Name: Product Update Briefing - Online Giving
Uploaded: 2026-05-06T19:16:32.595Z
Duration: 1 h 12 s
Description: Product Update Briefing - Online Giving

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - Online Giving": Hello, everyone, and welcome to the May 2026 online giving product update briefing. We're excited to share the benefits of Blackbaud online giving through the lenses of Blackbaud donation forms, Blackbaud integrated payments, and associated digital solutions such as donor portal. The team giving you all the details today and answering any questions you might have includes myself, Linda Myers, Sam McGuinn, Ron Fontenot, and Lacey Grigger. As a bit of webinar housekeeping, audio for this webinar is being broadcast through your computer speakers. If you run into any audio or technical issues, please refresh your browser. You will receive a link to the webinar recording via email so you don't have to take notes on everything, and you can download the slides you see today in the docs tab on the right side of your screen. Please use q and a to submit questions, which we will be responding to, and use the cogwheel below, you can see it highlighted in purple, to adjust your settings. Today's presentation contains forward looking statements that involve inherent risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. It outlines Blackbaud's current plans and general product direction as the date of this presentation. Functionality described in the presentation that is not currently available is subject to change at any time without notice at Blackbaud's sole discretion. It does not represent commitment to develop or release specific features within the time frame discussed according to the presented design or at all. Please make any purchase decisions based on features and functionality that are currently available. And with that, let's get started with a key question. What is online giving? Online giving is the end to end digital donor experience that connects the ways in which you raise funds online through Blackbaud donation forms. That means through giving experience such as one time and recurring donations, through tributes, pledges, and even membership with the non transactional ways your donors engage. Think of that as donor portal, constituent forms such as email sign up, and even components of your website, all backed by the richness of Blackbaud's integrated payments and built in AI optimizations. Our focus with online giving is quite simple, helping you grow your digital revenue through a high quality donor centric experience while saving you both time and money. In 2025, thousands of Blackbaud customers using online giving joined together to achieve some incredible things. That includes seeing an average gift amount of $358 across all transactions. They experienced, on average, 15% online revenue growth year over year. Together, they saved over $17,000,000 in processing fees and averaged raising over a $150,000 online each. Some amazing statistics. So today, we'll take you to the past, the present, and the future of online giving through these five themes. That includes the fact that online giving is expanding. It's growing. How we are working to continue to enhance the experience for your donors, how we're working to enhance the experience for you through integration improvements, through usability enhancements, And, also, what is the impact of artificial intelligence on online giving? Key question we wanna answer today. And last, how you can, if you have not already, adopt online giving. And we'll talk about the product changes and enhancements using these three categories. That is available now, meaning what has been recently released and you can take advantage of today, what's coming next, enhancements that are coming soon, and, also, a bit of looking ahead. What is the future of online giving? And with that, let's enter into our first chapter, online giving is expanding. Let's jump right in and talk about how online giving is expanding. Today, many of you know online giving as our standard and optimized donation forms and associated performance metrics. As some of you continue to look to move towards moving off of Online Express and Blackbaud NetCommunity, we know you're looking for solutions for things like email sign up forms and membership forms, and those are exactly what we're working towards providing as part of online giving. Expansion of form types, expansion of payment methods, we're excited to show you where we're going next. Starting off with Direct Debit for United Kingdom and Australia customers, if you are in these regions, you can now enable Direct Debit on both standard and optimized forms. When this is enabled, your donors will be able to select direct debit as a payment method and enter in their bank account information for withdrawals. Blackbaud integrated payments handles all mandate collection and storage, and direct debits are charged automatically and land in a Raiser's Edge NXT badge. This will also replace your manual EFT process in Raiser's Edge for those recurring direct debit gifts. Coming next, we also have some more new payment methods coming starting with DAF Pay. This is powered by our partner, Chariot. And this is these are donor advised funds. So donors will be able to go through the process of logging in and using their donor advised funds for their gifts. This will be available in The US only. And then also coming is Amazon Pay for US and UK customers. Amazon Pay will join our other wallets like Apple Pay, PayPal, and Google Pay, as an option for donors who use that, to expedite their payment process. As you can imagine, as we add more payment methods, some of this can get to be too much for your donors, so you'll also be able to select payment methods displayed per form. One of our key tenets is expansion beyond our donation forms. And I'm excited to say that we have just released a new constituent form, which is a new form type that gives you flexibility to collect new or existing constituent information, including fields like name, address, email, consent, or custom fields. Constituent form is now available to all Razer's Edge NXT customers in all regions. And our membership form is now in an early adopter program. Our membership form allows supporters to purchase memberships, including gifts of membership and collecting the names of multiple members. It also can collect additional donations and cover free membership scenarios. Membership records get created automatically with your gift records, and these two forms follow the pattern of our standard donation form. Both new forms have a drag and drop designer, have hosted and embedded display options, a simplified loader script, and are compatible with online data review. Let's take a closer look. Here we are in Raiser's Edge NXT, and I'm gonna expand the online giving menu where you can see we now have constituent forms and membership forms. Remember, membership forms are just exiting early adopter program, so you may not see this yet. And membership forms will only be available if you have the membership module in RazerSets NXT. So we'll start out here and edit a form that already exists. So here in the membership form designer, we can name our form. We can turn on features such as gift of membership and enabling additional donations and identifying that additional donation funds. But the real crux of this is in our membership selection. So this search will search through all of the membership categories you have set up from Raiser's Edge. And depending on what you want your your supporter experience to be, you can have a form for just a single membership category, or you can put, you know, 20 or more on here just depending on how you want this to, look like and what options you want available on each of your website pages where you put a membership form. Going into the payment and fees tab, we have the same payment processing options as well as options to cover processing fees as we do on standard donation form with your complete cover and donor cover options. And then we get into the actual form designer where our default form is here already, and you can click into each of these widgets and modify things like title and description of your membership categories. You can set your dues for each category, and tell us how many names you want to, allow for each of those membership categories. Changing those are just gonna change it for the form and are not gonna change that title and description down in Raiser's Edge. On the right, we have our form designer. So I have a lot of fields already on my form here, but if I wanted to, for example, add consent options, I can also add gift comments. You can just drag these over into your form and place it wherever you'd like. Once you add a widget, you can relabel and choose whether or not you want to make it required. Also, within the form designer, you have some styling options. So you can add headers, images, or additional text. So that really helps you make your form your own. You also can add additional styling. We definitely recommend, changing the, body colors, and the button colors to match your own branding colors, whether or not you're using our hosted or or our embedded forms. If you are using a hosted form and that that means that you're not embedding this within your own website template, we do recommend that you use these content options to add, you know, your logo, additional images, and additional text, to make sure that your your supporters understand where they are. So once I save and close, you can see here I have my published methods with my embed scripts and, a way to launch the form or download a QR code for access to that form. Let's go ahead and look at what the donor side of this looks like. So here, you can see I've got my, my membership categories. So, your supporter can select which one that they want to sign up for. You can see with my family membership, I, specified that, family membership can have up to four members. So you can see I've got additional first name, last name fields. But for today, I'm gonna switch back to an individual, and I'll go ahead and fill out this form. As they go into payments, we see our payment options showing up here. And then pay with my Visa today. And that takes me to my confirmation screen. I'll also receive a confirmation email, and you also can set up notification emails so that your staff can be notified with the details of a transaction as they come in. So that is our membership form. As we go into our constituent form, this is gonna look very familiar, which is as intended. So constituent forms have a little bit less complexity than our membership and our standard donation form. But we can see here, we have the same form designer and a lot of the same field options here. Now this example is set up as a, an email sign up form or a communication sign up form. So I've dragged in the consent widget. So when I go in and click to edit my consent widget, you can see here the channels and categories that I've set up in Raiser's Edge NXT are here, and I can go ahead and I can relabel those as needed. You can include both the channels such as email, and you can also choose to include categories. So in this case, I have my my annual campaign, and I've got my monthly newsletter that people can sign up for individually. So you can really get as granular as you want with how you want people to be able to opt in or out of your messages. Looking at the front end here, you can see here I've got my quick little email sign up form, and I'll go ahead and submit this one as well. And there you have it. With both membership form and constituent form, these integrate with our online data review. So you have some options on how you want it to integrate. You can have these automatically match to constituents and automatically approve updates, or you can choose to put them through our online data review tool in Razer's Edge NXT. And that will take you through a process where you can look at the recommended matches or search for your own or decide when to create a new record for this incoming transaction. And that's the same way that it works for your memberships as well. And with the constituent form, you really can choose your own adventure. So whether you wanna use it for an email sign up form, we got another example here that's a profile update form that's added in three additional custom fields. So you really can use this, for anywhere you want to use as an acquisition form with that data coming right into Razer's AgenixT or, or even, you know, a profile update form where your expectation is you know the people coming in and they are just updating, you know, their basic information. So that is our, constituent form and membership form, and we are excited to have you check those out soon. And as we look a little further out, we're looking at a new concept that expands online giving even further called fundraising pages. Fundraising pages will blur the lines between forms like your optimized or standard forms, branding cards, and website components like your goal meters, and outputs into one script that embeds everything on your website, or you can still use our hosted version. Whether for a Giving Day or a high profile fundraising campaign, this page puts your best foot forward with a user friendly design. That branding card really helps your mission and your imagery pop, and then gold meter always helps donors, see, you know, how much they actually wanna support, may help them encourage to support just a little bit more. And with that, let's jump right into our next section on enhancing the donor experience. Hi. This is Ron Fontenot, product manager with Online Giving, and I will be walking you through the work affiliated with enhancing the donor experience. First up, let me talk about portal. We released a few new features in March, the first being enabling optimized forms for use in portal. Previously, only standard forms could be used with the giving features of portal, but now we've enabled optimized forms so that you can have access to the user experience that optimized forms provide, including branding cards and goal meters. Next up, we've expanded the footprint of functionality of the portal by creating event and membership history features for your donors. Enabling these features gives donors access to their historical and active memberships as well as historical and upcoming events where they've received an invitation. The goal here is to show a broader view of donor engagement with your organization and to lay foundation for future enhancements. Also released in March, we've made changes to the portal navigation bar, moving it from a top of page navigation to a left pane navigation. This aligns with current user experience patterns and sets a foundation for additional homepage redesign goals for the future. Now let me hop into a quick demo of these features. Here, we're in RE NXT. We're gonna start in settings. I am going to go to tools. We'll be in tool settings. We're gonna go to portal features. First off, we talked about optimized forms. Those forms are affiliated with the giving features of portal, and you can access forms for those features to this edit settings box. Today, you probably have a standard form set up here, and this form was previously limited to only show standard forms. But now you see it will show optimized forms. Also, I already have an optimized form selected here. We'll leave that until we get into the portal demo itself. You also have events and membership features. If you're brand new to these features, you can go into your portal features settings, there'll be an enable button, you just click that button and that'll turn on events and memberships into your portal. Let me go into the portal home itself. So this is, me as a donor in portal. Note right off the bat, you have your left nav, which is the change from the top nav. I'm gonna click the give button so we can show what that optimized form will look like when it's embedded in the portal. I'm not gonna walk through the whole donation form process. You have seen that a 100 times, but just know this is how the optimized form will embed in the portal. Donor can go through the process and give. From here, I'm gonna click on events, and this is gonna show me my event history. You'll get the event name, the event date, your status with r v RSVP status, and any fees or outstanding balance that might be due. Note that, often people will set up events, they'll load participants into the event, but they haven't invited people yet. Until you're invited, the event will not show up here. So you can preload an event with a bunch of participants Won't show here unless they're invited. Finally, memberships. Memberships is gonna default to show just the active memberships. Here in this demo, I've loaded two memberships, with my donor, an individual membership and a corporate membership. You can see the program category, subcategory if there is one. We'll show your membership ID, your current active status, your join and expires date, and any, outstanding dues that may be owed. But you can also uncheck this box to show any previous historical memberships. In this case, I'm showing a lapsed membership. So that is your walk through of the new features that were released in March. Coming next, work is in progress now on a new pledges portal feature that will enable donors to make payments to their non automated pledges. To be more precise, managing pledge payments can be tricky, especially if you have a unique payment schedule set up for the donor. To that end, we are limiting the options here to paying the next installment or paying the remaining balance only. When they select one of payment options, they can use either a save payment method if this feature has been enabled in your portal, or they can enter the payment information as they go. A payment will be created and routed into GetBatch for your review and approval. The goal here is to make pledge payments more accessible for your donors. Now looking ahead for portal, we'd really like to give the portal a bit of a face lift by providing options to embed branding cards, nudges to expand your impact, and other quality of life improvements that'll transform portal from just a place to update contact information to a new marketing channel to bring your supporters giving opportunities tailored just for them. Remember, portal is included as part of online giving, and we're just getting started with improvements. It's a core part of the value prop of having an online fundraising class platform that is embedded in your CRM. We'd also like to modernize the portal invitation process a bit. First, there are lots of requests on the idea bank for the ability to customize the portal invitation. If you are familiar with the email designer used on donation forms today, we wanna bring that same functionality to the portal invitation. This would enable you to add images, have more control over messaging, and over general format of the invitation, itself. Additionally, we'd like to bring some new options to automate the portal invite process. Imagine having the ability to auto invite when a first gift is given or to be able to auto resend invites when previous invites expire. The intention here, for with both enhancements is to help ease and improve the onboarding of donors into your portal. Moving on from portal, let's talk about our recently released bill me later feature for pledges. Prioritized due to idea bank votes and customer feedback, we've enabled a new payment option on standard forms to allow donors to submit their pledge without a payment method. When a donor selects bill me later, no payment information is collected. A new pledge will go into gift batch for review, and then the organization can work with the donor to collect pledge payments in the future. Let me jump into a demo of this feature to show how it works. Let's start on the donation form. Let's show how to set this up first. I'm gonna go to my bill me later pledges donation form. I'm gonna edit the form. And on the third tab of the donation form designer, I'm gonna go into the gift options section. I'm gonna click edit. I'm gonna go to the pledge tab, and what you will see at the bottom is a new checkbox, collect payment method, enable donors to pledge without payment. You wanna check that box. Checking that box will enable bill me later. I'm gonna go ahead and cancel out of this, and let me show you what that looks like on a donation form. So I'm a donor looking at the form. I'm going to pledge. I'm gonna say I'm gonna pledge $1,000. Gonna make it quarterly. Note that we default some dates in for the donor. I happen to have this donation form set up to, end a pledge within twelve months, hence the date defaults. You get a summary here of the schedule of a February quarterly. You get a first payment date, next payment date, last payment date, and your total contribution, $1,000 after four gifts. Let me go ahead and fill this out. Note at the bottom, we have a new button here, bill me later. So when the donor clicks that button, they're gonna get the typical splash screen that says thank you for your pledge of a thousand dollars. I'm gonna hop back over to RENXT. As mentioned before, that's just gonna go into a gift batch for normal review, so it'll show up as a cash payment. I'm gonna hop into this, batch just to show you what it looks like. Here's my Steve Smith pledge. Once again, thousand dollars. It comes in as cash. Pledge schedule is set four payments, $2.50 each. From this point, as I mentioned before, your organization can work with the donor to work out a payment schedule. I'll also mention I mentioned, the pledge payment feature coming to donor, portal later. This would be a perfect opportunity to enable that pledge payment, feature when it becomes available because any billing later pledges would show up there, and a donor can make payments to them. Now let me talk through a few features that will be coming next for you. We will be providing a new option for donation receiving via online giving. Today, receipts are sent with a receipt email template when a batch is approved. In the future, you will have an option for real time receiving by placing a receipt PDF on the confirmation email donors receive after giving through online giving. Next is a new website component you can place on your website pages that will generate an abandoned donation reminder. If a donor begins a donation form but then leaves the form midway through the process, this component will provide them with a nudge to go back and complete the donation. This is another feature in online giving that will help you improve your form completion rates and thus improve revenue. Additionally, we will add support for write in funds by donors. Using a generic fund with a custom field to take in the donor suggested allocation, gift processors can then review, modify, approve this data in Gift Batch or later, based on your organization's processes. And for those of you coming from OLX and BB and C, this was another big hitter in the idea bank. We will be making title and suffix fields available on standard forms. These fields give organizations an opportunity to gain a bit more information from their donors, which in turn will help, in enabling more precise or appropriate addressee salutation data depending on the use case. And finally, in our looking ahead section, you will have the option to include taking payment information in line with your standard donation form as opposed to having it as a separate form. But once again, this will be a new optional design choice for you to help build forms to meet your organization's needs. And now we will move on to our next section, improving integration and admin usability. In addition to continually improving your donors experience, we're also working to continually improve your admin experience in managing the forms, creating the forms, and managing the data that comes in through your forms. Let's take a look. Available now, you have the ability to close forms in online giving. Previously, you could only delete forms or keep them around. With the close form functionality, you can set a close date and a message that the form will show if a donor tries to visit the form after the close date. This also includes new form status indicators that you'll see in your form list that will show test mode, publish date, and close date. I know a lot of you have been looking forward to this. Another thing that many people have asked for that's now available is support for additional hidden fields on our forms. You've always been able to set a campaign and appeal to be attached to gifts that come in through your online giving forms. And this additional feature adds the optional field of package and gift subtype that you can set for your donations. This also includes URL pass through parameters if you're a fan of that feature, and that would override the package setting if you were to have that on a URL. Online data review has some improvements as well that are relevant to online giving. With our new form types of constituent forms and membership forms, you have the option to review data that comes in through those forms in online data review. It continues to use the same settings and the same permissions that it always has, but it just shows the additional form data in the list now. This gives you the ability to control the data that comes in, reducing duplicate records and keeping your database clean and organized. Finally, some batch features that are very welcome to online dating users. You can now use the new grid batch in the templates to create a template specifically for donation form batches. This allows you to specify which columns to include in what order so it will simplify your gift processing for your mind giving batches. No Blackbaud presentation these days would be complete without a section on artificial intelligence. Let's take a look at the impact of AI on online giving. Blackbaud approaches artificial intelligence with an intelligence for good strategy. We use it to address some of the biggest challenges in the social impact sector. Blackbaud AI is built on experience and designed to scale. It's integrated at the source with connected systems, which makes it secure by design. In the online giving space, AI can be used to help predict donor behavior and make the right ask to the right person at the right time. It can also be used to recommend next steps and features for your donation forms that you might not be using today. AI can help you generate content for your emails and your donation forms, and it can even help you automate full processes with intelligent agents. Let's take a look at some of this in action. Intelligent ask is not a new feature, and it's available on all your forms today. Intelligent ask uses AI to modify the ask ladder or the giving levels that display on your form based on the individual donor's characteristics in your organization's giving data. We are constantly assessing the data model used for intelligent ask to make sure it's optimized to raise the most for your organizations. One nonprofit organization saw an increase of over $9,000 in online gifts in just four months after enabling intelligent ask. It's currently enabled by default on optimized forms, and you have the option to enable it on all standard forms. We recommend enabling it today. I can show you a quick way to do that on the next slide. We've recently made some enhancements using AI to our online giving experience. On the home page, you'll see a new intelligent analysis summary at the top of the page. This provides a narrative summary of your donation form performance, and you can look at different time periods. And you can use the chat button to dig more into those data points and learn more about your performance. Additionally, in the how are you raising more tile, you can see some highlights of specific features, and you can use the AI chat button to learn more about these features. And you can even ask the chat to help you enable them on your forms. So this demo is showing the chat helping the user enable recurring gift upsell. You can also do this for intelligent ask and donor cover today. It tells you a little bit about the features so that you know what's going to happen, and then it gives you an option to enable it across all your eligible forms. Additionally, there's some chat tools that are available that you can access from anywhere in r n x t in the Blackbaud AI chat. You can ask chat about online getting best practices. Things like, what is a good conversion rate? How do I improve my conversion rate? How do I reduce friction on my forms? What kind of images should I use on my forms? Questions like that, the chat will be able to help you with. Additionally, chat can help you with some steps and information on how to migrate your forms from Online Express to online giving. So check out those tools as you're in there as well. In taking it to the next step, you can now create an optimized donation form with a simple chat interaction. That's right. You don't need to go through the whole form editor process. You can initiate donation form creation right inside Blackhawk AI chat from anywhere in our end next team. You can ask it to create a form and then provide a title, and then the chat will prompt you with a few questions and pieces of data to provide to help you create an optimized form. This interaction we're looking at right here is showing the chat creating a brand new card. So after typing a description of what the donation form is for, the chat generates content for the brand new card and allows you to update to upload an image to display on the card as well. Next, it will ask you if you wanna display a logo, and that will be positioned on top of the image for your card. You can skip this step too if you'd like to, but it's nice to have your branding there visible on your greeting card as well. And after a few confirmation steps, we'll get to see the AI created form. So that's confirming the branding card, and then we'll confirm the donation form. And now we'll get to take a look at it. Additionally, you can interact with the chat back and forth and make changes to the content. You can have it write shorter content, different content, regenerate, etcetera. And here's a look at the AI created form. In just a couple of minutes, we were able to spin up a brand new donation form that you can use as a starting point for a campaign. Isn't that going to save you tons of time? Looking ahead, we're gonna continue to build on these AI capabilities. So the intelligent analysis summary that we looked at, we're excited to be bringing benchmark data into that summary. So not only will you get a narrative, summary of your own donation form performance, you'll also get to see how you measure up against your peer organizations. That's gonna bring the Blackbaud special sauce into the AI elements on the online giving page. We're very excited to bring that. Additionally, in that donation form creation process we just looked at, we're going to add the ability for the AI to suggest images for your branding cards. We know that selecting images is one of the hardest parts of creating branding cards. So we're going to have the AI suggest from a library of images some beautiful branding card images for you to use. Additionally, we're working on more form performance and configuration comparison tools so that you can use chat to drill into the performance of individual forms and find out ways that you can change the configuration to improve each individual donation form's performance. We're looking forward to bringing these features to you in the coming months. And now let's enter into our last view. Why adopt online giving now? Throughout the course of today's product update briefing, we've talked about a number of things, and what's available now, what's coming, really what's the future of online giving. They're only focused for a second on that available now because today, there are a number of key new feature areas to think about adopting with online giving. That includes membership forms, constituent forms for sign up, a number of donor portal improvements, and all of these things with international global availability. There are a number of new key in advanced capabilities such as URL pass through, the ability to do things like pass in the dollar amount that you want for an ask in your donation, a great number of partner add ins, intelligent ask, AI powered capabilities to choose what your donors receive on inside of a donation form, Recurring gift upsell to push more and more donors into monthly giving, for example, and also complete donation reminders. So as they abandon a form, reminding them to come back. We also talked about our AI innovations, whether it is recommendations, insights, the ability to start to generate donation forms and other content within online giving using AI, and more and more coming every month. We talked a bit about the results you were seeing, those of you who are using online giving. A significant conversion increase across many of our forms, particularly the optimized donation form. Right? An average 20% conversion rate for all online donors that come to your forms. A great year over year increase. Right? That 15% year over year online fundraising increase that we see from adopters, as well as the more than $17,000,000 in processing fee savings in 2025. So how do you get started? In the docs tab, you can see registration links for multiple webinars, workshops that can walk you through step by step how to set up your donation forms. You will also see a link to a key video where we recorded a walk through, a product tour of how to get to the key elements of online giving, why you should get started, and something that you can share across your organization that explains the value of online giving. We also would encourage you to look at the Blackbaud integrated payments and online giving resources within Blackbaud University. Enroll in the learning paths. Learn more again about how to get started with Blackbaud donation forms. And not only just the online giving product update briefing, but register for Blackbaud integrated payments so that you can see what's coming on the payment processing side of all of your giving. We would also heavily encourage you to look at attending b b dev days. One of the fantastic conferences that Blackbaud puts on in mid June, like, for more of the technical side of all of our products. How you can use our APIs, how you can use our platform services to extend your solutions and build the things you truly want. There are three online giving sessions that are part of bbdev days, how you can extend online giving, how you can make small tweaks to get big impact, and then on the last, you see what are the fee cover options and what do they mean to you. So please, k, start your online giving journey today. We wanna thank all of you, not only for the time that you have spent in today's product update briefing, but for your usage of online giving. It's fantastic seeing the results that I talked about in 2025, and we're very, very much looking forward to what you achieve in 2026. So thank you for your attendance today.