Are You Prepared for Fast-Approaching Critical Updates to Luminate Online?
If your nonprofit uses Blackbaud Luminate Online for online fundraising and marketing, you might have heard that Blackbaud has added a new checkout experience. Among other things, the enhanced experience supports upcoming new Payment Card Industry (PCI) v4.0 requirements and uses Blackbaud Merchant Services to process and disburse funds.
There are some things you must do by the end of February 2025 to stay PCI compliant and ensure your donation forms continue to work properly. Let’s look at some details about the new checkout experience and some tips on how to move forward.
An overview of changes to the Luminate Online checkout experience
The new checkout experience is a combination of new merchant account settings and new form data elements. They work together to provide dynamic, secure, PCI v4-compliant payment transactions for your donation forms.
The updates include a new embedded or modal checkout experience, digital wallets (with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, and Venmo options), fee cover options, and enhanced security to comply with PCI v4.0. The embedded experience is integrated into your form design, while the modal experience is a pop-up window that appears when a user is ready to make a payment.
It’s important to note that Luminate Online will no longer support direct credit and debit card payment processing through Payflow Pro, iATS, and CyberSource payment gateways after January 31, 2025.
Changes also include an update to the security feature for NEXTURL, a function in Luminate Online that automatically redirects a user to another page after they sign in or complete a form. To avoid bad actors using this function to redirect the user to a fraudulent site, Blackbaud has made updates to this function.
How to prepare your Luminate Online donation forms for critical updates
If you have not already done so, there are some actions you must take before the end of February 2025 to ensure your Luminate Online forms continue to function properly, stay secure, and stay PCI-compliant:
- Secure your NEXTURL forms. Blackbaud recommends that you enable the updated security feature in your site settings and add any URLs that you want to allow people to be auto-directed to. If you have not already completed this step, you may have found that any external re-directs that are not added to this list are not functioning properly, giving users a “page not found” error after they sign in or complete a form. For more details, see this Blackbaud Knowledgebase article.
- Get set up on Blackbaud Merchant Services. You can learn more from Blackbaud’s Get Started with Blackbaud Merchant Services guide.
- Clean up any old forms that you no longer use. This step will help to reduce the number of forms that must be updated. To help with this activity, use the Donation by Forms report to pull a list of active forms. Unpublish or archive any forms that you do not use.
- Create a new Merchant Account in Luminate Online.
In the Setup menu, choose Payment Capabilities, then select Create Account. Name your new merchant account and select a gateway appended with “Checkout.” - Add the Checkout Embedded or Checkout Modal element to an existing donation form. Then, update the donation campaign containing that form so it is associated with your newly created Checkout merchant account. Optional: Test all the payment types on this form by making $1 real-money transactions.
For more information about how to make these critical updates to your organization’s forms and stay PCI-compliant, take a look at Blackbaud’s Checkout FAQ. If you need additional help, contact Cathexis Partners. We’re ready to assist.
—
by Andrea Fleisher, Account Manager, Cathexis Partners
With a combined background of technology and nonprofit experience, Andrea works alongside clients to successfully put their online events and fundraising campaigns into action.
