Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit (discontinued)

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

I have recommended Microsoft for Nonprofits to other Nonprofits that we work with. I have helped to implement it for a couple of them. I want to share the good things that Microsoft has to share for nonprofits like ours. I understand the struggles of paying for things and not having enough money at times to do everything I would love to be able to provide.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Providing a basic framework for nonprofit organizations who've been limping along or have capped out with their current platforms to consider switching to amplify and multiply their capabilities, reach, and impact
• Increasing the accessibility for both citizen developers and tech teams to extend a platform, so long as there are clear parameters (business use case) and thoughtful design and architecture planning
• Sharing some core infrastructure that accelerates the use of important tools to further the mission of nonprofit organizations

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

Incentivized

• The system is ridiculously hard to implement, requiring too many tiers of Microsoft cloud services to be enabled.
• The technical aspects of the product are far too complex for anyone with standard cloud-based app training to implement.
• The non-profit "qualification" system is poorly designed.

Incentivized

It's been very helpful at a very discounted price, especially in data analysis and visualization with Power BI.

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 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

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit has a similar applicability for us to Microsoft SharePoint; however, Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit really fits the size of the organization, whereas Microsoft SharePoint seems to be often tuned for larger organizations than our own. Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit seems to be the right product and size.

Incentivized

• Hard to work with
• Resource intense

Incentivized

• Attempting to deploy Microsoft Cloud for Non-profits had a negative impact on our donor relations staff, the technical team tasked to deploy it, and upper management who watched the deployment fail.
• Overall, this product is too dependent on too many Microsoft Cloud services to really deploy with any sort of clear expectation to management of what the "hidden" costs would be.

Incentivized