Blackbaud Announces Hundreds of Product Updates
Credit: Blackbaud
Blackbaud, a provider of software for powering social impact, held its semi-annual Product Update Briefings virtual event, rolling out hundreds of updates and sharing roadmaps for key products across its portfolio. With this technology innovation, Blackbaud is helping organizations power fundraising, financial management, education management and corporate social responsibility, putting AI and data intelligence to use for social impact.
In the most attended Product Update Briefings event to date, thousands of customers tuned in, expressing particular excitement around the enhancements for Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT, describing the updates as "bold," "ambitious," and "promising" in live chat.
"We're embedding intelligence into our products at an accelerated rate and building deeper integrations between our core products to deliver connected systems that work seamlessly together," said Sudip Datta, chief product officer, Blackbaud. "With Blackbaud's deep expertise and industry-leading products, our customers can work in unique ways and uncover efficiencies and insights that no other technology provider can offer. We are excited about the ambitious roadmaps underway for the next 12 months and beyond and are committed to bringing customers the very best technology to power social impact."
Blackbaud Q2 2024 Product Update Briefing highlights included:
Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT. As part of a major wave of innovation coming to the market's most popular fundraising software, Blackbaud announced that a thoughtfully reimagined user experience with 100% of critical workflows available in a single, unified view will be available by the end of 2025. Features and updates now available in-product include top-performing Optimized Donation Forms, generative AI-powered acknowledgment emails, online event registration, field encryption to enhance the security of donor data, and more. Enhancements to Prospect Insights will expand access to the data intelligence tool within Raiser's Edge NXT workflows and enable Prospect Insights to use AI to adapt models to specific customers to improve model accuracy.
Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT. Blackbaud accelerated innovation for its industry-leading fund accounting solution, enabling intelligent, data-driven decisions for accounts payable that will save organizations time and money. Enhancing its robust end-to-end procure to pay workflow, Blackbaud rolled out features for automated payment processing, invoice scanning backed by AI document intelligence, purchase requests embedded in expense management, and new certified Microsoft Power Platform connectors for Query and Accounts Payable. Additional certified Microsoft Power Platform connectors for General Ledger will be coming soon, as well as AI for prescriptive insights into project and grant data.
Blackbaud CRM. With an all-new user interface coming in 2025, Blackbaud CRM will deliver a modernized user experience that is mobile-friendly, more accessible, and more secure, relying on Blackbaud's SKY UX open-source user experience framework. By leveraging Blackbaud Cloud Operations, customers have faster access to Blackbaud innovation that's enabling improved workflows, processes, and security, as well as access to new machine learning and AI capabilities. The Optimized Donation Forms, which are already demonstrating higher than industry average conversion rates with Raiser's Edge NXT, will be released soon for Blackbaud CRM.
K-12 Education Solutions. Blackbaud shared updates on the planned release of its common records engine later this year to help private K-12 schools more deeply connect their education management portfolio to Raiser's Edge NXT. With this improved connectivity, fundraisers can easily track and engage students as alumni once they've graduated and improve fundraising efforts targeting newly enrolled families. Teachers can also save time with Blackbaud's new AI-enabled question generator and assessment question banks for class assignments, quizzes and student assessments.
Corporate Impact Solutions. EVERFI from Blackbaud has fully updated its consumer financial education content for teens, now called Achieve Foundations, and rebuilt its Data Security and Privacy workplace training course with modular content for the age of AI, with more course rebuilds coming soon for financial literacy and wellness courses. Updates to YourCause from Blackbaud include processing improvements, like a new charitable funding dashboard that improves visibility into the status of corporate and employee donated funds. Blackbaud will have exciting updates coming soon for Impact Edge, its AI-powered reporting and storytelling tool, which is currently in an early access program.
Peer-To-Peer Fundraising. Blackbaud is enabling customers to drive supporter engagement through Good Move, the inclusive fundraising and activity tracking mobile app in Blackbaud TeamRaiser, with new updates that make event creation even easier and provide live event reporting capabilities. On its popular JustGiving platform, Blackbaud continues to enhance generative AI offerings and page optimization to help supporters raise more and has work underway to enable cryptocurrency donations. For Blackbaud Luminate Online, the company continues to strengthen security and compliance with multi-factor authentication via SMS, advanced database level and field level encryption technologies, and updates to comply with regulations set forth by the State of California as part of California Assembly Bill 488. Blackbaud also announced updates coming soon to Luminate Online for a modernized checkout experience that will enable recurring donations via digital wallets.
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.
