Don’t miss these critical updates for Blackbaud Luminate Online

Blackbaud Luminate Online is a popular digital platform used by many nonprofit organizations for email campaigns and donation forms. If you’re one of them, you should be aware of two important changes coming to Luminate.

New donation form requirement: Later this month, Blackbaud is rolling out updates to the payment processing system on donation forms. This will require all LO donation forms to be updated by March 2025.

We haven’t had the opportunity to test the new form configurations out yet, so it’s hard to know how much work/time will be needed to make changes. Organizations with custom/redesigned forms are likely to need the most time.

Blackbaud says this change “provides a dynamic PCI v4.0-compliant and optimized payment journey for your supporters. This brings exciting features such as a new embedded or modal checkout experience, digital wallets, fee cover options, and enhanced security to comply with PCI v4.0.”

The digital wallet means that Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay and Google Pay options would be enabled (if you have these in your Blackbaud Merchant Services account).

More information on this topic can be found on this Blackbaud blog post.

Security feature update: Luminate Online has a feature called NEXTURL parameter that automatically redirects a user to another page after they successfully sign in or complete a survey. It sounds like some bad actors are leveraging this to get someone to sign in or complete a survey, and then it automatically redirects the user to a fraudulent site.

Blackbaud is recommending that you go to the site settings, enable the security feature and put in any URLs that you would want to allow people to be auto-redirected to. After Oct. 30, any external re-directs that are not on your allowlist will no longer function properly, and users will experience a “page not found” error.

Our best recommendation is to enable the security feature and then put your website as the only whitelisted domain. More info on this process can be found here.

Meta ad restrictions during election week

Meta announced a restriction period on ads about social issues, elections or politics before the Nov. 5 election. This restriction period is set from 12:01 a.m. PT on Oct. 29 through 11:59 p.m. PT on Nov. 5.

Depending on your organization’s mission and cause, this could have a significant impact on your year-end fundraising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. These are the same restrictions that Meta enforced in 2020, and most nonprofits will be in the clear.

However, even if you don't think your ads fall into those categories, you'll still want to review the details to prepare. If you are concerned, you can pause your social ad campaign during that time and reactivate it on Nov. 6.

New AI tools for video ad campaigns

Advertising Week took place Oct. 7-10 in New York, and we have two big announcements that nonprofit marketers and fundraisers should note: Meta and TikTok are both unveiling new AI tools for streamlining their ad campaigns.

Meta is making updates to its video ecosystem, creator content and generative AI ad creative tools—including video generation capabilities.

TikTok introduced Smart+, which “automates various stages of the ad-buying process, including creative development, targeting and optimization,” according to Digital Marketing News.

Both are in response to the rapid rise in consumption of video content on their platforms.