Kindful (discontinued, now part of Bloomerang) vs. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

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

If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.

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

• Lots of connection points. I can associate a contact with an organization, an event and a donation, easily bouncing between them and pulling reports accordingly. Love this!
• This system has many more features than we will ever actually use but I love that because when we have a new idea or want to try something out we don't have to switch systems, we just have to dig a little deeper into salesforce and they probably have a solution waiting for us already.
• Salesforce is great at training! I love their trailhead and have used it a lot, especially when I was just getting to know the system. It is easy, fun, informative, and always there to teach me something new. I can also go at my own pace instead of many people's models of training through webinars that are almost always at inconvenient times.

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

• Learning curve - very powerful, but takes time to learn
• Batch processing - takes time and advanced skills to reach efficiency for data entry and certain operations which you want to do in batch
• Mass email is extremely limited - must choose a third party tool which adds complexity and cost to the system

Incentivized

There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out

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

I would say the support for Salesforce for Nonprofits is overall pretty great, as they offer many avenues to find the information you need and offer nonprofits the ability to work with Salesforce-trained volunteers or professional for free, which is useful especially during the customization process. I will say that I have often encountered situations where I needed to figure out certain information that I could not find even amongst the vast network of knowledge they provide.

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

As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.

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

• Salesforce for nonprofits is our source of truth for donor and member data.
• It's made a world of difference to know we only have to look in one place for an address or donation history.
• We have yet to connect Salesforce with our financial software (QBO) given the cost of the third-party connectors though I am investing a fewer lower cost options I have just found.

Incentivized