Five Capabilities in Blackbaud Luminate Online Your Nonprofit Should Be Using
If your nonprofit organization uses Luminate Online from Blackbaud for online fundraising and marketing, you have a lot of capabilities at your fingertips. And since you’ve made an investment in the software, doesn’t it make sense to get the most out of it?
In our work here at Cathexis Partners, we find that organizations aren’t always aware of everything their software can do. That’s why I’m sharing these five capabilities in Luminate Online you might not be aware of that can be extremely useful in taking your fundraising and marketing to the next level.
- Admin Dashboard improvements
The Admin Dashboard is the first page you land on when you log in to Luminate Online as an administrator. It contains shortcuts and has components that can be added to display legacy reports and miscellaneous content. But did you know that you can edit it?You might ask why you would want to edit this page. Here’s why: It’s prime real estate to provide a more pleasant and efficient user experience for your administrators to access priority areas in Luminate Online and share useful and dynamic data on TeamRaiser performance and constituent statistics/query-generated group counts.
TIP: Cathexis Partners can help you upgrade your Admin Dashboard to your specifications – putting the most important information at your staff’s fingertips.
- Email unsubscribe flow enhancements
To stay compliant with data privacy laws and guidelines, your emails must include a link to an unsubscribe page, allowing recipients to unsubscribe from all emails or opt out of certain types of emails from your organization. You can edit the content for your unsubscribe link and page through a combination of edits in your message catalog and SDPs. There is also a more attractive and responsive version of the default unsubscribe page that you can enable in Luminate Online to make the unsubscribe process more appealing and seamless for your email recipients.
TIP: Cathexis Partner can help you to enable this page. As part of the process, we can also direct people who unsubscribe or opt out of an email interest to a survey so that you can get more information about why they unsubscribed. Upon submission, they will be directed to a thank you page that offers your social media channels as other options to stay connected with your organization.
- Autoresponder Center efficiencies
The Autoresponder Center controls the default confirmation email content that is sent for newly created surveys and donation forms. Autoresponder emails are typically customized for each form that is created, but you can use Autoresponder Center for a more efficient way to set up autoresponders.Using the Autoresponder Center is especially convenient for sustaining gift autoresponder emails when you have several donation forms to keep track of year to year. For example, say your organization has more than 30 forms processing sustaining gifts. You have three autoresponder emails for each form, but the content for them is old, and you want to update it. You would need to update the three autoresponders for 30 forms (90 edits!). But, if you use the Autoresponder Center for the autoresponder emails for all of your forms, you can simply update the content in three places, and all of your forms will automatically have the new content.
TIP: If you’d like to take advantage of the efficiencies that Autoresponder Center offers, Cathexis Partners can help you audit your current forms and configure Autoresponder Center to meet your needs.
- Site Data Parameters (SDPs) optimization
SDPs are configuration options for Luminate Online that alter the appearance or functional performance of your Luminate Online-powered web pages. If your Luminate Online site is several years old, it very well might have outdated configurations in place that haven’t been updated to be mobile-responsive or use the latest version of software enhancements that are available.Check to make sure that your SDPs in Luminate Online are configured to be mobile-responsive and use the latest enhancements, including CAPTCHA, responsive UserLogin, unsubscribe, and email preferences pages.
TIP: Cathexis Partners can help you review your SDP configurations and make recommendations for optimizing your settings to reach your goals.
- Group Conditionals and S-Tags optimization
The WYSISYG editor in Luminate Online allows you to customize content based on group membership. This Group Conditionals functionality is an easy way to tailor content with no special coding knowledge. You can also use S-Tags to include the number of members in a group to your content. So, for example, on Giving Tuesday, you may want to include in one of your email communications an update on how many people donated that day and the amount raised; using Group Conditionals and S-Tags, that information can be added dynamically.Group Conditionals can be handy for things like a welcome email series and including pre-headers in your email stationery based on dynamic group membership, so that you only need one stationery. You can also use Group Conditionals for adding group counts to your Admin Dashboard to keep track of how many sustaining donors you have, or to keep a running count of unsubscribes or new constituents.
TIP: There are lots of possibilities with Group Conditionals and S-Tags, and our team at Cathexis partners is happy to explore them with you to help take better advantage of your data in unique ways.
Learn more about getting the most out of Luminate Online
Optimizing your use of Luminate Online can help you to ensure you’re getting the most out of your software investment and your fundraising and marketing efforts. Learn more about our If you’d like help implementing any of the approaches in this article, contact Cathexis Partners today to learn more and get started.
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by Nicole Tucker, Account Manager, Cathexis Partners
For over 15 years, Nicole has worked with nonprofits to help them use technology to raise funds and spread the word about their missions.
