Join the Next Generation: Luminate Beta Email Contest

Shannon Emery

Hi Community!


Are you using Luminate Beta? Join the next generation and take part in our contest for an amazingly cool prize when you use the Email functionality and share your experience right here in the Community.


Use the new Email functionality and send a test email and share what you did here in this discussion for multiple chances to win. Bonus points for including a screenshot of your email! We want to know about your experience using this new functionality so the more feedback, the merrier! Our internal teams will be monitoring the discussion and will chime in!


Want to learn more? Check out all the rules and details here (including events, steps to get started, and other information) and get to emailing! We want to award you for being awesome so try out new functionality and get a prize on us!


Happy Emailing!

Stacy Dubuc

We would still LOVE to have access to this. We have been requesting this for a few months now - am I missing something? Is there someone we should contact outside of our account rep? We heard about this super cool feature that was "coming soon" quite some time ago and we still do not have access to it. Now there is a contest that we can not enter because we do not have access? Pardon my confusion but we have been clients since 2007 (yes, way back when!) and I am unclear as to how you all prioritize access to your products.


Year end is right around the corner and our team was really looking forward to the ease and ability to build beautiful mobile friendly emails as promised in the marketing materials.


We heard about this product in January (maybe earlier?), a request for us to have access was submitted in June...and now it is October.


Are we the only clients left in the dark here? We would like to join the next generation.

Michele Stender

Hi Stacy! Great news. We were able to remove some obstacles that we had on our end and get Email provisioned for you in Luminate Beta. I apologize that it took so long for us to get there and thank you for your patience with us! I hope that you find the tool valuable and know that we will be enhancing with new features as we iterate and get feedback from our clients!

Best,

Michele Stender

Product Manager

Rachel Nigro

Hi everyone!


Just wanted to bump this topic up! Have you sent an email through Luminate Beta yet? Who did you sent to? Do you have feedback about the tool? If so, we'd love to hear your experience below!


If you want to learn more about Email in Luminate Beta, we also have a 30-minute Tips & Timesavers webinar, Using Luminate Beta Email and Lists, that is coming up next Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET led by our Customer Success Manager, Kent Gilliam‍. If you'd like to attend, click here to register.

Jeremy Reynolds

Just now got access. Having it on NXT kept it from going live in LO.


Is the party over?

Shannon Emery

Hi Jeremy Reynolds‍ - the party continues! We are extending the contest until November 30th so you have more time to participate and starting using Luminate Beta Email!




Happy emailing!

Loic Van Gaver

Just used the new email tool with a test and the result is great, the responsive looks great.

I know its a v1 and some features are missing compared to other drag & drop tools out there but it's a step in the right direction and it will cut so much time to produce our emails.

The only thing that I really miss is the opportunity to make changes in the html file. I would also like to be able to put some part of the text in superscript or subscript.

Lisa Slawinski

We sent our Enews on 10.30.18 to our whole list as we didn't realize the Lists didn't transfer from LO. We'll have to work it this and attend a few more webinars to understand what is fluid between the two systems (LO and Beta), and what we have to recreate.





Our Marketing Manager was tickled pink with the ease of the drag and drop of photos, but there's still much to learn!

Jeremy Reynolds

Lisa Slawinski:

We sent our Enews on 10.30.18 to our whole list as we didn't realize the Lists didn't transfer from LO. We'll have to work it this and attend a few more webinars to understand what is fluid between the two systems (LO and Beta), and what we have to recreate.


Our Marketing Manager was tickled pink with the ease of the drag and drop of photos, but there's still much to learn!

On that note, I was just starting to do our monthly newsletter in LOB last week, but I noticed there's no "View Online" link...is that intentional? Planned for future release? Done manually?

Michele Stender

Hi Jeremy Reynolds‍, I am a product manager for email in Luminate Beta. The ability to view email online isn't in our immediate backlog (next 6 mos) but it is something we are keeping an eye on for the future. If you have the time, please create an idea for this topic in the LO Beta idea bank so we can keep track of the urgency for this feature. Thank you all for the feedback so far and trying out this new feature.

Michele Stender

Product Manager, Next Gen

Jeremy Reynolds

Looks like there's already one on there. I'll vote for it.


Just kinda curious, though...were you finding that people don't really need it? I always kinda assumed it was a must have, but never really knew that to be the case.

Michele Stender

Great question, Jeremy Reynolds‍. It depends on what the primary use case for using the View Online link. This historically was used as a solution for when someone had images off or the email didn't render well in certain clients. That is a minority case now because most all email clients display content well these days. Some would argue that you no longer need that link and it takes up valuable space at the top of your email. However, I know others that like to use this for other reasons (like social sharing). I am definitely open to feedback on this topic in the ideas bank!

Ana Popescu

I would love to use luminate beta emails, unfortunatley the fact that the lists are so limited and not versatile is stopping me for doing that. Plus the groups that are in there are not reliable and don't show the correct results so at this moment I don't feel confident sending an email to just "random" 100 people in my database. If I could have access to the groups I have created in luminate that will be great and I would send the email in a heart bit but until then I'll wait. I love how easy are the templates let's hope they can figure out an easy way for the delivery lists and giving us access to groups from Luminate (where I can import lists of donors from queries in RE and manage my groups the way I want)

Philip Nawrocki

LOB (I like that Jeremy Reynolds‍ ) e-mail seems to be good for a smaller non-profit that has some resource limitations/no in-house expertise. If an org has a dedicated developer, this boxes them in with no option to just plug in HTML code they have developed. It's "next-gen" but not really because we lost functionality of the current-gen.


The fact we cannot use interests is a deal breaker right away. If someone unsubscribes, they unsubscribe from your entire house file. That is crazy for orgs that send all types of e-mails.


Also, why can I not edit the footer?


The one good thing about this is that LO, RENXT and OLX will all be using the same e-mail software. At least all of them will be in sync as they go forward, but we cannot use this at this time.

Michele Stender‍ What things are on the immediate backlog?


I know there is the LO/TR Roadmap tomorrow, and we might learn something from that, but it would be nice to have a better idea of what to expect.


Thanks,


Phil

Michele Stender

Hi all! We know this isn't going to meet all of your needs nor is it yet near feature parody of all the robustness of LOCG (Luminate Current Gen). This is just the first release of email in LOB (Luminate Beta). We expect that you can start using this tool to send some quick one-off emails that you might not have time to fully curate in LOCG. The ability to add HTML will be coming (probably in the later part of 2019) and we are researching the ability to expand on the list functionality.


Michele Stender

Product Manager

Hayley Adams

Very easy to use to create a quick email or newsletters. Love the way the improvements are going.

Hayley Adams

Michele Stender:

Hi all! We know this isn't going to meet all of your needs nor is it yet near feature parody of all the robustness of LOCG (Luminate Current Gen). This is just the first release of email in LOB (Luminate Beta). We expect that you can start using this tool to send some quick one-off emails that you might not have time to fully curate in LOCG. The ability to add HTML will be coming (probably in the later part of 2019) and we are researching the ability to expand on the list functionality.


Michele Stender

Product Manager

Would love to hear more about the expanded list functionality once it becomes available. It would be nice to email from beta to individuals who registered for specific calendar events. If this functionality already exists please let me know.


Thank you for all your help!

Hayley

Shannon Emery

Ana Popescu:

I would love to use luminate beta emails, unfortunatley the fact that the lists are so limited and not versatile is stopping me for doing that. Plus the groups that are in there are not reliable and don't show the correct results so at this moment I don't feel confident sending an email to just "random" 100 people in my database. If I could have access to the groups I have created in luminate that will be great and I would send the email in a heart bit but until then I'll wait. I love how easy are the templates let's hope they can figure out an easy way for the delivery lists and giving us access to groups from Luminate (where I can import lists of donors from queries in RE and manage my groups the way I want)

Hey Ana Popescu‍! I apologize but we changed the contest rules but didn't change the actual page - my mistake. Instead of emailing 100 recipients, you'll send one test email to our Community inbox to participate in the contest. You can find the steps here: https://community.blackbaud.com/emailcontest


Thank you for your feedback!

Jeremy Reynolds

Ana Popescu:

I would love to use luminate beta emails, unfortunatley the fact that the lists are so limited and not versatile is stopping me for doing that. Plus the groups that are in there are not reliable and don't show the correct results so at this moment I don't feel confident sending an email to just "random" 100 people in my database. If I could have access to the groups I have created in luminate that will be great and I would send the email in a heart bit but until then I'll wait. I love how easy are the templates let's hope they can figure out an easy way for the delivery lists and giving us access to groups from Luminate (where I can import lists of donors from queries in RE and manage my groups the way I want)

You should be able to use your old-school Luminate lists, Ana. Look for "Associated With" at the bottom of the "Constituent Basics" tab in your LOB list creator. As far as I can tell, it won't let you do it with "do not email" groups like it does in vanilla LO. I'd think the same would be true for limiting to interest groups, Philip. But yeah, if it's a global opt out then that's a non-starter.

Kathryn Hall

Ana Popescu:

I would love to use luminate beta emails, unfortunatley the fact that the lists are so limited and not versatile is stopping me for doing that. Plus the groups that are in there are not reliable and don't show the correct results so at this moment I don't feel confident sending an email to just "random" 100 people in my database. If I could have access to the groups I have created in luminate that will be great and I would send the email in a heart bit but until then I'll wait. I love how easy are the templates let's hope they can figure out an easy way for the delivery lists and giving us access to groups from Luminate (where I can import lists of donors from queries in RE and manage my groups the way I want)

Anna - we recognized this as a big factor keeping people from doing this challenge. We lowered the bar, rather than asking folks to send an email to 100 actual people. You can send a test email to community@blackbaud.com - details are all here: https://community.blackbaud.com/emailcontest (updated this morning). Hope you'll join in. I have a lot of these tumblers and I want to share them! - Kathryn

Ana Popescu

Kathryn Hall‍ I just sent a "test" email to Community@blackbaud.com . I wasn't able to add some feedback though. I sent a test to me first and there are somethings that i don't like but I don't have the options to change it (i.e one of my paragraphs is too much to the left side and there wasn't a way for me to move it. I tried the padding tool but it worsen the situation. Also the grammar spelling it wasn't working for me when I was writing the text. I know it's a work in progress and Love how quickly I was able to do that email but I would love to have a "preview" option so I can see how it looks and not send a test email for every change I do.

Ana Popescu

Jeremy Reynolds:

Ana Popescu:

I would love to use luminate beta emails, unfortunatley the fact that the lists are so limited and not versatile is stopping me for doing that. Plus the groups that are in there are not reliable and don't show the correct results so at this moment I don't feel confident sending an email to just "random" 100 people in my database. If I could have access to the groups I have created in luminate that will be great and I would send the email in a heart bit but until then I'll wait. I love how easy are the templates let's hope they can figure out an easy way for the delivery lists and giving us access to groups from Luminate (where I can import lists of donors from queries in RE and manage my groups the way I want)

You should be able to use your old-school Luminate lists, Ana. Look for "Associated With" at the bottom of the "Constituent Basics" tab in your LOB list creator. As far as I can tell, it won't let you do it with "do not email" groups like it does in vanilla LO. I'd think the same would be true for limiting to interest groups, Philip. But yeah, if it's a global opt out then that's a non-starter.

Jeremy Reynolds‍ I know I can use the group association the problem is the beta doesn't allow to many groups just couple of them and majority of them don't fit with the types of groups I have in my regular Luminate. As of now you can use groups associated with a team raiser event, opt-ins and Donors but i need groups that I created with external emails pulled from my RE and I was able to do those groups in luminate through an import but of course those groups don't show up in Beta in the group section.

Alex Russell

I really wanted to join the contest when it first launched and was super sad when I realized that there were certain groups from LO that I couldn't access to properly segment data. I was so happy when it expanded to sending test email!


The new drag-and-drop email designer is a ton of fun! It definitely beats having to adjust the stationary and preheader every time we want to send an email, we can just customize the layout in one place in each new email. I love all the templates and they have great ideas for placing content that we can definitely implement in our various newsletters and emails. Building the emails is so user-friendly; some of my coworkers bring their emails to me and just tell me to make it happen, but I think they could easily get the hang of using the new format. And I love the button creator!


There are still some quirks; for example, I had right-aligned social buttons for Facebook and Twitter, and in the actual email I received one ended up on the left side of the header and the other ended up in the center. And I'd love to see a preview so I can see how the columns will change on mobile devices. But I'm really looking forward to more features coming to LO Beta's Email function!

Gwendolyn Chambers

- Glad you changed this to a test email send instead. I went ahead and sent ya'll a test after testing internally. There are some items I hope are addressed. One is the footer editing limitation which I think was already mentioned. Here are a few others:

- Gif's do not seem to be allowed.

- Image size limit is lower than LO

- I had some difficulty maneuvering a headshot within our signature text. It kind of worked out ok but maybe there could be more flexibility?

- I was working with the Fundraising template you provide and including a donate graphic in the right side column. Since there is a 180 limit, our graphic is too small. I would like to be able to move the columns to accommodate a slightly larger graphic.

- I read the discussion over 'View in browser' link and I agree that they are not really necessary. That said, I often need it for social media and our president uses it .

- Is there a way to edit the link colors?

- We have a salutation included but it does not populate in the test message.

- Is there a way to control how the columns stack on mobile?

- The font is pretty small on my mobile device.


Thanks for creating this forum for testing. I'm super excited about the new email functionality.

-Gwendolyn

Danielle Kapsalakis

Is anyone having issues with high resolution images rendering blurry in Luminate Beta? I've uploaded high resolution images, dropped them into the Beta template, but in the testing and delivery process they appear very blurry.

Jennifer Schlager

This is such an awesome option - the email designer is SO easy to use, and I think is extremely helpful for those who do not have the design background to make their emails look so *pretty*. Thanks for the update!