Causeview vs. Convio Luminate (discontinued)

Causeview is a bloated, outdated, and expensive tool that is not well suited for any scenario. Salesforce.com offers many better nonprofit and donor management applications at a better price. Causeview's data model is rigid and does not match Salesforce's standard data model, which makes it difficult to add other apps and integrations to Salesforce. Causeview's donate pages are bland and not very customizable. Also, Causeview's servers are not reliable and will go down unexpectedly, which also causes donate pages to go down. Last year, this happened on Giving Tuesday, a very important day for nonprofit fundraising.

Incentivized

It works okay if you have a large budget and don't have the technical experience on your staff to set up NSPS appropriately. It probably also works better as a purely development-driven database; trying to track multiple departments with very different goals in the same database is challenging.

Incentivized

• Causeview's support team is mostly helpful and quick to respond.
• Causeview integrates event registrations within Salesforce.

Incentivized

• Luminate takes some of the legwork out of setting up NSPS for nonprofit use of salesforce.

Incentivized

• Event registration and donation pages could be better designed - not up to par with sites such as Eventbrite
• I would like to have the option for people to register with more than one e-mail address instead of creating a duplicate record each time someone uses a different e-mail.
• Some of my coworkers find Causeview confusing to use or difficult to find information.

Incentivized

• Big Investment
• It's a sales program with a donation management overlay so it has some troubles around reporting.

Incentivized

Causeview's support is a lone bright spot. They are often quick to respond. They are generally helpful, although brief in their answers and explanations. I would appreciate more detailed answers to technical problems, but I do appreciate their support's problem solving ability

Incentivized

Support for the product is horrible; often support will have you bouncing between Blackbaud support and Salesforce support and it's very rare either are able to find simple solutions. Most of the time the solutions almost always cost money and hiring consultants which, for a smaller organization, means not being able to achieve proper solutions.

Incentivized

I did not personally select Causeview for my organization, but I have found it easy to use in comparison with other similar systems. The fact that Causeview can be added to Salesforce, and hop on our existing database, is very important to us and is one of the main reasons we continue to use the service.

Incentivized

I recently started using EveryAction, it is much more robust and nimble and does not need a lot of customization. The only big feature I miss is the acknowledgment process for Luminate CRM and Analytics: it was much more robust, but overall it doesn't have the cumbersomeness of Luminate CRM. I don't think I would ever switch back.

Incentivized

• Able to track donor behavior and relationships with different corporations
• Helped us to track our corporate fundraising strategy -- which companies are we cultivating, which have we had success with, etc.
• Overall Causeview is an effective way for us to keep track of all of our donor information.

Incentivized

• Hard to work with
• Resource intense

Incentivized