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

Specific scenarios where Blackbaud DonorCentral is well suited are definitely in regards to our Development team. They can quickly update our constituent's memberships and keep our communications team in the loop on current member emails and those who are in need or renewals. It also helps with their development and fundraising events. They are keeping track of the highest donors and those big prospective donors for future events. Scenarios, where it is less appropriate, are definitely in my meetings department. It does not sync with our registration database for conferences, so we have to do double work verifying if they are members or not.

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

• Has great security and privacy settings. Keeps your donor information safe.
• Has a direct link with donors to our information. Eliminates a lot of double work and or hitting the same donor with multiple emails.

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

• Doesn't interface with our Aventri Registration system.
• Has quite a few advertised features like SKY and DAF that don't get used that much and aren't as impressive as they say that are.

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

I gave it a low rating because response times are slow. It does have multiple ways to reach support, but it usually takes a while before you "get in front" of the person you need to fix your issue. Also, problems seem to happen a lot, so it makes the process more frustrating.

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 do not know of any other alternatives, as I do not work in the development department. Our Development team would have sourced alternatives to settle on this one.

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

• Helps development team keep a clear and concise donor relationship.
• Accounting can forecast money coming in more accurately.

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