Kindrid

Excellent Value and Benefit

Comments: We've solved the problem of insufficient fund checks and people being able to give when they can't attend.

Pros:

Kindrid provides the opportunity for our church attenders to easily and confidently give either during our offering time or at their own convenience. It's especially helpful to those who can't attend in person. The church gets the offering by the next day, no worries about theft or insufficient funds, and we have an excellent record of the transactions. It's user friendly for both giver and bookkeeping!

Cons:

there are no negatives as far as I'm concerned.

The Kindrid Team is great; I use the product daily and it meets my needs to process our text giving.

Comments: This software allowed our organization (a church) to offer text giving to both our members and to guest users. Anyone was able to make a donation to our church. Sometimes we have a special designated offering and this software allows me to easily make changes and additions to categorize the gifts. This software also interfaces well with my financial software and it allows me to import the text giving directly into my contribution database (I use ACS). I have been using this software for several years and use it almost daily. I allows me to see in real time each gift amount and donor information as it is given. It has increased our giving both in amount and in frequency. Many of our donors set up recurring gifts which is a wonderful feature. Anytime that I needed any assistance from Kindrid I was able to reach them immediately in online live conversation and they have always been very attentive and knowledgeable and able to assist me. I am thankful for this product and it definitely meets and even exceeds my needs.

Pros:

I love how quickly the Kindrid Team responds to my questions and helps me to walk through with set up and any changes that I want to make to our text giving platform. I also love that this product captures information from the text giving in real time and I can see donations as they happen. This product interfaces with my ACS giving software which makes importing text donations to my financial software so easy. It is very user friendly with set up and making changes as needed. I would definitely recommend this product.

Cons:

I would prefer that the per donation charges and fees were applied and debited monthly rather than from each individual transaction. I realize that this may be a personal preference but I use another software for other credit and debit processing that does it this way and I find it works much better for me in my bookkeeping when I am able to track a one time monthly charge and fee rather than individual transaction fees. I do realize this may not be as beneficial to Kindrid however. They do bill the plan fee monthly but each transaction fee is posted individually to the transaction.

Could be more accounting/administratively friendly

Comments: Yes, this is a very easy platform to engage giving at your church. User setup is fairly simple, and the ease of use is really good. A simple text with an amount and a keyword and your gift is on its way. It is the backend accounting for the administrators that is a bit clunky. Unlike other giving platforms, Kindrid only allows you to connect one bank account. So if you are like most churches with multiple accounts for different funds, you will be making a lot of journal entries and transfers on backend to get your funds where they need to go. You cannot do split disbursement either. You can only make one deposit of whatever amount is currently available. The dashboard cannot be customized to view they way you want it. You cannot add keywords to a gift if one was not put in at the onset. Keywords can get hard to program to make it easy for the givers because the platform does not allow spaces between words. This seems silly until you actually have to tell the congregation what key word to use for a particular ministry or project. Like Pastor Appreciation. You can make it all one big word. Or try to shorten it up - PastApp, apprec, etc. You have to get creative in keyword assigning. The customer service is super friendly - all questions are answered through chat/email. Very quick to respond. It seems like there is some tweaking with this app that needs to be done to make it more user friendly for the people who manage the funds and do the accounting. We will probably keep looking for a more user friendly method.

Kindrid makes it extremely easy for our church to manage our text giving

Comments: We use this service to provide our attenders with the ability to make contributions via text. They simply text a keyword to a short code number and set up an account. Once that is done, they can give whenever they want by texting a keyword and a number. They can make one time gifts or recurring gifts. We have seen people give via this method that have never given any other way. It is so easy for people to use, and it is extremely easy for us to manage. It integrates easily with our database and is easy for our accountant to reconcile.

Pros:

It integrates easily with our database. It takes me only a few minutes a day to import the giving. Our users love the simplicity of using it. They can make one time contributions or set up recurring giving. They can also easily give toward different funds so we can use it for different purposes. Their customer service is outstanding. They always respond quickly, and they really worked hard to get the correct integration with our database setup. They listen to our needs and help us make sure we are collecting the information we need about our givers.

Cons:

The reporting is quite limited. I can't always get the reports I want, but if I ask support, they can send them.

Good platform but needs more administrative features

Comments: fast and east texting for the users. Clunky on the admin side. Kindrid integration with other platforms has not worked for us.

Pros:

Quick and easy on the user end to send a text and set up account. Easy to set deposits as either manual or automatic. Keywords are easy to set up on demand.

Cons:

Administrative features need imrpovement. Cannot run reports by keyword; no abililty for our church to assist users with changes to their accounts, we need to go through kindrid support. Inabilty to designate more than one bank account for deposits (a feature available on Paypal), which requires more administrative work on the back end. Could use a better mobile platform - edit features for the user do not always work. Administrative reporting overall could be better.