GETTING STARTED with Luminate Beta

How often is the data refreshed for these charts and graphs? (Especially Teamraiser)


What accounts for the difference between the new graphs and the old PopCharts?


For our usable housefile, the beta vs popChart numbers are close but still different.


JAN: 127,496 vs 135,262

OCT: 144,385 vs 144,172

Brian Mucha:

How often is the data refreshed for these charts and graphs? (Especially Teamraiser)


What accounts for the difference between the new graphs and the old PopCharts?


For our usable housefile, the beta vs popChart numbers are close but still different.


JAN: 127,496 vs 135,262

OCT: 144,385 vs 144,172

Hi Brian, Chris, and Karen,


Thanks for posting your questions to the community! I’m the lead product manager on Luminate Sky Reporting and these features. This is a long response but I think gives detail worth knowing about the new Business Intelligence capabilities we just released and what is coming soon.


First let me give a little more background on what we built behind the scenes which power these dashboards and that should help answer many of your questions. Though current gen Luminate had a few visualizations here and there (displayed using PopCharts) , they weren’t very complicated and they ran directly off the main Luminate (OLTP for the technical folks) Database. This is fine for low volume/complexity however that same database is also working hard to do all the LO updates/changes, operational reports, parts of email etc. and is designed to be the best at doing all those things at once but the database structure that works best for those operations isn’t optimal at doing in-depth, comparative analysis, on larger and more multi-dimensional data sets. Your experience as a user would be very frustrating as reports/visualizations took long periods of time to recalculate (not the systmes fault, it just specializes in doing other things well). So what we’ve done is set up an analytics optimized (OLAP) data store dedicated to just doing these more complex comparisons which mirrors the data in Luminate Online and can provide better Business Intelligence capabilities faster to your organization (this is an industry best practice).


Now this data needs to be replicated and moved over which does takes time, though no more than a day, and as we continue to build out capabilities we’ll be working to try to get it down to as short a time as possible (likely a few hours) as we optimize the system. This might feel a little odd at first because current LO reports start running immediately however that’s the difference between reporting running directly off the transactional database (which often is done for Operational Reporting) and data run off an analytics data store (typically Business Intelligence). Operational Reporting (basically data in/data out, maybe with a basic transformations like total/sum/avg) is reporting you need to run day-to-day tactical decisions like “Did John Smith make a donation with a designated gift? How many donations did the form have? “ and Business Intelligence reporting which is used to make higher level decisions like “Over time, what have been the most successful donation levels? How are do those stats change depending on the time of year/constituent state/gender/age etc? Are we on track to our goals?”. BI reporting is about uncovering the “Why” of data trends through analysis to allow for tracking of Key Performance Indicators and how the organization is tracking their progress toward goals. Because of that, data changes down to a few hours or a day make less of an impact to the decisions made based on those higher level trends.


So bringing this back to your questions: the dashboards created are not representing up-to-the minute data because they are all intended to track those higher level trends and success toward larger goals, and understood that they might seem basic for some experienced users who are used to pulling this data but for others it saves time running multiple reports and combing them together in excel, and because of that opens doors for them to start using this information to make more/better data driven decisions. Also, these dashboards are just the beginning of what we’ll be able to do because 80-90% of the work we’ve done up to this point is in the setup of the infrastructure I described above. More dashboards are planned and will come out more quickly, updates /enhancements to current dashboards can be made faster based on your feedback, and we are launching a new Business Intelligence visualization and dashboard creator next year which will allow you to create and track your own Key Performance Metrics. All of this will run off the infrastructure we’ve already built!


We are also integrating more data sources from other Blackbaud products like Attentive.ly Social data and Target Analytics and additionally RE NXT, FE NXT, and LCRM are all in the process of deploying the same BI analytics capabilities so we can start sharing data across systems as well. Chris mentioned Google Analytics and that is a great example of an additional outside data source we will also be able to integrate with this system so that data is available in dashboards as well as your visualization/dashboard creators too. You will even be able to upload your own data in a CSV to compare against, build visualizations with, Luminate Data.


As for any differences you see in the data I would say the best approach is to first look at the documentation which gets into more detail than we've provided before about what is included/not included in a certain metric/report/visualization. Most large differences between current gen and Luminate Beta are due to assumptions made about what to include or not include in certain metrics and knowing this helps you make better decisions. Smaller differences likely come down to the delay in moving data to the analytic database. However, if something is still unclear let Support know and they have further capabilities to look at the underlying logic at the code level and can let my engineering team know how we can update the documentation to be clearer for you or if there is a bug like not including self-donations when it should be there (Karen: This should be included btw so please open a Support case about it so we can look into it asap if it isn’t appearing for some reason). It’s also worth calling out that with our new architecture our average time for bug resolution and deployment into product so far has been just a few days! This is a huge improvement in capabilities that you might not think about or experience at first glance when starting to use Luminate Beta but will be making a large difference in how fast you see fixes happen and how quickly we can get features into your hands going forward.


You have so much data to learn from and play with it’s a very exciting to me that we can bring these BI capabilities to you for free as a Luminate customer to help you save time and respond faster to trends you are seeing at the campaign, program, and organization levels. These dashboards are just the tip of a much bigger set of capabilities that will continue to roll out this year, next year, and for years to come!


Please continue to provide us feedback and questions on anything I stated above or that you may think of later. Thanks!

Ken

Hi Kathryn,


I followed the permission steps, and still do not have access to Luminate Beta. No drop down box appears when I am in Luminate and click the Luminate Online button. Help please!


Lisa

Kathryn Hall:

It's official! All Luminate clients now have access to Luminate Beta ... that's your first taste of the next generation of Luminate Online.

We're so excited about this ... we're also aware that some folks report they don't see the tools. There's an essential permissions-setting step that needs to happen before you see the toolbar link for Beta dashboards.


If you've got questions or comments about Luminate Beta, I've created this thread to give a place to ask and to share with others in the community about your experience.


And if you're an introvert like me, you don't need to talk to anybody, just go right ahead to the Getting Started Guide to see the three-step process and get started today. Our Support team is also happy to talk to you if you have questions.

I am using Safari and not seeing the Luminate Beta -- does it work in Safari? Thanks!


Trish

I don't see the switcher. It was showing the week before BBCON but now its not showing at all. I have cleared by bookmarks and cannot get it to show. I did create a support case and they indicated you couldn't login with the bookmark.