigator.appName`. I'm talking about the browser I used in elementary school. The forms they offer have "netscape fixes" within the HTML. It is pretty crazy how crappy these are. Many years ago these were acceptable, but now it looks and feels ancient. I'm surprised there aren't animated GIFs all over the page. The ways you need to manipulate TeamRaisers (fundraising event pages) are incredibly frustrating. Here are the steps to make a change to the HTML: Navigate to teamraiser section in portal. Search perfect terms to find it (you may have well over 10,000 to search through). You cannot search for the ID which is extremely frustrating. Click through manage, click through edit, click through page wrapper to identify which page wrapper it uses. Repeat process for page wrapper section within user portal Unpublish page wrapper to edit. Find version, click edit, make change. Go to publish section, click publish. No quick changes. ugh. Next, browser compatibility. Things like file uploads, click and drag features, open window, CSS styling of the luminate UI, ALL may or may not work based on which browser you're using. Mozilla is best for some tasks, internet explorer of all things is often best for a lot of the file upload features. Chrome will get me by for most of it, but when something just doesn't work, I have to open all my tabs in another browser and hope it will work there. THE SYNTAX FOR THEIR S:TAG LANGUAGE. oh my god what is the ugliest language you can come up with? Did they do this on purpose? It is literally a bunch of colons and brackets. It is extremely messy and difficult to work with. I dread projects that use it. It is a joke to me. I've sent screenshots to my friends to show how ridiculous it is. Can you tell how I feel about it? If not, let me just say again, that it's the ugliest thing I've seen in a text editor. I'm not sure if this review can include the CMS, so I won't get into it in detail. Just gonna say--don't use it if you don't have to. You will be much happier. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** Many non-profits use Luminate with good reason. It covers most of the bases that you need. It is not without struggle though. Luminate is run by Blackbaud which seems too busy trying to acquire any and all competitors to improve the software itself. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** My org uses it for constituent communication, surveys, fundraising, reporting, and email marketing. We achieve all of this, but often with frustration. ### 34. Why Luminate is a great system **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 24, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I am currently interning and have found that convio’s luminate system has a great training program which has really helped me learn a lot and be able to work with my team to create a strong media presence. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The training sessions are pretty lengthy. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** This service is really beneficial! **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps us communicate internally and externally ### 35. Online platform for nonprofits **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Individual & Family Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 26, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I like how donation transaction pages, emails, and transaction history are all on one platform. It easy to navigate through the portal and see how everything intertwines with each other. It is also great that it is compatible with Raiser's Edge and it easy to output and input donor data information. You are able to pull donor giving reports. You are able to create and track emails. And you are able to create donation pages that work with your organization's website. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The email platform is very finicky. It sometimes takes a long time to get a simple email created. While in mail chip it is easy to move text and picture block around, it is not that easy in Luminate. The options that are available for fonts are very little and making edits is very touchy as well. If you don't make separate tables for everything, it kind of all gets bundled together. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** An online platform that houses donor data that we can easily pull reports from. They do a good job providing a lot of ways we can capture donor data whether it is transactional data, email opens/clicks, what campaigns they are answering to and bio information. ### 36. Luminate ultimately gets the job done. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Museums and Institutions | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 03, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The modern look and capabilities. It is more advanced than our last system and allows us to do a lot of things at once. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The user interface is difficult to maneuver if you don’t know what you’re doing and there is a large learning curve. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are solving the problem of needing multiple systems do do what we are doing with just LOM and gained the benefit of being able to simplify our processes. ### 37. A little finicky, but easy to use **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in International Affairs | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Everything happens in real time - no need to wait for things to refresh. It's very straightforward and intuitive. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Searching for things can be difficult - some search fields are very particular and require exact wording and correct spelling **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is easy to manage customer information and transaction history, making it easy to provide excellent customer service ### 38. This CRM Take A Lot of Work **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joshua S. | Multimedia Marketing Manager, Non-Profit Organization Management, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** While this CRM has everything you need it to do, it does none of them well. It will do email, donation forms, landing pages, and advocacy tools. But it is overpriced and too complicated. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I dislike most things about Luminate. It has everything you need for a non-profit CRM, but it is more difficult to use then any other product on the market. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** I would recommend looking elsewhere. This product is not moving forward, it is staying stale. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Again, it fits the bill but is too complicated and far too overpriced. ### 39. Love this program **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** What don’t I love about this program. It allows our participants to register for our event, gives them a platform to raise funds on, i an able to send out mass emails to different groups, and pull reports! **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** There is nothing that I don’t like about this program. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are giving a participants a way to take charge of their fundraising! It also gives us managers a way to manage what our participants are doing and the funds they are raising! ### 40. Works well enough but there is a lot of room for improvement **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Thomas V. | Associate, Digital Marketing, Non-Profit Organization Management, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I enjoy the email interface. It gets the job done and gives you some options for the customization of the emails. You can do A/B testing, send different messages based on constituents locations etc. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The reporting feature is very clunky. Trying to create a custom report with only the information you want can be difficult and in some instances impossible. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're solving our email marketing, constituent database, donations, and our CMS. ### 41. Really easy to use and organized layout **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vivian C. | Legal Assistant, Hospital & Health Care, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 09, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Setting up and managing accounts is simple but also entering donations is easy too **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The finance part of it can be a little tricky **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing teams and donations ### 42. Powerful but not easy to use **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Religious Institutions | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 09, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The ability to integrate all of our online fundaring, user database / constituent profiles, and email marketing makes for a very powerful tool. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** While the tool is very robust and powerful it is also not user friendly and in some areas has a steep learning curve. The admin interface is clunky and very dated. Many tasks require a technical expertise beyond that of a typical user and thus may require you to frequently need outside cosultants. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** If you are going to use Luminate, I would definitely recommend that you partner with a vendor rather than attempt to do everything in-house. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Luminate for all of our online fundraising as well as email marketing across our organization. The ability to target and automate emails based on user actions / data is a fantastic, but often feels like setup and maintenance takes longer than it needs to. ### 43. Convio Luminate Event Manager **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 18, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** I like the variety of reports available, and the data they provide. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** really old interface and issues running reports sometimes **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing event constituents - great to edit their profiles, passwords and details in real time. ### 44. Luminate can be frustrating **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 24, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Ability to manage content across events or donor groups. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Some features are frustrating when working with large audience groups. It is time consuming to add so many groups one at at time instead of creating a saved group made up of existing groups. This hierarchy feature is also missing on the company page set up. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Online content and emails ### 45. The CRM Everyone Loves to Hate **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 17, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Powerful, many features. Very deep product. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Very expensive. Hard to work with. Inconsistency across platform, some modules are vastly inferior to others. Email module pales by comparison to products like Mail Chimp. Peer-to-peer very hard to implement. **Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online:** Look at alternatives! There are many. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Integrate fundraising, advocacy, email and peer-2-peer. Compared to what we had before (4 separate products), it's an improvement. ### 46. Works just fine **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2018 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Easy to use, and with little training can seek out data you need easily. Very user friendly. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Limited availability to compare YOY data Not CRM friendly. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use the data to drive our behaviors, we've benefitted from having real time data to help drive our work. ### 47. Love this software! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 05, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Love this software! We use convio software for all of our events. I love that it is so easy for us to track our events progress, email participants, and run reports! **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** There isn’t anything that I dislike! We utilize this software everyday at work! **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We solved the problem of running numbers in a timely manner, as well as being able to email all of our participants and past participants at once! ### 48. Convio Luminate Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Convio Luminate is very user friendly. It is a great platform for constituent/participant management, event website, reporting, etc. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** There is nothing I dislike about Convio Luminate. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are solving issues with running reports of participants from our events. Keeping track year over year. ### 49. Worth the resources **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 17, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Luminate offers a one stop shop for constituent management and engagement. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** Some of the tools require a bit of customization out of the box. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Single database to view all interactions, communicate with constituents and set up fundraisers. ### 50. Good strong tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kunal S. | CRM Director, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 11, 2017 **What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** It's easy to read and understand the records and the information in them. **What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online?** The reporting tool is not as advanced. Also, needs too many clicks to get the result. **What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you?** Keeping in touch with the client base. ## Blackbaud Luminate Online Discussions - [What is Blackbaud Luminate Online used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-blackbaud-luminate-online-used-for) - [What is blackbaud used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/blackbaud-luminate-online-what-is-blackbaud-used-for) - [Is Raiser's Edge a CRM database?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/blackbaud-luminate-online-is-raiser-s-edge-a-crm-database) - [What is luminate CRM?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-luminate-crm) - [What is blackbaud luminate?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-blackbaud-luminate) - [View Blackbaud Luminate Online pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/blackbaud-luminate-online/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-16+02%3A07%3A17+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=30c807fa-bd36-4951-a3ea-08adec5f4ed2&secure%5Btoken%5D=ea1e8eb0abd398754cb83f2ee1e40fef27802f57b18de0be3785f91440f9ee1b&format=llm_user) ## Blackbaud Luminate Online Features **Administration** - Reporting - Interaction Tracking - Automation - Donor Profiles **Constituent Management** - Constituent Profiles - Online Portal - Donor Communications **Fundraising** - Campaign Management - Online Donation Portal - Event Planning - Recurring Donations - Peer-to-peer Fundraising - Mobile Capabilities **Marketing Automation** - Email Marketing - Lead Management - Campaign Management - Marketing ROI Analytics **Marketing** - Email Marketing - Direct Mail Tools **Workflow Automation** - Donor Prospecting - Data Entry - Task Delegation **Reporting & Analytics** - Reporting - Dashboards **Integrations** - Accounting - Fundraising - Grant Management - Sales POS **Agentic AI - Nonprofit CRM** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration ## Top Blackbaud Luminate Online Alternatives - [Bloomerang CRM](https://www.g2.com/products/bloomerang-crm/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (890 reviews) - [DonorPerfect](https://www.g2.com/products/donorperfect/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (562 reviews) - [Neon CRM](https://www.g2.com/products/neon-one-llc-neon-crm/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (428 reviews)