Kindful is designed to be part of - not the whole of - a CRM/fund accounting strategy. The upside of this is that you are not pigeonholed into one system forever - it is designed to play nicely with other programs/systems. Once you go through the learning curve, the program is straightforward and easy to use. Customer support is fantastic for questions. I have to manually enter quite a few transactions, and it is much easier to do with Kindful than with Quickbooks. Automatic reports to my board of directors are fantastic. Also, for fund based accounting, this is much simpler to use than quickbooks - I do the math through kindful and my accountant does it through quickbooks - the information is automatically shared through the quickbooks integration. Zapier integration means you can get information in and out of kindful easily. Different price points for different organization sizes is key - a low cost entry point was a big deal for me.

Not the most intuitive layout, so takes some time getting used to, but once you do it is a very powerful tool. Looks good on a desktop, but not on iphone display. Integration with quickbooks is my main goal and is not perfect - numbers sync fine but sometimes followup is necessary to make sure the accounts/funds are credited properly. Would love to see an integration with campaign monitor for emails and a better to-do/task sharing interface (like basecamp).

Overall, I am happy with Kindful and the tools it provides my organization. It easy to use and my staff is not overwhelmed with using it. Their support team is top-notch and always able to help walk me through fixing an issue or answering a question.

I value our donors and I want to know how best to care for them and followup. I like the ease of use in creating new transactions and the automated reports. I like the reporting capabilities and ease of getting the data I need to manage our organization. I like that my staff finds it easy to use.

Entering a single new donor from a check takes additional steps to create the donor, then create the transaction. There is a batch tool that makes this process easier if entering multiple donations. There are some issues with reporting that make it difficult to pull everything I need. Most of these are one-off issues, but still important. I have not found the peer-to-peer tool easy enough to use where I feel confident that my donors would use it. I had to create a pdf to give to them to walk them through all the steps. I wish it had email and text message marketing built-in.

It is better than the system we were using before, which was not a CRM platform. We have the capability to add notes and upload documents to a constituent's record. That's about it.

Our problems with Kindful began with the data upload. Some of our batches were uploaded twice and the support team at Kindful could do nothing to rectify it. Once your data is into the system, it's a complete mess to view. It's organized in abstract boxes across the screen and difficult to filter for the info you need. We were excited that the platform integrated with MailChimp- but this has proven to be an awful integration. Kindful makes note of every time someone clicks on the email, so some records show as many as 20-30 actions for one sent email (apparently when users delete their emails in batches, this heightens the problem). Creating reports in Kindful is essentially impossible. Selecting your filters for output and view fields is difficult (a selection of check boxes organized alphabetically, not categorically). And once you finally create the awful report- you can save it, but can't go back and make any changes to the criteria you've set. So basically, start over. Then you might want to acknowledge your donors- good luck, because the merge fields are basic and dysfunctional, and the letters are ONLY generated as a PDF- so you can't edit them. Even the best of CRM systems doesn't get this perfect, and needs to offer editing capability. I also only learned the hard way that if you upload a gift manually, the system is going to automatically send an acknowledgement to that recipient unless you tell it otherwise. Overall- pay more for a slightly better system. Kindful is one of the cheapest on the market, and I can 100% see why.

In general it has been good in that it enabled us to take payments from donors and recurring payments and ACH payments. But I feel that we are struggling to get it working the way it should or to fully meet our needs.

I really like the fact that Kindful has a clean interface and makes certain things really simple: e.g. running a campaign, accepting donations online, setting up automatic emails to thank people, etc.

Somethings just seem much harder than they should be. e.g. (1) designing reports to work the way you want them to. In most cases you have to export it to Excel and muck around with it there - even things like column ordering is non definable. (2) Integration with Mailchimp for instance works, as long as you do it exactly as they want. For instance, Mailchimp sets users Country to "United States", Kindful sets it to "United States of America". So, guess what - the contacts will not sync to Mailchimp! I updated all the country names in Mailchimp and it still did not work. Advice from Kindful= perhaps don't collect that information!? (3) Groups sound powerful (e.g. group all the people who live in a certain geographic area) BUT they are not dynamic. So you add a new user for that area and they don't end up in the group! Until you re-run the rules or manually add them to the group. This is super unhelpful - there definitely ought to be an auto-update option. (4) When you set up groups based on a set of rules, you can't go back and edit the criteria for the selection. I don't think you can even see what the criteria was...?? It's frustrating because the software has lots of great features and it works hard to be simple. It's just that somethings don't work as well as you expect them to. I don't think that this is a trade off of functionality for simplicity's sake - it just seems lacking in places.