How to Configure Luminate Online Forms with ImportOmatic
There’s a reason why many nonprofits rely on Luminate Online for their online donor engagement needs. Luminate Online is expansive, adaptive, and—when configured correctly—quite comprehensive.
With Luminate’s vigorous features and nearly countless configuration choices, your nonprofit can set unique goals and follow through with constituents in a completely customized way.
More and more nonprofits are looking to Raiser’s Edge as their preferred donor management system. Many nonprofits have come to use these two tools in tandem — Raiser’s Edge is great for tracking information about constituents and their giving history, whereas Luminate has tools specifically for collecting donations online.
Nonprofits have so many software solutions to turn to with regards to their marketing and donor engagement efforts. The primary concern with using multiple solutions is that an organization’s mountain of data can get quite muddled and overly complicated. Ensuring your software solutions can communicate well with each other is critical to combat these data dilemmas.
Using an intermediary data integration tool is often the best solution when importing data between these two systems. When considering integration between the two systems, be aware of the potential issues that can arise if your forms in Luminate Online are not configured correctly.
If you are using Omatic’s ImportOmatic connector to import data from Luminate Online to Raiser’s Edge in bulk, much of your success can be attributed to how forms are configured in Luminate Online. With slightly more attention to these forms up-front, seamless integration can be achieved.
Here’s a quick guide to correctly configuring your Luminate Online forms for better success when using in conjunction with ImportOmatic.
Configuring Luminate Online Forms
One of the more common uses we see for the ImportOmatic Connector for Luminate Online is to bring gifts into Raiser’s Edge, mainly from TeamRaiser donation pages. Identifying ‘Campaign,’ ‘Fund,’ ‘Appeal,’ and ‘Packages’ on those gifts are important to align with your current Raiser’s Edge setup so as not to disrupt the import process.
To do this, we suggest adding the following custom donation fields to your Luminate Online forms:
- ‘RE Campaign’
- ‘RE Fund’
- ‘RE Appeal’
- ‘RE Package’
Once added, values in those fields can be populated and then hidden on the form itself so that donors don’t see them. Despite being protected from what donors will see, know that these custom fields will be there. They will be extremely helpful to the synchronization process when gifts come in through your TeamRaiser page.
The ImportOmatic Connector for Luminate Online picks those custom fields up upon import, and automatically populates the ‘Campaign,’ ‘Fund,’ ‘Appeal’ and ‘Packages’ data onto any incoming gifts. Since these values automatically populate, one consideration is that if you are allowing for a designee option on the form, and therefore ‘Fund’ could vary, you may want to un-map the ‘RE Fund’ custom field in your ImportOmatic profile.
The benefits to configuring your TeamRaiser or other Luminate Online forms in the manner described above are that there will be no need to use dictionaries in your ImportOmatic profiles. This removes the need to translate a given Form ID into the corresponding ‘Campaign,’ ‘Fund,’ ‘Appeal’ and ‘Package’ that need to be associated with gifts.
While dictionaries are wonderful and very powerful tools in ImportOmatic, they do require maintenance to be effective. In this case, dictionaries would require continuous updates each time a new Luminate Online form is created.
Conclusion
The proper system configuration can make or break the success of your organization’s data collection process. When configuring Luminate Online forms, the process laid out above isn’t as time-intensive as you would imagine but certainly makes for a big impact. For future projects, make sure that your designers are aware of any extra considerations for configuration when using Luminate Online forms in tandem with ImportOmatic. This will ensure that your data and gift information flows smoothly from Luminate Online into Raiser’s Edge.