Blackbaud Unveils AI-Powered Fundraising, Financial Management Enhancements

Blackbaud, a provider of software for powering social impact, announced a wide range of innovation shaping the future of social impact technology.

"Our 40-plus years of expertise in this space and unwavering focus help us drive innovation that empowers our customers to achieve their missions," said Mike Gianoni, president, CEO and vice chairman of the board of directors, Blackbaud. "We are transforming the way social impact organizations operate, giving back time and improving data-backed decision making. With cutting edge technology, thousands of customers—from nonprofits, to schools, foundations, companies and more—are amplifying their impact across communities and around the world. We're proud to be the chosen partner of so many incredible organizations, and we're committed to continue delivering for them."

Innovation to Fuel Impact
Blackbaud unveiled a range of product updates and enhancements aimed at connecting workflows and teams to free up time and provide users the insight they need to deliver their best results, without guesswork.

The Future of Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT
Blackbaud shared its plans and progress for the next generation of its market-leading fundraising software, building on its commitment to roll out a reimagined user experience with all critical-end-to-end workflows and enhanced functionality in a single, unified view by the end of 2025. Key updates include:

• A new navigation, making it easier and more intuitive for both fundraising and finance users to quickly find what they need among an expanded array of menu options.
• A common records engine for K-12 school fundraisers launching this year that will provide a complete picture of donors by connecting data across the entire school community.
• New donor recognition program management capabilities, coming in 2025, to automatically tie gifts to these programs for deeper donor engagement.

Intelligence for Good: AI Built for Social Impact
Blackbaud is building AI that delivers fundraising performance, benchmarking and forecasting directly in-product, providing social impact professionals with insights connected to their business data and built on Blackbaud's 40 years of sector leadership. Planned AI advancements include:

• Blackbaud Copilot, an AI-powered coach and assistant that allows users to interact with their data in natural language, ask questions, and gain insights. Copilot is already embedded in Blackbaud Impact Edge, and a technical preview in both Raiser's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT is planned for 2025 to help fundraisers understand, plan for and engage with high priority donors and prospects, and to help simplify fund accounting by combining automation and personalization.
• New performance insights to help organizations see how they stack up against others, based on Blackbaud's rich benchmarking data.
• New tools for education customers, like an Award Cycle Manager within Blackbaud Award Management to give scholarship administrators a centralized view and KPIs, and an "at-risk" student tool for Blackbaud's K-12 Education Management portfolio to help teachers identify students in need of extra support by consolidating data on attendance, test scores and work completion.

Accelerated Giving to Raise and Save More
Blackbaud continues to innovate across its integrated payments experiences to help organizations raise more and save more so that they can invest in their missions. Exciting updates include:

• A wider global roll out of Blackbaud's Optimized and Standard Donation Forms, proven to increase conversion rates, including the recent addition of the Intelligent Ask feature powered by Blackbaud AI, which ensures fundraisers target the right gift amount for each donor.
• Tap-to-pay capabilities that will allow supporters to tap their card on a mobile device to donate, pay entry fees or buy swag.
• The extension of Blackbaud's Complete Cover offering—the social impact sector's only solution with guaranteed 0% processing fees—to an initial set of partners, including Trellis for auctions and events and Almabase for higher education giving days.

Connected Financial Management
Blackbaud is connecting workflows throughout the finance office. The company will deliver 100% of core Financial Edge NXT capabilities in a unified view in Q1 of 2025, including new and improved Query and reconciliation functionality. Additional enhancements include:

• Automated invoice scanning using Microsoft AI Document Intelligence to automate the entire payables process from start to finish directly in Financial Edge NXT.
• Payment Assistant for fully automated bill pay in Financial Edge NXT, helping customers to save hours a week with auto-reconciliation of payment assistant transactions, to reduce processing costs and to benefit from robust, built-in fraud protection.
• Deeper integration between Raiser's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT to connect workflows from donation through disbursement with fewer manual steps, making it easier and faster to let donors know what their gifts paid for and when.
• Financial Edge NXT integration with Blackbaud Grantmaking, connecting departments and surfacing the right financial data at the right time.

Extensibility and Flexibility
Blackbaud is combining the power of purpose-built software designed specifically for the business operations of social impact with platform-level flexibility to enable endless possibilities. The company is delivering more plug-and-play apps, system integrators and consulting services in the Blackbaud Marketplace, plus:

• New partner integrations, including the connection of Blackbaud Education Management with UBIQ Education and BrightArrow, enabling K12 schools to power best-in-class school websites, connect their data, leverage marketing capabilities to drive enrollment, and give faculty access to mass communication functionality for all their classes, teams, advisories and more.
• The expansion of Red Arc's existing integration for Raiser's Edge NXT to Blackbaud CRM cloud-hosted customers, to directly connect their preferred digital marketing solutions, like Constant Contact, Mailchimp, HubSpot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, to their CRM.
• New SKY Add-ins for both low-code and pro-code developers to create hyper-specific solutions and access partner solutions without ever leaving Blackbaud software.
• Six new Microsoft Power Platform-certified connectors offering more flexibility, plus added low-code tools for Blackbaud CRM that have already been popular in Raiser's Edge NXT for embedding power automate workflows, power apps, adaptive cards and Power BI extensions.

Source: Blackbaud

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.