Blackbaud Altru vs. Kindful (discontinued, now part of Bloomerang)

Destinations with both membership/donations and admissions will benefit from Altru's capability to track revenue from all angles. As a pretty robust system, you'll find many ways to utilize Altru including through mailings and mailing lists, major donor moves management, merchandise, and online forms.

If your primary goals are: the ability to accept online donations [best/easiest to use donation form I've seen], acknowledge donors, and keep constituent data in one location - and you're willing to look for integrated solutions for other specific uses based on your needs - Kindful is for you. Bonus: Pricing for Kindful makes it easy to find the budget for other integrated solutions... because even if it doesn't do it all - it is still really inexpensive for what it does accomplish.

Incentivized

• Instant sharing of data across departments. When a visitor's address is updated at the front desk, that information is available immediately to our development staff.
• 360 degree view of our visitors. We can see all of a visitor's activity -- when they're coming to the museum, what events they attend -- which gives us a better understanding of their needs.
• Altru can be accessed from anywhere. If we hold an event off-site, we can still handle admissions/registrations so long as there is a network.
• Altru Tech Support is awesome! They are very patient and, if they don't know the answer, they find out for you.

• Campaign pages are easy to set up and donor information is captured for use in managing these donors long term.
• Kindful syncs with a number of useful and applicable apps such as Eventbrite which reduces the amount of time we need to spend on administration.

Incentivized

• Custom querying features can be cumbersome to build and don't always give you the results you expect.
• Online payments cannot always be re-designated, which can be difficult with high level donors and board members make pledge payments through an online form and then they cannot be re-designated to their pledge.
• Multiple donor or membership programs can be difficult to manage.

Incentivized

• Program Management - the system is still evolving which is great, but it currently does not fill every single program management and event management need that we have.
• Mail sync - Kindful no longer syncs with Gmail, which is a big issue with tracking emails and attaching those interactions to specific people.

Incentivized

From operations, support, and donor management, Kindful's UX and UI are top-notch.

Incentivized

They are always available and very knowledgable. Many times I am able to come up with a solution before they've finished troubleshooting just by having talked through it with them. I really appreciate the Chat feature to answer simple questions in a timely fashion. The training I received was top notch and very detailed.

Incentivized

I have not utilized the support for Kindful very often but the one time I have was fantastic. It was quick, courteous and thorough. Kindful consistently offers Webinars that outline the best way to utilize their product and get the most out of it. I think Kindful does a pretty solid job with support.

Incentivized

Having used multiple databases to collect data from visitors across all of our points of contact, we found we had information, but no comparison between areas. It was possible to have a volunteer who made a donation, bought a membership, made purchases in the shop, and attended a workshop, but only visited the galleries 1x a year. The result was to have power users without knowing it. While each of the products we had used were fine in their own right, they lacked the ability to tell us what we most needed to know - how often we were used across all of our points of service. Altru gave us that.

Incentivized

• Kindful is a one-stop-shop solution (whereas Salesforce and Dynamics require add-ons)
• Kindful is much more affordable than Virtuous, Salesforce, Microsoft when your team grows
• There are many more integrations available than with all competitors we evaluated

Incentivized

• It has become very tedious to account for registrants in each session of a class or camp, because you have to "sell" them into each session in order to have an accurate class roster.
• It is very easy to process payment and entry fees to our Museum and programs.
• It is easy to retrieve accurate information and records of patrons.

Incentivized

• Kindful's customer service team has saved us a lot of time and effort by being extremely helpful. I can't speak highly enough about the customer service they offer.
• We spend a lot of time cleaning our data base. I wish Kindful had a cleaner integration process.

Incentivized