Convio Luminate (discontinued) vs. Kindful, a Bloomerang product

It does great with donor cultivation processes and the workflow feature is top-notch for automating processes. Where it does a less than stellar job is getting it to work more specifically for your organization. Often times building that kind of special feature costs a significant time and money investment and it is something that is hard to transfer when it's time to move to a new database.

Incentivized

Kindful is well suited when:

• Important to integrate with a wide range of systems such as online fundraising tools or event registration without being tied to a single vendor
• Small to medium sized organizations looking for an affordable but powerful donor database/CRM
• Need a powerful but user friendly tool with customizable reports

Kindful is not well suited when:

• You need very advanced customization such as the ability to built entire custom screens
• You need to track donations in multiple currencies

Incentivized

• Luminate takes some of the legwork out of setting up NSPS for nonprofit use of salesforce.

Incentivized

• We particularly love the flexibility of Kindful's donation pages and donation plug-ins. They make it possible for us to accept donations on our website, without having donors have to leave the website.
• Kindful effectively streamlines back-office functions including acknowledgements for gifts - which saves our small 2-person team vital hours each week.
• Kindful integrates to a variety of valuable platforms, allowing us to manage all of our data in one place. Currently, we integrate with MailChimp [so all email recipients are segmented in Kindful, emails are sent from MailChimp], Fundraising Report Card, and several custom integrations through Kindful's open API [including one that tracks volunteer events and another that connects to CauseVox].
• Kindful's basic metrics and "dashboard" give us instant access to live fundraising results that are shown against historical information - giving us the ability to see how we're doing at all times.

Incentivized

• Big Investment
• It's a sales program with a donation management overlay so it has some troubles around reporting.

Incentivized

• Detailed custom email campaigns and reports can be confusing to navigate. However, Kindful provides excellent customer support and training to make it as easy as possible.
• The price can be a turn off for many people, but if you have an aggressive plan to increase funding, Kindful pricing is scalable based on the size of your database.

Incentivized

Support for the product is horrible; often support will have you bouncing between Blackbaud support and Salesforce support and it's very rare either are able to find simple solutions. Most of the time the solutions almost always cost money and hiring consultants which, for a smaller organization, means not being able to achieve proper solutions.

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

Of the databases I have used, Luminate CRM is my least favorite. However, it is powerful and large enough to function adequately for a large nonprofit; I couldn't say the same for some of Blackbaud's smaller products. We definitely need the full Luminate Suite (Luminate Online, Team Raiser, etc.,) to make it work, though - and we're constantly disappointed by the clumsiness of the way all the pieces interact.

Incentivized

We recently added HarnessApp to our software tools. Harness has a strong donor interface but not the backbone that Kindful has to offer. We find them a good match. I looked at dozens of other platforms that compare to Kindful but we always find ourselves sticking with Kindful as our primary CRM.

Incentivized

• Uncertain; we have not collected data on this. Our Luminate package is quite expensive, though.

Incentivized

• It is great to be able to quickly tell a prospective sponsor how we are doing financially in each fundraiser along with repeat donors that are helping to keep us going.
• I love that it sends a receipt to the donor immediately (if the email address is included in the profile) without me having to do anything! I am sure our donors love it too.

Incentivized