Using Luminate for corporate website

Jim Fields

Hello, community! I'm a new Luminate user, so I searched for this topic. I didn't find enough to address my question, so if you know of an existing thread please let me know. (Also, if I should post this elsewhere please say so.)


My organization has an existing corporate website, and we are looking to launch a redesign/redevelopment project in the next few months. We already have a great document that lists our needs and desires for our site; I am looking to you, the community, to help me learn what we should think about when evaluating using Luminate as our corporate site.


Who has direct experience with this process? What helped you? What do you wish you knew before you started?


Thank you for your time and advice!

Paul St Onge 2

Hey Jim, we have clients who have done this. Managing everything in one place is definitely a nice bonus. Two factors to consider are:

1) The amount of pages or content you have: If you have 50+ pages on your website, it might clutter up LO.

2) Plug-ins vs custom dev: If you build in something like wordpress, there are plenty of free plugins for things like calendars, blog rolls, FB widgets, search, page layouts etc. In Luminate, much of this would have to be built out custom. But if your needs are small, then it might still be efficient.


-Paul

Paul@doinggoodagency.com

Jim Fields:

Hello, community! I'm a new Luminate user, so I searched for this topic. I didn't find enough to address my question, so if you know of an existing thread please let me know. (Also, if I should post this elsewhere please say so.)


My organization has an existing corporate website, and we are looking to launch a redesign/redevelopment project in the next few months. We already have a great document that lists our needs and desires for our site; I am looking to you, the community, to help me learn what we should think about when evaluating using Luminate as our corporate site.


Who has direct experience with this process? What helped you? What do you wish you knew before you started?


Thank you for your time and advice!

Daryl Bunker

Hey Jim,


Our company is actually in the process of moving our site off of Luminate; we will still be using the platform for donation forms, surveys, emails, etc., but our site is being redesigned and migrated over to Wordpress. For us, it came down to customization, which Luminate lacks. The biggest reason we started considering moving our site was for SEO purposes; we needed control over simple things such as our page urls, which Luminate makes more complicated than we wanted. But Wordpress also allows us to modify the backend code and of course you can take advantage of popular plugins and themes that already exist.

Lucas Metherall

Daryl Bunker:

Hey Jim,


Our company is actually in the process of moving our site off of Luminate; we will still be using the platform for donation forms, surveys, emails, etc., but our site is being redesigned and migrated over to Wordpress. For us, it came down to customization, which Luminate lacks. The biggest reason we started considering moving our site was for SEO purposes; we needed control over simple things such as our page urls, which Luminate makes more complicated than we wanted. But Wordpress also allows us to modify the backend code and of course you can take advantage of popular plugins and themes that already exist.

Hi Daryl, are you using Google Analytics to track donations, through to the thank you page? I am getting stuck on how to set it up as a goal. Or make any oglas, for that matter, each thank you page becomes a unique URL for that session.

Jim Fields

Paul St Onge:

Hey Jim, we have clients who have done this. Managing everything in one place is definitely a nice bonus. Two factors to consider are:

1) The amount of pages or content you have: If you have 50+ pages on your website, it might clutter up LO.

2) Plug-ins vs custom dev: If you build in something like wordpress, there are plenty of free plugins for things like calendars, blog rolls, FB widgets, search, page layouts etc. In Luminate, much of this would have to be built out custom. But if your needs are small, then it might still be efficient.


-Paul

Paul@doinggoodagency.com

Thanks, Paul! I can definitely see the need for our org to customize, so that would be important to keep in mind.


In your experience do Luminate and WordPress play nicely together?

Jim Fields

Daryl Bunker:

Hey Jim,


Our company is actually in the process of moving our site off of Luminate; we will still be using the platform for donation forms, surveys, emails, etc., but our site is being redesigned and migrated over to Wordpress. For us, it came down to customization, which Luminate lacks. The biggest reason we started considering moving our site was for SEO purposes; we needed control over simple things such as our page urls, which Luminate makes more complicated than we wanted. But Wordpress also allows us to modify the backend code and of course you can take advantage of popular plugins and themes that already exist.

Great to know! And I'm glad to hear from you who has direct experience, too. I read that your redesign and migration are in process, but so far would you say that Luminate and WordPress play well together?

Daryl Bunker

Lucas Metherall:

Daryl Bunker:

Hey Jim,


Our company is actually in the process of moving our site off of Luminate; we will still be using the platform for donation forms, surveys, emails, etc., but our site is being redesigned and migrated over to Wordpress. For us, it came down to customization, which Luminate lacks. The biggest reason we started considering moving our site was for SEO purposes; we needed control over simple things such as our page urls, which Luminate makes more complicated than we wanted. But Wordpress also allows us to modify the backend code and of course you can take advantage of popular plugins and themes that already exist.

Hi Daryl, are you using Google Analytics to track donations, through to the thank you page? I am getting stuck on how to set it up as a goal. Or make any oglas, for that matter, each thank you page becomes a unique URL for that session.

We don't actively track donations through GA for that specific reason, the Luminate urls are very messy. Although I imagine you can do it by regex, as the donation thank you page has something along the lines of "&donation=completed" (I can't remember the exact parameter that gets added to the url, sorry). So you could look for that along with the correct donation ID in the url. Around a year and a half ago I was working on something along those lines in Google Tag Manager, but we decided the info in GA wasn't worth the extra work \

Daryl Bunker

Jim Fields:

Daryl Bunker:

Hey Jim,


Our company is actually in the process of moving our site off of Luminate; we will still be using the platform for donation forms, surveys, emails, etc., but our site is being redesigned and migrated over to Wordpress. For us, it came down to customization, which Luminate lacks. The biggest reason we started considering moving our site was for SEO purposes; we needed control over simple things such as our page urls, which Luminate makes more complicated than we wanted. But Wordpress also allows us to modify the backend code and of course you can take advantage of popular plugins and themes that already exist.

Great to know! And I'm glad to hear from you who has direct experience, too. I read that your redesign and migration are in process, but so far would you say that Luminate and WordPress play well together?

If you want Luminate functionality in Wordpress, you'll need to use the API, which in my experience, is very clunky and outdated. I know it can be done and there are a lot of threads about it, Noah Cooper's LuminateExtend library in particular is very popular https://github.com/noahcooper/luminateExtend, but in the end we opted for not really integrating the two. Rather than embed our donation forms onto a Wordpress page, we'll just link directly to the form hosted by Luminate. My biggest complaint with the API is that the documentation is old and if you follow it, you'll wind up with errors.

Paul St Onge 2

Hey Jim, Yes I think Wordpress and LO play really well together. The majority of our clients have a WP site and use LO for donation forms, surveys, advocacy, etc. After you finish the redesign in WP, then you would want to update your LO pagewrappers to match your new branding. This would give your donors a nice seamless experience.

Jim Fields

Paul St Onge:

Hey Jim, Yes I think Wordpress and LO play really well together. The majority of our clients have a WP site and use LO for donation forms, surveys, advocacy, etc. After you finish the redesign in WP, then you would want to update your LO pagewrappers to match your new branding. This would give your donors a nice seamless experience.

Fantastic! Thank you, Paul!!

Jim Fields

Daryl Bunker:

If you want Luminate functionality in Wordpress, you'll need to use the API, which in my experience, is very clunky and outdated. I know it can be done and there are a lot of threads about it, Noah Cooper's LuminateExtend library in particular is very popular https://github.com/noahcooper/luminateExtend, but in the end we opted for not really integrating the two. Rather than embed our donation forms onto a Wordpress page, we'll just link directly to the form hosted by Luminate. My biggest complaint with the API is that the documentation is old and if you follow it, you'll wind up with errors.

Excellent!! Thanks so much, Daryl!!

Derek Martin

For what it's worth, Blackbaud has a new offering for building and hosting a website on the WordPress platform which is entirely subscription-based, meaning no large capital outlay to get going. Jim, I'd recommend reaching out to your Account Executive to learn more.

Jim Fields

Thank you, Derek! I appreciate that heads up!

Lisa Slawinski

Jim Fields:

Thank you, Derek! I appreciate that heads up!

Hi Jim,


I hope what Derek suggests helps as we've experienced a not-so-smooth relationship between WordPress and Luminate Online. Every time we change (or think of changing) our wrapper (the header and footer that displays on all donation forms), we have to consider the cost for the "custom" change to the wrapper from Blackbaud. We didn't realize it would be so difficult and the lack of flexibility is a hindrance.


Lisa

Jim Fields

I hope what Derek suggests helps as we've experienced a not-so-smooth relationship between WordPress and Luminate Online. Every time we change (or think of changing) our wrapper (the header and footer that displays on all donation forms), we have to consider the cost for the "custom" change to the wrapper from Blackbaud. We didn't realize it would be so difficult and the lack of flexibility is a hindrance.

Yes, his answer helps as does yours. Thank you!!

Jim Fields

Thank you to everyone who took the time to reply to my question. Based on what I've read here it sounds like using Luminate Online exclusively as our website will not meet our needs. We'll want more options to quickly and easily customize our content.


Thanks, community! You've made my first question a great experience!!

Philip Nawrocki

I agree with everyone else.


Luminate isn't built for a corporate website. Its good for microsites and all the other modules it has, but using a different platform for your corporate site is a wise idea. Just don't use Sharepoint. ;-)


Thanks,


Phi

Brian Mucha

There is Luminate CMS. I have no experience with it so not a recommendation, but my understanding is that it's regular Luminate Online with an expanded CMS module rather than PageBuilder.


I'd describe the API as more or less abandoned rather than clunky or outdated. It's REST, and Web Services is SOAP. But I don't think there's been an update or bug fix in years, and I see no evidence that any are planned. The documentation, such as it is, is indeed confusing at times and has some errors - and support won't deal with API issues. That said, we've done a lot with donations and surveys. As mentioned, LuminateExtend and Noah are a big help - LuminateExtend DOES get frequent updates and Noah is a big brain that posts here frequently. But you will need some JavaScript and time to make any headway with the API, of course.


Lisa's point about PageWrapper updates are exactly why I tell everyone to get an html person on staff, or at least a good contractor on retainer. You can do this stuff (and lots more cooler stuff) yourself instantly, and for free. We have four web devs, and everyone is kept pretty busy.


BPM

Jason Thomas

Brian Mucha:

There is Luminate CMS. I have no experience with it so not a recommendation, but my understanding is that it's regular Luminate Online with an expanded CMS module rather than PageBuilder.


I'd describe the API as more or less abandoned rather than clunky or outdated. It's REST, and Web Services is SOAP. But I don't think there's been an update or bug fix in years, and I see no evidence that any are planned. The documentation, such as it is, is indeed confusing at times and has some errors - and support won't deal with API issues. That said, we've done a lot with donations and surveys. As mentioned, LuminateExtend and Noah are a big help - LuminateExtend DOES get frequent updates and Noah is a big brain that posts here frequently. But you will need some JavaScript and time to make any headway with the API, of course.


Lisa's point about PageWrapper updates are exactly why I tell everyone to get an html person on staff, or at least a good contractor on retainer. You can do this stuff (and lots more cooler stuff) yourself instantly, and for free. We have four web devs, and everyone is kept pretty busy.


BPM

Whoa, four web devs! *jealous*

Brian Mucha

We're doing support, reports and all that sort of thing too of course. But everyone knows html and css well, and a couple of us work with js/jquery too. Phil concentrates on email, and another guy is dedicated to Teamraisers. We just hired a new entry level guy, and myself. And there still isn't enough time to do everything I want.


It wasn't a hard sell for us, just the ability to create and test variations on donation forms and email alone should pay for itself. That's something we're supposed to be doing constantly.