Best Platform for Online Donation Forms – RE NXT or Alternatives?

Leo Rezende

Hi everyone,

Our organization is transitioning from Luminate Online for donation forms, and we’re exploring the best platform to use moving forward. Since our CRM is RE NXT, we are considering using its online donation Forms.

What do you recommend?

I’d love to hear your experiences and any recommendations you have!

Thanks in advance for your insights!

Aldera Chisholm

@Leo Rezende Hi Leo, what features do you need from your donation forms? That can be the biggest decider to determine whether NXT forms are a fit for you, or, if you want to look at an integration.

Brianna Thompson

@Leo Rezende
Hey Leo! I haven't had experience with Luminate, but I can say I've been very impressed with NXT forms. As is they're very intuitive, and the upcoming upgrades are looking great (membership options, pledge automation). Are there specific features you're looking for?

Therese Morris

@Leo Rezende We went from OLX to GiveCampus for all our online giving, giving campaigns, and donation forms. We also use their VMS. Our fundraisers did not feel OLX satisfied their needs and at the time NXT did not offer all the options or flexibility that GiveCampus does. We use ImportOmatic to bring all the gifts into RE database view currently.

Leo Rezende

Hey @Therese Morris @Brianna Thompson @Aldera Chisholm

Thank you for your replies.

We just need online donation forms that we can share easily with our campaigns. We need them to accept credit cards, digital wallets are a plus, support monthly donations. Not much, I guess.

Dan Snyder

@Leo Rezende Same as @Therese Morris, but we use Importacular to bring the gifts in. I know there are other options, but as @Aldera Chisholm mentioned it all depends on your needs.

Aldera Chisholm

@Leo Rezende I'd give NXT forms a try then - if you just need a quick simple form, they are great for that! They are easy to set up, and it's nice to just have them directly integrated into the system.

Leo Rezende

@Aldera Chisholm Thanks a lot!

Guys, what about OLX. Has anyone used it, and have some input?

Aldera Chisholm

@Leo Rezende
I've used OLX for years, and I like it. The forms aren't as customizable as NXT, but, I do like the process of reviewing the gifts and having them in a database view batch so that they can be edited etc quite easily. The downsides are that the confirmation email isn't quite as nice as the NXT one, and OLX will be sunsetted at some point when the move to NXT is complete. OLX doesn't let you add an option for the donor to cover the fees, but, if you do go that route, there is a free add-on called SmartCover that will do that for you.

Samantha McGuin

@Aldera Chisholm Just wanted to remind you that NXT does not have an Online Data Review tool similar to OLX's that allows you to review and confirm constituent matches before any records or record changes are completed. You can find more info here:

Aldera Chisholm

@Samantha McGuin Did you perhaps mean to say does, instead of does not? The NXT review process isn't the same as the OLX one, but I do appreciate being able to set it to review all unmatched constituents as that really helped to cut down the duplicates while still being efficient. I'm looking forward to when it will bring that into the events forms as well. Since I do a lot with memberships and events, I still do a lot of work in OLX since we don't have that in NXT forms yet.

Leo Rezende

Hi everyone, thank you so much for your support! This was REALLY helpful!

One last question: Is there any solution to NXT that does not have an Online Data Review tool similar to OLX's? How do you (or someone in your team) process the gifts? Is it too much trouble?

Miki Martin

@Leo Rezende at my old org they were using OLX and we moved everything to NXT. I much preferred that and now that you can review things before committing it should be even better. Reviewing gifts in web view batch is not as complete currently as database view but I know this is in the works. Either way I did not feel the process was too much at all and you can always go into the gift record in DB view to update something if it's missed in web view.

My current org has been using Luminate Online for years which works similarly to OLX in that you review things in database view before accepting and can update things before committing a batch. They've recently started the migration to Classy and so now we have to use Omatic to bring over the gifts directly. We can still review things and map to an exiting constituent or add new and all but I feel it's more work than using LO. Your needs sound pretty straightforward, though, so I would highly recommend at least giving the NXT forms a try. We created several different ones for different needs (annual fund, scholarships, capital campaign) and even had one that was unpublished that we could email to people who wanted to donate to a specific fund that wasn't on a published form.

Amy Dana

@Leo Rezende We recently moved all our donation forms to FundraiseUp. We previously had Luminate Online and before that we used OLX. We could not use NXT forms because of the limitations in membership and foreign currencies. We have been extremely happy with FundraiseUp - much easier to set up forms and we love the automated ask they use (which Blackbaud is implementing as well).

Although FundraiseUp is able to connect with RE through an API, web view does not have all the gift fields available to we run a daily import with ImportOmatic. If you'd like more info, feel free to DM me.

Keola Yap

@Amy Dana How was your experience with the integration with Fundraise Up and RE? We are most likely going to use them for our online donations (we're still using Online Express) and I would love to hear your pros and cons.

Amy Dana

@Keola Yap We haven't fully integrated because some of the gift fields we use weren't available in the connector (I need to check and see if that changed). But we've been really happy with how the system works and it's been fairly simple to import the gifts through ImportOmatic. The support from FundraiseUp is AMAZING and they continue to be really helpful walking us through step-by-step if we need help.