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).

The integration with Classy, QuickBooks, and MailChimp has been life-changing and has definitely increased productivity. We paid for the additional support feature and that has been super helpful; allowing us time to gather questions and then meet every two weeks with our customer lead to discuss and troubleshoot.

The all-in-one feature and how user-friendly the software is. Did I mention the integration was simple and overnight?

The MailChimp tagging and integration is something to get used to but the support has been helpful.

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.

Over all, I like KF. When ever I need help, someone is available to assist. Your support team is great.

It was a lot of work to change to KF. However, any change to new data software reqires effort for accuracy.

We thought we would have more one on one traning. If it wasnt for the great chat support, I would have had a hard time.

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.

Our donor retention has increased, our organization and capacity for communication has more than double. We love Kindful!

When we decided to implement Kindful as our donor management and CRM software, we didn't realize the gift that we were giving ourselves as an organization. Kindful has allowed us to grow and scale in a way that wasn't possible before implementation. It has given us insight and helped us with donor retention. It has reduced our workload and made growth possible.

It's such a powerful tool that it can be difficult to learn sometimes; however, compared to other tools out there, it's a beautiful interface with a much shorter learning curve.

Overall, Kindful's customer service and their willingness to teach you how to use any tool could outweigh any negative. It's extremely user-friendly and you can tell was created with the user in mind.

I like most that I can see a very clear snapshot of a donor's activity on their profile. Donations, if they recently opened a mailing, if they have been acknowledged etc.

For fundraising, I feel that there could be a better way to host a fundraiser for an event through Kindful.

To date, it has been a positive experience from data entry to reporting. I hope, with the recent hire of an administrative manager, that we will make better use of the software.

After one year of using another product, I requested that my team member investigate other options. After reviewing several options, Kindful seemed to match the needs we had and addressed the paths that we hoped to go. We are still in the learning curve of the many features, but the software has been very helpful in achieving what we need.

I have not had too many negative experiences with the software. I wish there was a way to print the dashboard for overview reports for my board. If there is a way I would like to learn it.

Our overall experience has been good. Have worked out most of the kinks over the last year and have been able to train other staffers to use it with ease. Thankful for the support and quick answers to our questions and resolutions (though not always solutions) to our challenges.

Easy to use. Has most of what we need without being overwhelming or requiring our own IT/programming team. Friendly and helpful support.

Not as customizable as some CRMs are, so while Kindful Is taking care of most of our needs, we have had to hobble a few things together with it to make it serve all of our needs.

We needed a place to both store historical donor data as well as organize a capital campaign as well as a sustaining campaign.

Ease of setup and use Capture of information from Paypal Automated tax receipts and easy end of year tax documents

Lack of ability to setup and link different paypal / payment accounts to each of the different campaigns Awkward interactions when you are both an admin and a donor Limited customization of public facing donation pages.

Overall I am incredibly happy with Kindful. It is very easy to use and on any type of hardware! Whenever I have a question or problem my customer support contact is always available and I get answers right away. The setup was easy and the care that the team at Kindful have for their customers is second to none.

I love the features, ease of use, quick access to support professionals and individualized customer service.

There are one or two features that our organization could use that are not on Kindful, like a very robust events and program management system. But to be fair, unless one is customizing a CRM, it is almost impossible to find. Additionally, the mail sync feature no longer works with gmail, and that would be a huge help to have.

Customer service is outstanding - I can often find my answers in the help menu, but when I don't the email response is almost immediate and very thoughtful & thorough. There is little that I dislike about Kindful. Support during start up was personalized and authentically interested in what my needs and questions were, I didn't ever feel that I was being pitched to. It is quick and easy to set up and link with Stripe etc. Importing donor information from our previous system was very simple, but I felt that Kindful staff were ready to assist at every step if I needed. Day-to-day I get just the right amount of updates in my email inbox. Payments and new donors are quick and easy to add. The dashboard is attractive and has very relevant information. Reports are easy to generate. I have recommended Kindful to several other local agencies - and I found it myself from another local agency. Price is right for a small non-profit, too.

Pros FAR outweigh the cons! Some of the features are not completely intuitive, especially the naming and categorization of them. Sometimes I have to click on several tabs to find the feature I was looking for. Some of the "field" names do not function as I expect them to - but customer support assisted me in writing a query to fix them all at once. (it was not too problematic) I don't love the formatting for snailmailers and acknowledgements - but I haven't spent a whole lot of time trying to tweak them. I print envelopes from Kindful, and export the list of acknowledgements and mail-merge that data into a document I prepared in Microsoft Office; again, not a big deal, but I had to figure out this work-around.

The customer support team was fairly prompt in replying, but often they weren't on the same page. Not only that but we were being strung along for much of the time we were working with them. We were often promised that if they received a file, that it would be up in no time. After 7 months we were done with the broken promises. We were originally attracted to Kindful because of the ease of use and because it appeared to take something complicated (which some donor management systems can be) and make it simple enough for anyone in the organization to use. They offered support, and unlimited users which were a plus. Not only that but we were promised from the time of uploading our previous database and quickbook files, that it would be a month max before we were online and running. Unfortunately, we did not received what was promised. We were asked multiple times for different files and tweaks to the files and it was clear that we were not a priority for the staff. After back and forth of needing different files for 6 MONTHS, we gave an ultimatum that we would need to have the system up and running by the end of the 7 month or else we would need to find another provider. By the 7th month, we were still promised it was almost ready (something they had been promising since the 3rd month that we had been paying for the service). In the end, the system was never finished and we were never fully functional. We filed a complaint with the better business bureau. Kindful responded with a timeline that made it look like they were diligent. We responded with scores of emails that left no doubt they had dropped the ball and there has been no reply since then. We are a small non profit with basic and general methods of receipting. We use Quickbooks but Kindful required multiple practices which forced us to create work arounds simply to use some of the methods we have used before. We are all about change, but when the new methods require more work, we tend to want to keep it simple and efficient. Kindful made some things easier while making other things harder.

Onboarding and uploading data was smooth, however it could not run robust reports, could not customize event page with something as simple as adding a field for participant to choose shirt size.

It had a good price point that included CRM and event and peer to peer platform

Customer service was horrible. You could not talk to a live person. You would use chat box or email only to get a link to a response 48 hours later.

Kindful is a wonderful software, with a really strong customer service team. I have used a number of platforms over the years and I find Kindful to be my favorite. I have never used a "perfect" CRM and we know that there isn’t such a thing, so if you can't have perfect its really nice to have good, with great customer service.

- It's very user-friendly - It works with most of the other software we use (Mailchimp, Eventbrite, Quickbooks, Zapier...) - Kindful has the very best customer service

- It's "dashboard" doesn't report accurately, you have to create custom reports to get some of the actual data they advertise. The most frustrating dashboard number they display that isn't accurate is there "Retention Rate" number. Rather than showing donor retention, it shows activity retention, meaning that if someone came to a free event one time and doesn't end up giving a donation within a year it shows it as a drop in your retention. - The duplicate finder isn't very strong, and takes a lot of manual work. We have to call kindful every few months to ask them to reset the duplicate finder so that it will work again. - The "Fundraising" tools aren't very robust.

Wonderful!

The ability to integrate with other software The ways we're able to capture lots of information and different types of gifts

It needs a fully integrated email system - at least with a more advanced text editor and a way to view emails that have gone out from the system.

Kindful is easy to use and track donations by campaign or by fund. You can setup color scheme preferences for all donation pages or you can customize each and every one. Kindful pages are clean and the Dashboard as been recently improved to really help monitor donor management such as donors that have upgraded giving, retention rates, activity on recurring donations, etc. The Kindful on boarding team was extremely helpful in assisting me setup my donation pages, multiple campaigns, and making sure all my data was successfully transitioned from my previous payment gateway. Making the switch to Kindful has made it much easier for us to manage donor relations and also get better reporting by each campaign.

Some reporting features could be improved to make sure you can download actual donated funds that do not include refunds or canceled payments. While you can get customer support via email, I wish my monthly fee included at least some webchat or phone based customer support without an additional fee.