Bonterra Salsa vs. Kindful (discontinued, now part of Bloomerang)

As I mentioned before, I was the decision maker for Salsa CRM. I worked in software prior to moving to nonprofit. I reviewed several software platforms. Salsa CRM was the most intuitive and met my needs as a whole.

Incentivized

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

• Managing donations - Salsa helps keep track of the donations coming in whether they are a one-time donation or a series of donations.
• Automatic email series (set it up once and it will run without you once you initiate the trigger point.)
• This software also allows you to set up roles within the company for controlling access to things like donations and data entry.

Incentivized

• 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

• With the constant updates comes challenges. Often times, with an update comes several small bugs that Salsa has to work to fix.
• I believe their customer support works from home so it is challenging to get a concrete answer on the first phone call. It often takes several follow ups.
• The implementation was a bit rocky but customer service worked with us a lot and we got through it! We were moving from google drive and several other platforms for ticket sales, emails, etc. so we didn't have any experience with this. It eventually all worked out and the Salsa team really stepped up to accommodate our needs.

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

It suits all of our needs.

Incentivized

You do not have to be a tech-savvy person to be able to use the CRM. Reporting is easy to do.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Their tech support is very good and I am very pleased with it. They speak in non-techie lingo for my non-techie staff just as easily as they speak techie to me (a techie). I appreciate their quick turn around in time to answer our questions and the follow up to make sure their answer(s) helped.

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

Classy is about the same cost per month. Classy was really good at peer-to-peer and crowdfunding. Salsa encompasses many more facets of a nonprofit. With Classy, we also had to have an email company and manage our supporters in a different program. Now, we do all three of those things together. Although Mailchimp is pretty straight forward and nice to use, I prefer the email capabilities of Salsa. I think this is because Mailchimp didn't have direct access to all the donor information and we had to use Zapier to communicate between our donor information and Mailchimp. Now, Salsa has some clever tools that allow you to both automate and manually send out emails.

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

• Upon using Salsa, our financial records are much easier to review and compare over time
• Salsa allows Foundation staff to quickly look up donor records and identify what steps need to be taken to cultivate and steward them better

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