Kindful Reviews

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).

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.

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.

I love that we no longer have to send receipts at the end of the year. It saves me hours of time. The fact that it interfaces with our accounting program has cut down time for our accountant and helped him keep track of donors. Perhaps the biggest win for us is that we get our donations within a few days. The last donor management system we used only paid out once a month.

The expense. It is competitively priced but as a small non profit it's a chunk out of our budget.

Kindful's ease of use is the premiere experience.

Report writing and interpretation is its greatest weakness.

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.

Allows donors to designate their donations

We have some needs that Kindful does not provide:
-Ability to log calls within a donor's profile
-Table Within Contact with custom columns
-Auto-sync emails with donor’s profile
-Improve the note taking feature
-Individualized dashboard that shows the tasks and call history for the admin logged in.
-The ability to search donor profiles based on amounts they donated to specific programs/campaigns
-Be able to track all donations on each individual contact.
-Need ages for all donors so that when I’m calling I’ll know which generation of a family I’m calling
-Be able to actually see the pictures on each person’s profile. Not just a tiny circle that cannot be zoomed in on.
-Be able to tab between cells when entering or changing information in existing donor profiles. We currently have to enter and select “edit” for the next cell. (i.e. entering address changes)
-Being able to track recurring donors for those who send checks in monthly. The only way I can see to do this is making a group, which is fluid over time and doesn’t allow us to pull accurate historical information if a donor stops sending checks in and gets removed from the group.
-Attempt to make kindful by name and by email not just email. (Make it so that families don’t have to use a random email for their 14 year old.)
-Create a way other than the cause page for donated money for a mission trip will show up on the individuals profile not just their own donations.
-ability to search by birthday month

I chose Kindful as we were launching our non-profit after researching many products. With many products you have to choose between robust functionality and ease-of-use. The more it does, the more difficult it is to use. Kindful gave me the best of both worlds. It does nearly everything I would want it to do, with some great integrations such as Quickbooks and Mailchimp, and was still very user friendly. All with a price point that is more than competitive.

There maybe could be greater functionality and customization with the donation pages and plugins.

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.

Basic functions are easily taught, yet it has a robust reporting structure that is anything but basic. I can train others to do data entry as we get new donors and donations so they can gain confidence using the system quickly. Then I can show them other features as they are ready to learn more.

We are a membership organization and the software really isn't designed to manage memberships. They were upfront about this and give suggestions for addressing our needs and it is working for us.

I like how clean the layout is. Things are easy to find and easy to use. The simplicity and how connected to other co-workers you can be within the database is fantastic. The integration with quickbooks was the most appealing thing when we were purchasing the software... it is a little more finicky than anticipated, but still is nice to have connected.

How much needs to be done via integrations with other software. We are a small non-profit and can not afford all of the extra integrations. Also, there are a few basic things missing from Kindful that really need to be added. The duplicate tool is sub-par and there is no feature that catches if you are creating a duplicate contact or not. A lot of my time is spent merging duplicate contacts because there is nothing to catch them.

Easy to use, lots of useful information.

No formatting capabilities in event descriptions, registration receipts -- not even minimal HTML. A big problem for us. Also, somewhat unreliable credit card processing, users sometimes get a zip code error and cannot complete the transaction.

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.