Name: Reach More, Engage Faster: SMS, MMS, and RCS Messaging with Luminate Online and TeamRaiser
Uploaded: 2026-08-25T16:31:23.348Z
Duration: 37 min 1 s
Description: Reach More, Engage Faster: SMS, MMS, and RCS Messaging with Luminate Online and TeamRaiser

Transcript for "Reach More, Engage Faster: SMS, MMS, and RCS Messaging with Luminate Online and TeamRaiser": Thanks everyone for joining us today. We're really excited to spend the next forty, forty five minutes or so with you talking about how messaging is evolving inside of Luminate Online and Team Raiser with our all new native integration with our great partners over at Nucleus. And we'll talk more importantly about why this evolution matters at this point in time for all of your fundraising teams. So for the most part, today's session is going to be educational first. We'll talk about what's changing, why automation has become an essential part of your messaging strategy, and how integrated RCS, MMS, and SMS fits naturally into that shift. Then we'll ground it in some real examples and our friends over at Nucleus and Cathy will do a live demo for us. But before we get started, as always, just a few housekeeping items. Audio is coming through, your computer speakers. If you run into any issues, a quick browser refresh, typically does the trick on that one. We are live today, so feel free to use the q and a panel to submit your questions as they come up, and we'll try our best to answer them live. And if not live, then we will answer them at the end of our session. You'll also receive a recording of this webinar directly after this ends and the slides are going to be available for you in the docs tab up on your top right corner. Looks like we have a blank agenda slide, so I'm going to move ahead and we're going to spend our time together starting with a quick introduction here, framing around what we're going to do today. Cathy's gonna spend the majority of the time walking through the Nucleus messaging side of things, the RCS function functionality and a live demo. So just as a quick introduction, I'm Seth Braddock. I lead the product management team for Luminate Online and TeamRazor here at Blackbaud. I'm based in Syracuse, New York. When I am not building new products for you into my spare time, especially as we get to the close of summer, I'm probably gonna be on the golf course trying to trying to improve my handicap before I, before the season ends, or I'll be out with my my Labrador Retriever auto. Kathy? Hi, everyone. My name is Kathy Kempf. I'm the CEO of, New Clavis. A little bit about myself. I have an incredibly big soft spot for rescue dogs, and I have five dogs. So I actually chose not to work from home today, so there's no barking and dogs running around behind the scenes. So I actually came to a, workspace to make sure I had nice, quiet, and reliable Internet. Nucleus has been around for about four years, and, we're really excited to be able to share more with you guys today about our, native integration with Luminate online and our expanded options beyond peer to peer. So, you are gonna be in for a treat. Awesome. Alright. Well, that, quick overview of Luminate Online and Team Raiser, and then I'll pass over to Cathy. As most of you know, and if you are new to Luminate Online, just a refresher, Luminate Online and Team Raiser is a personalized fundraiser and donor engagement platform. It is not an add on. It is embedded at the core of the platform to enable organizations to build deeper, more meaningful relationships at every stage of the supporter journey from website page creation to marketing automation through email and now our CSMS and SMS, peer to peer fundraising engagement, the whole nine. And these products have endured over the last twenty six years for a reason. Luminate online and Team Raiser are proven market leading solutions, and they are still trusted by the most successful nonprofits across North America for all of their fundraising and peer to peer engagement needs. So let me tell you a little bit about, Nucleus and our mobile first solution. So we have been around for four years. Next month is actually our anniversary, and we started out really focused on mobile first peer to peer solutions specifically. So, we started with our white labeled enterprise peer to peer mobile app. We service about probably 50% of the top 30, in The US market and about probably half in the Canadian market. So the idea behind our mobile app experience is a fully branded app allowing you to have an extension of your brand in the mobile space, and that would allow you to continue to have your web experience. But as we know in today's day and age, almost 80 plus percent of traffic is actually coming from mobile devices. So it really enables you to have, an optimized experience, for your users. What we've seen in all of our benchmark data is across the board, users who adopt the mobile app are actually raising a 167% more than non mobile app users, so certainly making a very large impact to your bottom line. One of the challenges that, we see in today's day and age is that participant registration is down for many organizations. That trend started in 2025. It's continued in 2026. And so what can you possibly do to make these, participants more effective fundraisers? So that is one of the things that we tried to solve for on the Nucleus side of the house. The second thing that second product that we rolled out is our peer to peer messaging solution allowing us to be able to create journeys, so broadcast messaging, for peer to peer specifically. So allowing you to focus on recruitment and, coaching, fundraising coaching, just like you would on the e communication side of the house, but doing it in an automated fashion. So enabling you to really look at what is the fundraising life cycle of a participant. They might be registered sixty days before the event. That thirty day window we know is a really important sweet spot for them to be effective fundraisers. So how can you get them the right CTA at the right time based on their event and or based on when they registered if we're looking at a DIY, fundraiser? And so what we're able to do through this incredibly rich integration with Blackbaud Luminate online is enable us to be able to send the message to the right participant at the right time based on what they've done and what they haven't done most importantly so we can give them the correct call to action. And then last but not least, we have broadcast messaging that allows us to also send messages to any user regardless if they are in the peer to peer space or not. So being able to have this real time integration with Luminate online, being able to target specific individuals, whether they're past participants, whether they're existing, participants in a current event season or otherwise, enabling you to make sure that you're able to get the right message at the right time all within your Illuminate, admin experience rather than having to go to different platforms. So it's all fully integrated in the back end. So I'm going to hop over to the next slide. There we go. So this is the evolution of communication. So pre-two thousand, so some of us have been around that long, direct mail was the primary channel of communication. So, you would get tons of direct mail asking you to participate in an event, asking you to, you know, make a donation, etcetera. And not to say that direct mail is long gone, but we know it's also fairly expensive. So what has shifted between 2,000 and call it 2020? So one of the huge things is shift to communicating via email. So, you know, back in the early 2000s, everyone wanted to start an e newsletter and starting asking for gifts online and really moving from an offline world to a digital world. Now what's happened is everyone's jumped on the email bandwagon and emails are no longer getting the level of engagement that they once were. So open rates at best might be 30% at best. And click through rate, you know, don't don't even let's not even talk about click through rate because that's gonna be very sad. So what is that next evolution? What does that look like? So over the last five plus years, there's been this, you know, big movement to move towards SMS and MMS, and being able to start engaging people through a mobile mobile device. Well, that has continued to evolve and actually with iOS 26 which came out last September, you know, Apple has started more widely supporting RCS which is stands for Rich Communication Service. It was actually initially built by Google, and Apple just didn't wanna play ball. You know, they were just like, I'm not supporting it. We have this, iMessage thing that's fantastic and we wanna keep our little blue bubble. Right? And so it took them a while to admit that they were wrong, but also admit that they needed to really ensure that this was supported because SMS was no longer gonna do the trick. And so with RCS, you have a much, much richer experience. So while there still is a, time and place for SMS and MMS, when you're really looking for what does that optimized next gen experience look like, it's gonna be significantly richer than anything that you've seen in the past. So these are two little examples of what an MMS versus an RCS message might look like. So one of the most important things that you'll notice right off the bat is who is the message coming from. So it could be coming from a six digit short code if you've purchased one. In general, otherwise, it's gonna come from a 10 digit long code. But it's doesn't really mean anything to me whether it's 811464, whatever whatever. It just is a phone number. Right? On the right hand side, you can see that there's a Nami Woks branded icon and their name called Nami Woks fundraising. Much more identifiable. It jumps out at you. Right? So if a message comes in and you don't know who it's who it's from, if you were seeing a preview of the message with just a couple of lines and the event name or the event or the organization name is not prominently displayed in those first couple of lines, guess what likely can happen? Users are gonna be like, I don't know what that is. Delete or just leave it in unknown senders and don't engage. So this branded identity, the verified sender coming from Google, is gonna be worth so much. So getting an RCS channel is much more rigorous than getting approved for SMS or getting approved for a short code. All the carriers have to approve you and they do require quite a bit of due diligence in terms of your terms of service, your privacy policy, how you're handling data. If you are actually soliciting donations, you have to go through a different type of approval. And so it is more rigorous, but it actually says verified by Google. And so we know that it's not spam. They are very, very good at making sure they're keeping the spammers, out of their mix. But what you can see is, again, messages coming from the verified sender branded. It would have your iconography, your name, etcetera. And then you can have a video, you can have images, you can have an audio file, and those can be really large. So it can be up to 10 megabytes much, much larger than anything that you could do, on the MMS side. And then you could have a short URL, you could have a call to action like a button, and you also get read receipts. So that's actually something that you do not have available on SMS or MMS which is equivalent to an open rate for an email. And one of the things that we see on average is the open rates on, or the deliverability and open rates for, messages is about 90% compared to emails at about 30% at best. And so that's gonna be a huge differentiator and the time, that it takes to actually open a message. So emails might take days, weeks. If your Gen z could be months before you ever actually check your email, and then suddenly, that call to action may no longer be relevant. However, with text messaging, the average time it takes for an open rate and for someone to actually see the message, three minutes. So if you're thinking about how do I get the CTA to the person at the right time and make sure they're taking action, text messaging is the way to go. One other thing I'll also mention is RCS as of, you know, last year relatively new to iOS, but it's actually widely available across all the carriers in The US. We're seeing about 90% of carriers already support RCS in The US market. Of course, all the big ones, T Mobile, Verizon, AT and T, for sure already support it. But there's about 300 little carriers that might be local, distributed across the country, but it's still 90% across the board. So we do have an automatic rollback. So if someone maybe has RCS disabled on their device or two, the carrier that they have is a small local provider and they haven't upgraded their technology to support RCS, we roll over to MMS. Therefore, they're able to still get the same message. So let's talk about impact. What does this look like? And yes, that's a really good question, Pierre. It is available in Canada. We have several customers in Canada and they are doing incredibly well. It works exactly the same. It just needs to be, included as a country of origin at the application time. So breakthrough t one d actually deployed our messaging solution just over a year ago, and they are leveraging, of course, our Blackbaud Luminate online integration that I mentioned is incredibly deep. So we're able to retrieve new registrations, updated amounts raised, whatever the segmentation is that the individual, organization is looking at to be able to create this personalized messaging journey based on their fundraising life cycle. So it could be if they've updated their personal page. It could be if they're a self donor. It could be if they have, used the mobile app or not the mobile app, if they're a team captain or not, if they've achieved a specific fundraising milestone, you name it. What are all of those different parameters that you use in your traditional e communication plan and translate that to the mobile world and ensure that we're complementing these channels with the same CTAs and similar messages around the same time. So breakthrough t one b unlocked this mobile first potential by adopting both the mobile app and the texting solution, and the results were beyond what I had forecasted. In fact, we needed to rerun these numbers multiple times because I didn't quite believe the story was as strong as it was. So this is the the top line. If you have non mobile app participants, so not using the mobile app, not using texting, your average activation rate for fundraising is only 36% and those users on average raise $316. Now if you are using the mobile app and texting, that increases from 36% to 80% and the average amount raised goes to $1,138, a 260% growth. What a story. Right? And so when you're thinking about, okay, my participants are down. I need to help them raise more money. Well, here's a really great option to ensure that you are meeting users where they are, which is on a mobile device, and make it easier and frictionless for them to be able to raise more money. Awesome. The numbers really speak for themselves, don't they? But one thing that I'll add before I start I pass it back to Kathy for a live demo so you can see it in action is just how the messaging needs to be framed. And the goal here isn't just to add another channel for your team to manage just so that there's another thing to manage. The goal here is to remove the manual work that gets added, quote, unquote, but while improving the participant experience. So the additional work is, very much worth the return on investment as those numbers show. In general, email is just no longer enough, and that's what one of the main reasons why we decided to add Nucleus messaging within Luminate Online and Team Raisers so that we could turn this platform from a single channel marketing platform with email alone into a multichannel marketing platform almost overnight. And so the difference of why we chose Nucleus Messaging is that it is already deeply integrated into the Luminate online and Team Raiser ecosystem. You're using the same groups and segmentation and interest data that you already trust for your Luminate online platform and the the the groups that you already create, then targeting is automated. Journeys can scale. The recording's already built in, and now Nucleus messaging is just one more layer on top of that. And so the combination of all of these things then turns this dual channel marketing platform into an a true efficiency multiplier for you and your team. Messaging now stops becoming one more thing to manage, becomes more part of how you run your programs, helps your team scale the engagement, reduce the effort, and deliver better experiences and better outcomes for your organization. So what what does this actually look like inside of Luminate online? And it's gonna speak for itself when Luminate, when Kathy shares the demo. But as a at a high level, Nucleva's messaging supports now this onetime broadcast or journey based messaging through r c f RCS, MMS, and SMS messages. We released the TeamRaiser version of this earlier this year. So those of you that have existing peer to peer programs have had this functionality for a little while now. But most recently, we've scaled this up to support, messages being delivered not just through TeamRaiser but through Luminate online. So now you can leverage the power of Nucleus messaging for your entire end to end constituent journeys, not just through TeamRaiser and peer to peer, but through the campaign messages that you're sending as well, for example. And so the outcome of this is simple. We want to help you turn those timely personalized outreach messages across all of your campaigns and events into higher engagement and higher fundraising for your organizations. And so with that, I'd love to turn it over to you, Kathy, and we can we can turn this into a live demo so you can show exactly how this looks and how it works. Fantastic. So as Seth mentioned, we do have, the integration fully live with, Team Raiser within Luminate online and, the expanded option which allows you to, send messages to groups and, any segment that you choose, within Luminate is now readily and then group messages within the campaigns. sorry, Kathy. Sorry. Hold on. We're gonna pause for one. we we started the video, but we didn't realize that we can't talk over the video. It pauses and mutes our microphone. So sorry everybody for for that one. So so what we'll do, just so that you're prepared, is that this video is not gonna have voice over, but let's do this. We're gonna play it. All we ask is you watch it so you can see how it works, and then we'll come back off of mute and online, and Kathy can talk a little bit more to how it actually works. Sorry with the, the technical difficulties on that one. Alright. Thanks, everyone, for bearing with us on that. And if you had it in full screen so that you could see the entire thing, you may not have noticed that Kathy was doing her best to post real time updates in the chat as the video was playing. So feel free to to read back, and and align on on the message Kathy was delivering as the video was playing. But, Kathy, you can feel free to give a little recap here as well. Yeah. So, with Team Raiser, the integration was really focused on targeting current participants and past participants because the audience is very well defined. Right? You know, you might be targeting current participants or past participants, maybe team captains. Again, there might be specific segmentation. But that, that audience is pretty known. When we wanted to expand that integration to enable organizations to message any user with any type of segmentation, we realized that we needed to expand to be able to use groups. And so with groups, of course, as we know with LO, you can create a query, you can segment on anything you choose, have a group that's a one time, update, or you can have it scheduled to update at any point in time. And so that really enables you to be able to send a text message to anyone in Luminate online based on data that they have on their constituent record, whether it's interest they've opted into, whether they're from a specific state, whether they maybe donated last year during Giving Tuesday and we wanna target them again this year. Whatever that looks like, you can actually create that segment whenever you choose and then essentially what we will populate is the target groups, either who you're targeting or who you're suppressing. You can have as many groups as you want and we will integrate those in real time so that you're able to send a message to anyone in your house file. Of course, it's opted in. We wanna make sure that you're fully compliant, but you can then have, as much flexibility as you want and you don't have to have multiple platforms or multiple back ends, enabling you to be able to send out text messages. You can do it all within Illuminate online. Awesome. Alright. Well, let's end, with an update on pricing and packaging if for those that are interested in hearing that. Yeah. So, this is actually a similar, a package that we rolled out, in the March, April time frame when we had the Team Raiser integration, that that we announced. So what we wanted to do is make it, you know, easy for organizations to be able to jump into the text messaging, world. We recognize that it's a little bit different than email that, you know, with email, it's essentially free to send. But with text messaging, it isn't. And, one of the reasons it isn't is because carriers charge a fee. They charge a fee for read receipts. They charge a fee for inbounds. Everyone has a their hands out trying to take 0.5 a penny here or a penny here to make that ecosystem fully work. So, yeah, yes, it is more expensive than email, but it is far more effective and you will raise more money whether it's direct response, end of your giving, engaging your your your community, giving them mission updates. The return on investment will be far greater because people will actually read and see those messages. So the offer that we wanted to provide is that if you mention the webinar and choose to sign up with new Clevis messaging, just mention the webinar. We are able and you start with 150,000 message package credit, which a credit equals a message, not necessarily a large message or a small message. Every message credit is equal. You actually will get a thousand bonus message credits that you can use at any point in time. And so that allows you to dip your toe into the messaging world, start seeing some feedback and ROI around how effective it is, what is the open rate compared to email, are you able to actually What is the open rate compared to email? Are you able to actually see people raise more money or actually hire donations for a campaign for people that received a message versus just an email? So I would encourage you, if you do not have any type of messaging solution in your marketing stack that this is something that you explore because this is really going to meet your users where they are and in particular the younger generation. They are not doing email. They are on their mobile phones so all of us are trying to figure out how do we better engage the Gen z market and how do we start stewarding them, building relationships with them so that as they have increased purchasing power, we're able to connect with them and have an effective relationship with them to ask them for a gift. Right? And so this is gonna allow you to cut through the noise and enable you to start being where they are, which is gonna be on a mobile device. Awesome. And just to to wrap things up, there are a couple, there are a couple questions in the chat that I saw, so I can ask those to you, Kathy. But, from a Luminess Online and TeamRazor perspective, it was very intentional for us to choose to integrate Nucleus natively into Luminess Online and TeamRazor. A lot of you have the need not just for messaging via RCS, MMS, and SMS, but you also may have a need for mobile applications for certain programs. And Nucleus has a very deep integration with Lumenanda Online and TeamRazor for both of these things, and you will see that your outcomes and results will be, much, much different by pairing, these two tools together. So with that, I'll I'll I'm going back through the chat. One question we had oh, perfect. There you go. We'll put it on the screen here. So, Kathy, can you select multiple groups and suppress multiple groups like the email campaign function? Yeah. So you can actually select as many groups as you want, in both targeting as well as suppressing. So you don't have to do any query magic to be able to suppress groups. You can actually pick the groups you wanna target and pick the groups you wanna suppress. So you can do that and it will work just like it works on the email side of the house. Awesome. And I think the other one was, is this available in Canada? This is available in Canada, and we actually do have a customer who is, live in Canada, has actively been using it and seeing very similar, results to The US market. Again, just during the application process, you have to specify that you're targeting Canada versus US in terms of the carrier approval. But beyond that, really no no differences. Awesome. That was all I saw in the chat. Oh, here's one Right on time from Jay. Can you run AV. messages to gauge performance? So you can run AB testing. And so one of the things that you can do is create two versions of a message and be able to have a smaller send, be able to test out either the image or the content, CTA, whatever that might look like, be able to see what the results are, which one of the beautiful things about text messaging is with the open rates typically happening within three minutes, within an hour, you know what's gonna resonate and not resonate, and then you can actually do the final send of what you think is gonna perform the best. So I think the AB testing is gonna be much, much easier to run than email just because email takes so long to actually get data that's gonna be meaningful given the low open rate. So, AB testing, definitely something I would recommend. Awesome. I think there's one more question. Oh, no more questions. That was the last question. If there are any others yeah. Go ahead. one other thing that, wasn't asked but I wanna just kinda put out there because I do think it's really important is what is the, best send time? People always ask that and it definitely depends on the ask and the demographic. But one of the things that we're able to do that I think is fairly unique is have the send time be based on the person's area code. So if we know that there's this really narrow window and you want it to go out at 5PM local time to this individual, you don't wanna just pick 05:00 but then suddenly if the, you know, they're in, the West Coast, that's gonna be a pretty big difference in terms of that sweet spot of when people are gonna respond. So being able to use a person's area code, it's not a perfect science because some people have move around and people can take their their numbers with them, but it's gonna allow you to really ensure that you're sending it closest to that optimal window that you are expecting and targeting based on whatever the CTA looks like. So, something else that I just wanted to point out because I do think that's a a nice differentiator. One question that I have based on that, is some some organizations that we have talked with have asked about whether or not to copy email campaigns and send the same messages via text message or if they should be different sequences. And then, likewise, should this should the messages between email and text be sent at the same time or different times? What have you seen, Kathy? So I definitely think that they need to be complimentary. I would not do it on exactly the same same day or time, but I would try to make it complimentary too. I think the other thing that I see sometimes as a opportunity for improvement is it's not just like make this email smaller and send it via text. You really have to have a much more concise call to action and really think about, you know, you probably don't want more than 500 characters or so, and you want to make sure that that CTA is coming across really strongly. And so I do think that some people might think, oh, if I write emails, I can just write text messages. I would encourage you to really hone in on what the CTA is. I would also recommend to use some of our AI friends, to help us with helping, you know, make that CTA very clear, very concise. But I wouldn't do it on exactly the same day and time, but complimentary too. So maybe you, like, start with text and then follow-up with an email because we know that those might take longer to read, and or the the reverse. But definitely almost looking at what are the calendars that you're sending by channel and making sure that those are all working in unison because some people will see one versus the other. Some people might see both. But you do wanna make sure that they're seeing that consistent messaging across the board regardless of how they choose to engage with you. Last question. Will organizations who work with new Klaytis, will you support or help with strategy and messaging build out? Yeah. So, as part of our offering, we do provide, strategy to help organizations with what's the right message, help with the copywriting, help with the image creation to make sure that we're optimizing it for the channel that we're actually going to be using. We also partner with several agencies here in North America that have amazing teams working on either direct response or the peer to peer side. And so we're happy to work with an agency that you might already have on board, but also, you know, if your team doesn't have the capacity and you're looking for help directly, that's certainly something that we can offer as well. Awesome. And it seems like the last couple last questions have, sparked some new questions. So we've got a couple more in here, from John. So when donors ask questions in response to an initial message, those conversations live within Luminate or Nucleus. Great question. So, yeah, we do have an inbox. So similar to maybe what you would see with, you know, email, there's gonna be a reply to inbox that someone's going to need to manage. And so you'd be able to see what are all of the inbounds, be able to have AI filtering on the sentiment of the type of response. Is someone angry? Is someone excited and happy and just wants to say hi? So you can figure out how do you want to prioritize communicating with these individuals and then it allows you to actually have a back and forth, which would be more considered peer to peer messaging rather than broadcast. But it does have to be user initiated. Awesome. Looks like we got a couple more questions now, so thank you. Keep them coming if you've got them. So will we get a link to an on demand this is from Ray. So this is will we get a link to the on demand recording of today's webinar? That's for me. The answer is absolutely yes. You'll get the recording, and then, you can reply and, request more information on this. So we can send you directly to the Nucleus team to have that first conversation around messaging. There is one more question in the chat. So I'll just talk this one out loud. Can you use the RCS messaging for surveys? Good question. So, if you had a single response, you know, type in X, you certainly could do that. You could also link to a survey, that would certainly be an option. RCS allows you to do much richer integrations than just a link. So depending on what you are looking to ask in the survey, I would either recommend linking to a survey going to LO or maybe even asking people to just give you the response and then you could use the inbox to be able to run the stats. So you can also run a report on inbounds. And so if you want what are all of the inbounds for this particular message and then actually be able to see all of that data that would be another option. So that's a great question. I love that one. Yeah. Awesome one to end on. Well, we want to thank we're right at forty minutes. So hopefully, you've all booked this for an hour and you can have twenty minutes back in your day. The last thing that we'll share is that we're always available. So please post in the Blackbaud community whenever you have ideas or wanna get connected. And as mentioned, you'll get the recording of this. So you can you can rewatch it. You can reach out. You can share it with your team members. So we want to thank all of you for your time today and hope you have a great rest of the week.