Blackbaud Announces Product Updates
Credit: Blackbaud
Blackbaud, a provider of software for powering social impact, unveiled its recent innovation and future roadmap direction for its suite of solutions during its semi-annual Product Update Briefings.
"In the last year, we've been investing in key advancements and AI technology that will empower our customers to achieve greater impact with our essential software," said Sudip Datta, chief product officer, Blackbaud. "During our Product Update Briefings, we'll be giving customers a first-hand look at the latest developments, further exploring the six waves of innovation that we announced at this year's bbcon."
Built specifically for fundraising, nonprofit financial management, digital giving, grantmaking, corporate social responsibility and education management, Blackbaud's software accelerates impact through expertise and powerful data intelligence. Following onto the six waves of innovation recently announced at bbcon 2024, Blackbaud shared how its products drive more connection and deliver more context. Attendees heard from product experts across the company as they review roadmaps, offer previews, and discuss themes for longer-term development. In some cases, customers learned how to get early access to new tools and provide feedback that shapes feature development.
Highlights included:
- Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT: Blackbaud will share previews, plans and timelines for transformational user experience enhancements like a reimagined home page that surfaces key insights, including benchmarks, fundraising performance trends and other KPIs for each user, as well as a new, highly scalable navigation system. Other enhancements include new event management features, more communications and consent preference capabilities, new query and reporting capabilities, and the continued transformation of gift management workflows to a unified view. In addition, Blackbaud will share exciting updates for the Prospect Insights feature that puts the power of AI in the hands of fundraisers to help them identify, qualify and cultivate major gift prospects. Previously available only in the U.S., a new version of the solution built specifically for Canadian fundraisers will soon be available.
- Financial Edge NXT: With Payment Assistant now in Limited Availability for U.S. customers, Blackbaud will share how this feature automates and accelerates vendor payments, directly within Financial Edge NXT, ensuring vendors are paid quickly and on time. This feature helps nonprofits and other social impact organizations safeguard financial data and decrease risk of fraud while streamlining reconciliation and reducing transaction and check cost. In addition, the team will share more Accounts Payable automation tools coming soon, including AI-powered Document Intelligence Scanning that allows users to effortlessly upload invoices in any format, leveraging AI to extract key information and generate the invoice in Financial Edge NXT, helping reduce errors and improve efficiency, all with a smoother user experience.
- Blackbaud CRM: Blackbaud will share more about powerful new connectivity options, including native integration with Blackbaud Donation Forms, including the Optimized Donation Form that has already seen strong adoption by Raiser's Edge NXT users. In addition, a new Red Arc Marketing Connector will enable Blackbaud CRM cloud-hosted customers to directly connect to their preferred digital marketing solutions, like Constant Contact, Mailchimp, HubSpot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
- YourCause from Blackbaud: Blackbaud is making significant progress in connecting social impact and corporate impact customers by simplifying and accelerating the process for nonprofit customers to receivecorporate donations through Blackbaud Merchant Services. By early 2025, YourCause will directly disburse corporate employee donations to Blackbaud Merchant Services charity customers, accelerating the donation to distribution process and bridging Blackbaud's social and corporate impact technology.
- Data Intelligence: Blackbaud is announcing it will leverage identity resolution services from LiveRamp, a leading data collaboration platform. Aligned with Blackbaud's Intelligence for Good strategy, this announcement represents a significant investment in core technology. With improved identity resolution powered by LiveRamp, Blackbaud will be able to more accurately match records of wealth, charitable giving, spending and more to constituent records. This will result in more actionable predictions and insights, stronger constituent relationships and better fundraising for customers utilizing Blackbaud's wealth screening and predictive modeling services.
- K-12 Solutions: Blackbaud will share more details about exciting AI innovations coming to its K-12 education portfolio, including an At-Risk Student Tool that will help teachers identify students in need of extra support by consolidating data on attendance, test scores and work completion. In addition, the team will share how new partner solutions are making it easier for K-12 customers to extend and enhance their solutions, with UBIQ Education for school websites and BrightArrow for mass communication functionality.
The preceding press release was provided by a company unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of NonProfit PRO.
