Top Rated Blackbaud Luminate Online Alternatives
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 They're just really terribly out of date.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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It's horribly outdated.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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
63 out of 64 Total Reviews for Blackbaud Luminate Online
Overall Review Sentiment for Blackbaud Luminate Online
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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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Blackbaud Luminate Online is great for donation pages, gift receipting, and email templates for E-Blasts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It has created lots of duplicate records and is not the best for merging feilds to spot pre-exisiting records. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I like that it's not just a system. It's many modules that can work together and / or independantly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Luminate Online's email capabilities are adequate. Donation forms are alright. That's about it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Terrible integration with other products, even products also owned by Blackbaud. No real social integration. Terrible customer service. The Events module is shameful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There is literally nothing that I like about this product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Inputting data can be glitchy at times but usually resolves quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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 . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Fixing problems seems to take a while and involve several layers of people. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
