What Am I Getting From The New Release?

Robert Kiser

Blackbaud’s work to introduce organizations as first class entities in Luminate Online was completed with the solution’s 16.1 release earlier this year. The 15.9 release saw the introduction of the Organizations capability under the Constituent360 tab. As an extension of the Organizations capability, the 16.1 release builds on that by allowing gifts and donations to be associated to an Organization. In order to take advantage of this capability, your organization will need to decide whether or not to enable Organization Gifts. Before making a decision, it's important explore some scenarios where the functionality will be beneficial to your organization.

1. Do you record interactions with organizations?  Do you want to make sure that you can access key information on major donors without leaving Luminate Online? The organizations feature includes the ability to record notes on the organization record so that you can capture background information on relationships between major donors and their organizations.  Do you want to ensure that you contact an organization only on days when you know your main contact will be there?  Record this information in Luminate Online so that you can get greater return on your contacts.
2. Do you want to record more than one contact on an organization record?  For instance, does a larger organization often have different contacts for volunteers, events, membership, and general communications? The Organizations capability will provide you with the ability to record unlimited numbers of contacts on an organization record and also log the reason for contacting them.
3. Do you want to store more information on your organizations, such as addresses and telephone numbers?  This is vital to enable efficient communication with organizations directly from the system without recording this info in a workaround constituent record.
4. Do you want to know the dollar amount employees of a particular organization have raised for you as a whole?  What if a company has many subsidiaries?  You can now record what those organizations raised individually as well as roll up this information so you can see what the organization has raised on a state, regional, or national level.

Luminate Online now offers unlimited hierarchies, unlimited contacts, more contact data, and most importantly, the ability to record organizations in the Luminate Online system alongside your constituent records. You can learn more about the impact of adopting organizational functionality in 16.1 in the post “Are Organization Gifts Right for You?”