If you run a nonprofit on Kindful, you already know the situation has changed. Kindful was acquired by Bloomerang and is no longer really its own product. It is not being sold to new organizations, it is not getting meaningful new development, and the path Bloomerang is steering everyone toward is an upgrade onto the Bloomerang platform.
For most Kindful organizations, none of that forces a decision on a random Tuesday. It comes to a head at renewal. That is the moment you look at the invoice and decide whether to move onto Bloomerang as the default, or treat this as the opening to ask a bigger question: now that you have to move anyway, where do you actually want to spend the next five years?
The easy path is clicking yes on the Bloomerang upgrade. For a lot of organizations that is genuinely the right call, and we will say so plainly. But it is worth slowing down long enough to make the decision on purpose, because renewing onto a new platform solves the renewal. It does not necessarily solve the reason your systems felt disconnected in the first place. Here is how we think about the choice, and what choosing HubSpot for your nonprofit actually involves.
Short answer: yes, but only for the right organization. HubSpot is a real alternative to Bloomerang for nonprofits that want a flexible platform they can scale and shape around their own operations. It is the wrong choice for nonprofits that want a fundraising tool that works out of the box with no decisions to make. The rest of this section is how to tell which one you are.
Let's start with where we are not the right answer, because it matters.
Bloomerang is the right call if you want an out of the box system you do not have to think about. If you do not want to spend energy deciding how your organization should operate, if you do not need much control, and if flexibility is not a priority, Bloomerang is fine. So are the other purpose-built nonprofit donor management tools. They are designed to be turned on and used, and for a small shop that wants the shortest distance from Kindful to a stable, working system, that simplicity is a feature, not a compromise.
HubSpot is the right call when you want something different. If you want a platform that drives scale and efficiency, and that can evolve with your organization as it grows and changes, that is what HubSpot gives you. The tradeoff is honest. HubSpot is not a fundraising product you turn on. It is a platform you build a fundraising operation on top of. You get flexibility and a system that bends to how you actually work, in exchange for doing real design work up front instead of accepting someone else's assumptions about how a nonprofit should run.
The mistake is comparing the two on a feature checklist. Bloomerang will win a fundraising-feature checklist, because that is what it was built to be. HubSpot will win a flexibility and scale checklist, because that is what it was built to be. The real question is not which tool has more fundraising features. It is whether you are a fundraising-database organization or a platform organization. Answer that first, and the rest of this gets a lot simpler.
Key lesson: Decide based on the organization you are becoming, not the feature list in front of you. If you want fundraising in a box, Bloomerang is a smart choice. If you want scale, efficiency, and a system that evolves, HubSpot is worth the work.
If you choose HubSpot, the first thing to understand is that Kindful and HubSpot do not structure data the same way, and the difference is bigger than it looks.
Kindful is flat and friendly. There is really one main concept, the contact, and there is no true separation between a person and an organization. Transactions and details hang off that contact record. It is intuitive, which is exactly why people like it. HubSpot uses defined objects with structured relationships, contacts and companies and deals connected by association labels, with no single all-in-one profile the way Kindful presents it.
As our implementation lead Casey Goodrich puts it, any system can hold your data, but not every system can let you act on it. Kindful can hold a lot. HubSpot can hold that same data and then let you connect it, display it, and operationalize it in ways that fit your actual processes rather than forcing you into a fixed mold. That is the upside. The cost is that the logic Kindful kept simple has to be consciously rebuilt, starting with how you separate people from organizations and what ties them together.
Key lesson: Kindful's flat, contact-only model does not translate one to one. The simplicity you liked in Kindful is the thing you now have to design around.
Kindful rarely worked alone. It usually sat in the middle of a stack, wired to MailChimp for email, an accounting system, event tools, matching-gift services, and a payment processor. That is part of what made Kindful feel modern, and it is also where a migration gets complicated, because you are not moving one system. You are moving everything Kindful was connected to.
Two realities surface fast. First, duplicates. Because an email address can be attached to multiple records in Kindful, it is normal to find the same person represented thirteen or fourteen times, created from different sources and different transactions over the years. On one recent migration, a contact list of roughly 51,000 records came down to about 34,000 after cleaning and deduplication, pulling from Kindful, a separate relationship tool, and MailChimp in a defined priority order. Hundreds of records still needed a human to decide which version was the one to keep.
Second, the export itself is not friendly. The full data export from Kindful comes out in a structure that almost requires a relational database to make sense of. Values you expect to see on a contact actually live on separate tables, referenced by keys, so completing a single record becomes a scavenger hunt across tables to find where the real data lives. This is not a drag-and-drop migration, no matter how clean your data feels from the inside.
Key lesson: Before you do anything else, export your contacts and count how many duplicates you have by email. That number, and whether Kindful even lets you run a full export, tells you most of what you need to know about the road ahead.
The instinct in any migration is to bring everything, so nothing is lost. That instinct is almost always wrong. Migrating years of accumulated junk just rebuilds the mess in a more expensive place.
Kindful makes custom fields easy, which means most organizations have a lot of them, and many are abandoned, duplicated, or quietly repurposed. We have seen a custom field that was renamed and reused for a new purpose, which left years of historical values that no longer mean what the field name says. The migration is the moment to audit what you actually track, decide what is worth operationalizing, and leave the rest behind. Most organizations come out of that exercise understanding their data better than they ever did inside Kindful, and they usually discover what they were missing, too.
The same discipline applies to cost. On that same migration, the cleaned list held more contacts with valid emails than the organization had licensed as marketable contacts in HubSpot. Rather than mark everyone as marketing and pay for the overage, the smarter move was to segment by recency, prioritize recent donors, and grow into the license deliberately. Not every record needs to come over as the same kind of record.
Key lesson: Do not bring junk from your old system just because you had it. Audit what you can actually use, and bring that.
No, and that is the most important thing to understand before you move. This is the biggest functional gap, and the one that rightly worries people. Kindful gave you hosted donation pages, embedded forms, and recurring billing inside the product. HubSpot is not a payment processor and does not host forms that move money. You cannot turn Kindful off and expect gifts to keep landing in HubSpot on their own.
This is exactly why we recommend Fundraise Up as the giving layer, working in unison with the CRM. The principle is simple. Let each platform do the one thing it is best at. Fundraise Up optimizes giving, the donation experience, conversion, and recurring billing. HubSpot optimizes constituent management and engagement, the relationship, the segmentation, the reporting, the stewardship. The two work together, with Fundraise Up owning the transaction and HubSpot serving as the system of record for everything you do with the donor afterward. You are not asking one tool to be great at both jobs, which is how you end up mediocre at each.
This setup also solves the part of the move that scares people most, the recurring donors. Recurring givers are the highest-stakes records in any migration, because there is money moving on a schedule and a donor with expectations. Fundraise Up has a migrations team that handles moving existing recurring commitments over, so those gifts keep flowing without a gap. On a recent migration, that team handled the token migration of the organization's existing recurring donors directly, while we set up the integration into HubSpot in parallel.
Key lesson: HubSpot does not collect gifts, and that is fine. Pair it with a focused giving layer like Fundraise Up so each platform does what it does best, and let Fundraise Up's migrations team carry your recurring donors across.
Kindful was usually connected to your accounting system, and that connection breaks when you leave. Rebuilding it is one of the most underestimated parts of the project, and it is where the differences between systems get vivid.
In one organization's setup, the same idea has three different names depending on which system you are in. What Kindful calls a campaign, the accounting system calls a location code, and the finance team is now relabeling a fund, while the accounting tool is not even true fund accounting and is being bent to act like it. Translating that cleanly is not a field mapping exercise, it is a definitions exercise.
The pattern we land on repeatedly is a one-way sync, with accounting staying the authoritative source for gift data and HubSpot receiving gifts for fundraising visibility and reporting, not for editing. Gift entry and reconciliation stay on the finance side, and HubSpot becomes the place the development team can see who gave, to what, and when, so they can act on it. We have built this both ways recently, syncing from QuickBooks for one organization and from a different accounting platform for another, and the shape is the same each time: a clean line between the system that owns the money and the system that owns the relationship.
The payoff is real. In one case, online gifts were being entered into accounting as a single monthly journal entry, six to eight weeks late, with no donor-level detail anywhere in the finance system. A proper integration replaces that with gifts that arrive coded correctly and visible where the fundraising team needs them.
Key lesson: Decide which system owns the money and which owns the relationship, then build a deliberate one-way sync between them. Do not try to make HubSpot your accounting system.
Kindful keeps gift data simple. A transaction comes in, the details sit on one record, and it is associated to a contact. Hard credits and soft credits are not really a concept, and there usually are not association labels describing the relationship between a gift and the people connected to it.
That simplicity hides decisions. Split gifts are a common example. A single check meant for multiple designations often came into Kindful as multiple transactions, and depending on how it was entered, those transactions can lack the detail about which designation each piece actually belonged to. HubSpot has no native soft credit concept either, so recognition logic has to be built with association labels and calculated properties, and rolling totals like trailing twelve-month giving require Operations Hub and custom actions because HubSpot cannot aggregate across associated records on its own.
The migration is the moment to define these rules explicitly: who gets hard credit, who gets soft credit, how household totals are calculated, and how split gifts should be represented going forward. The data coming out of Kindful will surface years of inconsistency. Cleaning it up before the move is the right call.
Key lesson: Define your credit, household, and split-gift rules before you migrate. Kindful did not enforce them, and HubSpot will not infer them.
This one is not really about software. In a lot of Kindful organizations, the knowledge that makes the data meaningful is informal. One finance leader told us, candidly, that ninety percent of the logic for how restricted gifts get coded lives in their heads. Whether a gift is restricted, and which fund it belongs to, depends on which staff member owns that donor relationship and simply knows.
That works until someone takes a two-week vacation, or leaves. HubSpot can systematize a lot of this, but only if the process is explicit enough to be built. The migration forces the conversation, and that is a gift in disguise, because the institutional knowledge that was trapped in a few people's memory gets documented and made transferable. It takes time, and it requires the people who hold that knowledge to be active participants, not just end users of the finished system.
Key lesson: The migration is your chance to get the rules out of people's heads and into the system. Treat that documentation as part of the project, not an afterthought.
Not automatically. The data comes across, but the reports themselves get rebuilt. Kindful's dashboards and donor reporting are a genuine strength, and staff look at them every day, and none of that structure transfers on its own. Donor retention, LYBUNT and SYBUNT, giving by campaign and designation, year over year trends, all of it has to be rebuilt with HubSpot's reporting tools, custom properties, and Operations Hub for the rolling calculations. The underlying data comes over. The reports get built on top of it.
There is one quiet trap worth flagging. When gifts are imported, the date often defaults to the date the record was created rather than the date the gift was actually made. For any nonprofit that runs year over year or retention reporting, that silently breaks the numbers, and because everything imports cleanly, nobody notices until leadership asks a question the report cannot answer correctly. Map historical gift dates explicitly, and validate against known records before go-live.
Key lesson: Identify your most important reports up front, rebuild and validate them during the project, and get gift dates right before the first import.
A new platform does not click in a handful of training sessions, and Kindful's friendliness can make the adjustment feel sharper, because staff are used to something light and easy and HubSpot has more structure. That is normal, and it passes. The organizations that handle it well set the expectation honestly up front, invest in enablement past go-live rather than only at launch, build documentation around their actual HubSpot instance instead of generic tutorials, and lean on the staff who adapt fastest to bring everyone else along.
Two things help most. Understand your team's strengths and where they will need support, and do not be afraid to bring in a partner, both for the complex data work and for the decisions along the way. And go in expecting an iterative process. There will be a transition, a testing period, and training, and it will take time to get it right. The reward for that work is the thing the other systems cannot give you: a platform you shaped around how your organization actually operates, instead of one that prescribed a process for you.
Key lesson: Plan for a transition, not a switch. The flexibility that takes work to set up is the same flexibility that makes the system genuinely yours.
Kindful served a lot of organizations well, and its wind-down does not have to be a crisis. If you want a fundraising tool in a box and the least possible disruption, Bloomerang or another purpose-built donor platform is a reasonable, defensible choice, and we will be the first to tell you when that is the right fit.
But if the reason your systems always felt disconnected is that fundraising, engagement, and relationships were never in one place, your renewal is the moment to fix that rather than renew past it. HubSpot, paired with a focused giving layer like Fundraise Up, gives you a platform that drives scale and efficiency and evolves with your organization, where each tool does what it does best. Getting there takes deliberate work, on your data, your definitions, and your processes. The organizations that do that work come out with something worth the effort: a system built around how they actually operate, not one they have to bend themselves to fit.
Effectively, yes. Kindful was acquired by Bloomerang, is no longer sold to new customers, and its features are being folded into the Bloomerang platform. Existing accounts still work for now, but Kindful is a dead-end product with no meaningful roadmap, and Bloomerang is steering customers onto its own platform, usually at renewal.
No. Bloomerang is the default path Kindful points you toward, but it is not your only option. Your renewal is a genuine decision point. If you want a fundraising tool in a box, Bloomerang or a similar donor platform is a fine choice. If you want a flexible platform that scales and unifies fundraising with marketing and relationships, HubSpot is a strong alternative.
Yes. Contacts, organizations, gift history, recurring commitments, custom fields, and activity history can all move to HubSpot. It is not a drag and drop. Kindful's flat, contact-only structure and its table-based export have to be transformed into HubSpot's object model, and duplicate records nearly always need cleanup along the way. But it is a well-established migration path.
The data migration itself usually runs about five to seven weeks. Timing depends on how much data you have, how many duplicates need to be resolved, how many integrations have to be rebuilt, and how much configuration and reporting you want in place before go-live. A looming Kindful renewal date can compress the schedule, so it helps to start before your contract lapses.
They keep giving, as long as the move is planned. Recurring commitments are re-established in your new giving layer rather than exported as static records. We pair HubSpot with Fundraise Up, and Fundraise Up's migrations team moves your existing recurring donors so their gifts continue without a gap, while the integration syncs everything into HubSpot.
It is typically a fixed-scope project, and the investment is driven by a handful of factors: how much data you have and how clean it is, how many integrations need to be rebuilt (email, accounting, events, and your giving layer), whether you need custom objects like memberships, and how much reporting has to be recreated. Our migrations run anywhere from $12,000 - $30,000+ and are spread out over 12 months that include the migration build phase and time to activate your team, train, and iterate on anything once you get into the new platform. Many organizations then move to an ongoing retainer to keep optimizing after go-live.