Name: Welcome to the Family: Blackbaud + SchoolBI
Uploaded: 2026-01-29T19:32:20.308Z
Duration: 58 min 20 s
Description: Welcome to the Family: Blackbaud + SchoolBI

Transcript for "Welcome to the Family: Blackbaud + SchoolBI": Hey, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar. Welcome to the family, Blackbaud and School BI. Thanks so much for joining us today. If you've been on a webinar before, we have some housekeeping. It wouldn't be a webinar without my due diligence. The webinar audio will be broadcast through your computer speakers, so hopefully, can hear me. You will receive a recording to today's presentation about twenty four hours after the fact. If you need captions, you can hover over the stage and click the CC button on the bottom of the screen to turn your captions on and off. If you encounter any audio or technical issues such as the slides freezing, usually a quick refresh of your browser is the best way to get it working again. And worst case scenario, you can leave and log back in. Please click on q and a on the top right to submit any questions that you might have. We anticipate that there probably are going to be a lot of questions. Ryan and Mark will do their best to answer as many as they think you might have during today's presentation. We'll leave some time at the end to look at them as well. If for whatever reason we don't get to your question either via the chat or answering it audibly, just know that we will take a look at the questions and follow-up after the fact. Also, I wanna call your attention to the docs area. We've got some links and some resources that we will speak to during today's presentation that you might want to access both now and in the future. And you can adjust any of your settings by using the cogwheel at the bottom of the event space. As we get started, just a reminder that things can change. So some of what we're talking about today is, of course, forward looking. So know that while details will change, the overall vision does remain consistent. We've got quite the dynamic duo today. We've got Ryan Bows and Mark Davis with us as we are thrilled to welcome School BI to the Blackbaud family. So in terms of what we're gonna cover today, we're gonna start by talking about the announcement. We'll talk about how School BI fits into the vision of Blackbaud, give an overview of School BI, and talk about what to expect next. So without further ado, I will welcome Mark Davis to the stage to give us some remarks. Thanks, Mark. Hey, Elizabeth. Can you hear me? Yep. You're doing great. Awesome. Hello, everybody. Hey. I'm Mark Davis, head of education products here at Blackbaud, and I'm tremendously excited to discuss our recent acquisition of School BI and also to later introduce you to my friend, Ryan, who joined us from School BI as their CEO. In short, let me take a couple of minutes just kind of describe and set the lay the groundwork for the for the why in terms of the in terms of the acquisition and its benefit to Blackbaud and our customers. So in short, Skoal BI is a user friendly platform that simplifies data operations while unifying disparate data systems and enables data visualization and BI capabilities across products and industry benchmarks, specifically and purposely built for K-twelve independent schools. School BI accelerates our promise, first announced at b b con two thousand twenty five, to enable k 12 total school solution, our our premier solution to serve k 12 independent schools, with intelligent action driven by data insights empowered through AI that expands accessibility, the availability for data in schools. School BI further complements other big innovations that we announced at BBcon and thereafter, like the Common Records Engine, our Student Success Insight reports, as well as Collections Assistant. All of these are new capabilities we're introducing into the total school solution this year that aim entirely to make data more meaningful, accessible, and impactful for our schools. With this acquisition, Blackbaud will also now be able to arm and empower multi campus school groups with essential institution wide reports that merge data and provide insights from across the comprehensive Blackbaud product suite across all those schools and campuses within that organization. And to close, and I'm gonna let Ryan come up on here and kinda take away the rest of the webinar take us away the rest of the webinar, I'm especially excited about having Ryan and the rest of the school BI team joining Blackbaud's family. And because they are now able to partner with Blackbaud's amazing data scientist team. And through that partnership, they're bringing a deep expertise in k 12 school data that is now accelerating plans that we have in place to bring new analytic offers tailored made for schools in the near future. So with that brief intro, Ryan, why don't you join me up here on stage and talk a little bit more about School BI and your plans here? Yes. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Elizabeth. Thanks, everyone, who's on the call. Mark, you did a fantastic job describing School BI and and the story behind, I think, what we're what we're gonna accomplish here together. And I really appreciate the time that you put forth, to make this kind of come to fruition and and what lies ahead. So, I thought we could get started and and, you know, I'm I'm looking, I talked to a lot of friends back east. I know some of you are under a lot of snow. I'm in California, so I am not trying to rub it in with this high degree weather behind me. It's just the way my office is set up today. So for those that are struggling with the snow, I'm empathetic. Grew up on the East Coast, and I and I feel for you all. So what I thought we could do, Mark, is just to to kinda talk a little bit about, what you mentioned about this kind of how School BI is fitting into the larger Blackbaud picture. And I remember, the first time we started talking about how to better partner at Atlas many, many months ago. I think it was in 2024 when we first started talking about this. And I have to say that, you know, Blackbaud is listening. And and to hear that even, you know, a year and a half ago that Blackbaud was watching this data warehouse space and how to help schools was really exciting in 2024 and even more so now with the work that Blackbaud is doing. So I put this slide together. It's a very subtle change, but if you notice everyone on the call, Blackbaud believes and we believe that a data warehouse technology and the and the and what it unlocks will be a core piece of a private school k twelve's tech stack. And, you know, Blackbaud really believes that, and we set out on that journey to solve for that at School BI. And so it unlocks a bunch of different capabilities that Blackbaud sees as the future. And, you know, a lot of credit goes to Mark because I believe that that culture has has been started at Blackbaud, and we were excited to hear it as as a small software company. So I just wanna talk now a little bit about what and how the idea of School BI came to fruition. And, it was really right before when Mark was going both Elizabeth were going through the Mark were going through the kind of, the agenda today. I quickly looked at the people who were attending. And, one of the things I think, if you know me, and there's a lot of folks on this list that know me, is I care and believe in this market tremendously. And seeing so many familiar names on this list, seeing so many schools that we've either worked with, in the past, it's just, you know, fills my fills my bucket up, to speak. I have two young kids and I always talk about filling buckets up, not knocking them over. But the interesting thing was that the idea for School BI started many, many, many years ago. I'm highly involved in two of the schools that I went to, two private schools I went to, both transformed and put me on a trajectory in my life that I'm forever grateful for. One of the things that happened while volunteering about I don't know. Probably it was, like, ten years ago. I was complaining with a few board members about how private schools don't have data, like commercial businesses, and how do we solve for this? Well, interestingly enough, fast forward ten years later, that itch was still bothering me. And, you know, a few of us in this space said, let's solve for it. Now the great thing that was happening was the cost of data warehouses, the technology was getting better. This was probably about three years ago, and even AI was and machine learning was becoming more affordable. And so we set out in this journey to try to figure out how to become a purpose built data warehouse for private schools. And some of the things that we wanted to do was to make it easier and secure for k 12 schools to connect siloed data systems to allow them to get access to their data in a nice easy way to make better decisions. And so when we started out on that journey, you know, one of the things that we learned early on was that we needed to be the plumbing that connected school data systems together. So fundamentally, we all know that you run, you know, you may run all Blackbaud systems and you may run only a few Blackbaud systems. If you're like so many schools, you have a smattering of siloed, systems. And so, we've set out to try to solve that by building what we call purpose built data connectors. So a lot of you in this room may have built your own data connectors to reach out to the Sky API to pull in data or to another system to pull in data. And what we did was we wanted to package those connectors together. We wanted to be the plumbers of that. We also knew that being a data warehouse was really important for schools to make that piece of the puzzle easier. So we built a, kind of what we call an advanced k 12 ETL, extract, transform, load engine. So think of that as the green bubble in this nice slide. And what we're doing is we're reaching out to the data connectors. It could be a system, it could be a Google Sheet, it could be also something that I call a third party system, which I'll mention at kind of the end of the slide. Pull that data in, extract it from where it came from. And systems usually who run really efficiently and have great systems, Blackbaud being included, they store the data in a very, very what I call transactional. I don't mean that in a negative way, I mean in a positive. They're storing data because that data has dependencies in a workflow. You know, having it stored in a warehouse is slightly different. It's not designed for transactional things. It's designed for reporting and analytics and modeling and forecasting and things like that. So we ingest the data, we transform it, and we put it in a common data model, and then we pull in other data from other sources if you want. One of the most interesting things that we did early on was we had to decide how are we gonna help schools visualize this data. And we listen just like some of you have said and have already started doing is we wanna use our own tools. We wanna use Looker, Power BI, Tableau, and those tools are fantastic. Don't get me wrong. And so we built out a API which served up our data to those, but it was in a common data model and it was transformed already. So all the things like maybe changing a ethnicity or a race to a to a more modern term because that's the way it's stored in your core database, We do in our data model, and then you don't have to do on the reporting side. But we also heard fundamentally, and and I and I say this because I've lived this, is that a lot of schools, if not the vast majority, are interested in Looker and Power BI, but not so much to adopt it on a day to day basis. If those are great tools, they are bears to to implement at scale and with security. And if your school's not set up to do that and do it well, we wanted to provide another additional service. So we now have and there's a little bubble there. It's probably be kinda small, small in my screen, is the b. And the b is really our native charts, which I'm gonna talk about a little bit later in the presentation. But we wanted to give schools the choice. We believe that, you know, 80%, and I'm using round numbers here, 80% of the schools that we work with probably use our native charts and graphing and technology, and the other 20% might use Looker or Power BI and so forth or a combination. It is not it's not there's this isn't binary. You don't have to use one or they can use both, and there's some schools that may do that. So we wanna provide these visuals, these data packs that are built on built for schools by schools. And one of the most interesting things that gets unlocked by being now part of, Blackbaud is their investment in this data science area. We we're small. School BI was, you know, founded with three people, bootstrapped, you know, staying up late. I am not a person a data scientist. I love data, and I love building reports, but I do not have a data science degree. Some days, I'd say I'm a data science with a little d and a little s. But, ultimately, Blackbaud has this rich, institutional, division, which is all about looking at data scientifically and looking for patterns to help their customers. And so we're gonna have proven, vetted, deeply researched analytics that are going to be shared amongst our customers when we start to kind of get to scale. So that's the kind of architecture at a high level, and I just wanted to kind of explain that. The interesting thing was when we set out to build our data connectors, we wanted them to be easy to use and self configured. In other words, we want our software engineers to build out these connectors that connect to Blackbaud, connect to Ravenna, connect to whatever technology. There's even one on there that I, you know, hesitant to say, but Veracross. Right? We had we had data connectors that pull data in from these technologies and custom files, CSVs. We know that, so many of these schools are operating on, you know, using Excel or CSV files or Google Sheets to actually run, and that's okay. And in some cases, you might use a technology that doesn't allow for a data connector to directly connect and pull down the API, data. So we might have to use an ingest process. Process. So we wanted to do that for schools. You shouldn't be in the business of writing software data connectors. I I say that and very well know that some of you might have the capabilities to do that, but there's probably bigger and better things that you all, should be doing and and steering your community, into the next kind of evolution of, the world. Now I'm just gonna bring up something here about the data connectors, and this is an interesting concept that we we fundamentally believe we're gonna start to see come to fruition. We believe that data connectors may also be third party things. I could give you probably 25 different examples, but the single biggest one that schools ask for is economic or, demographic data. Imagine having a data connector that is the US Census Bureau. Right? So in other words, if you're looking at admissions trends and you're pulling in your admissions data and you're kind of looking at applications over time and you wanna overlay birth rates for the last, you know, twenty five years, our technology will support that. We'll have a placeholder for that. We haven't built out that data connector yet, but the infrastructure supports that. And so I just wanna bring that up. It's an exciting thing for me because I was part of the, and a couple of us that are at School BI were also part of the founding team at Ravenna. And one of the most interesting things was, you know, looking at data, outside of your systems can really transform your strategy. So that's our vision here. That's still Blackbaud's vision, and we're gonna be going after that. And the last thing I'll kind of talk about is just a little bit about the school's, kind of journey around using charts and using, data insight. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the complementary strength that we're gonna be gaining with, now being part of the Blackbaud community. And this is just a quick overview of that we're gonna be providing these native charts and dashboards in the product that are based off of best practices that we've learned and that that Blackbaud has learned. They're going to be highly configurable, so they're going to be using modern modern tech stack that, in the early days, we're configuring them, meaning School BI and Blackbaud's configuring them, but the user will eventually be able to configure and use charts and change things. The difference here of using a native chart and dashboard is slightly different than, say, Looker or, Power BI is that the data governance will be a lot easier. In other words, is we will more more so just because we understand schools. Right? We understand that the board shouldn't see all these things and they should see, you know, a published dashboard that your school has curated and and made a dashboard. So there's gonna be a little bit, for the for the majority of schools out there, this is gonna be a great solution. It's gonna get them, using the product, unlocking data, and getting to the, kind of, holistic views faster. And if you wanna build your own Power BI or Looker, you know, eventually, maybe we'll support one or two other, visualization tools, you can. So don't think, again, it's one or the other, but we think that most schools are gonna start with this because we think we can actually help with it pretty pretty fast and pretty, governance, aware. Now I am gonna just talk a little bit about what this means around AI. Because I think there's Sorry. We we you turned into a robot for just a minute when this slide came up. Got it. At least, am I back to normal? I hope I hope I'm the last thing like a robot. I think you're good. I will sit. tight for just a minute, and I will. hop off. And then if we need to, Okay. we'll come back on. Alright. Well, I'll start back to the point where I think I was gonna get on my soapbox. So, the idea is that, this industry, data AI, as you all know, is changing weekly, monthly. It's moving so fast. Blackbaud is taking what I call a pole position. They they they are, investing heavily in it. They are are strategizing around and figuring out how to help their schools using these advanced technologies, but in a very thoughtful way. And so what I used to tell folks is that I don't while we will always use chart building and we will always build, you know, authoritative places that we need to publish data so we could all huddle up and look at and discuss in a very kind of authoritative way, I don't think chart building in Power BI or in Looker will be the future. I think and let me just caveat that with a second. I think what's gonna happen is we're gonna be using a chatbot, and you we're we will we'll make it very friendly. You know, we actually we're gonna call it scout and use the little b. But the idea is that you we're gonna get to a place that instead of firing up the software to change the, graph, you're gonna be asking natural questions. And the and the tools will respond based on who you are and what access you have to the data to those questions. And so I give this real world example because I I you know, we're never perfect in this. So I was in a board meeting. I'm I'm on a board of trustees of one of the schools I went to, and the admissions and the development team did an amazing graph and chart. They worked really hard, and it was beautiful. I mean, it was gorgeous. And it was showing percentage of annual fund, by constituent type, so how many different types of and I asked a question that was very specific that was outside of the graph. And, they said, oh, we don't we actually don't have that. It wasn't answered in our graph. We'll go we'll go back and recreate it. And the first thing I said was, oh, no. No. Don't do that. Because I know I just put a bunch of work on someone to go recreate a graph to answer my question. And what I think the world what we're gonna be unlocking here is we're gonna empower folks to ask that question, and it's going to answer it. And then it's gonna say to you, would you like me to build you a chart? So questions like that, that ability to kind of democratize the access to the data through a highly secure, highly curated permission way is the next is where we're all going. So don't get me wrong. We'll still have charts. We'll still grab some insights. But this ability to kind of take this and put it in the hands of your users that they'll be we'll be able to answer those questions in real time, and it will not take hours of somebody sitting down and building a chart. So that's my soapbox moment for a second. I'll get off of it. But what does that mean moving forward, and what does it actually look like now that we're actually part of Blackbaud? So, there's a couple of new exciting things, and there's a couple of things that we're gonna continue to do. And I'm just gonna quickly go through them. So when we started at School BI, we were single school focused. How do we help single schools, you know, solve their data needs? And we worked with a wide range of schools that had mature data needs and some that were just beginning their data journey. Some schools had tons of systems and a bunch of teams, but we really do believe that we can help schools whether you're using a lot of Blackbaud products or just a few, to figure out the answers to getting to your data. Now we will continue to do that in 2026, but we are going to be working with a limited number of schools. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about what that means in a minute about using an EAP. For those that are, you know, really entrenched with what Blackbaud does, they do an early access program, which we'll talk about in a second. So we will have this strategy of trying to solve this for single schools. As Mark had mentioned, one of the beauties of our product is because we've created a data warehouse under the hood that is purpose built for schools, we actually unlock the ability for schools to work together. That means officially, like in a multi school organization, say you're a school that's part of a diocese and a diocese wants a roll up, we can actually do that pretty well. We're going to call that an enterprise offering. It also means that we might be able to help a group of schools who work together like a cohort that want to do some shared data analysis on very specific things and that could also be possible in the future. So the idea of us being able to now work with school organizations or school groups is going to be transformational both in how we go to market and kind of the products that we're going to be supporting in the future. So that's a new exciting area for us. We'd always believed we would get there, when we were before we were acquired, but we always knew it was gonna take us two years to get there because it had a lot more, complexities. But now being part of Blackbaud, there's some things that are accelerating that and making it a lot faster. The other exciting piece, which I'm gonna call exchange, and, for all those in Elizabeth mentioned, this is a forward looking statement, so don't hold me to the name of that. Blackbaud has a awesome team to help come up with good creative names, but we're calling it School BI Exchange. And this is a new product, and this is an idea that came up with a few folks that are on this call as well as listening to the market. And this is the idea that we believe that outside of reporting and analytics and forecasting and modeling that we can help schools solve the proverbial problem of I've got all this data, I need to get it into some third party system. And the two that come up, that are very obvious are some private schools, even, you know, you all might have said this five years ago that you never had to provide the state any information. With school vouchers and school, choice now, a lot more schools are having to report to the states or to provincial, requirements. And so this will unlock this ability for us to help Blackbaud schools provide this integration. And we will be starting with the state of Indiana. There's a couple reasons why we're doing that. They use an edified standard, and we have, several customers in that market that, will will help. But this also unlocks what I call the DAZZLE easy button. Now, again, I'm not a brander, so that might not be the brand. But the idea is I'm sure all of you have someone in your organization, if you are part of NAS and you contribute to DAZZLE, that stresses two times a year to get the DAZZLE information out of your system and actually put into DAZZLE itself. Because it comes from different systems. It's gotta be touched and manipulated maybe, and it's kind of a it's a it's a kind of a work. And and Dazzle has made, a huge investment to try to make that easier, but it's hard for schools. And so what we believe is that this exchange product will, in the first phase, allow you to create a CSV ready import file depending on the systems that you ingest in the School BI Blackbaud that then we can produce to actually, integrate into Dazzle. Now it's just the start. Right? So, Dazzle and we're working with the amazing folks. Hillary over at Dazzle has been a huge advocate for trying to make it easier for schools. And so, you know, they've got their own workflow, and we both agree to a vision that at some point, that exchange will not just be a CSV file. Right? I don't wanna put a lot of work on the road map for Dazzle, but they do envision a time where the systems are directly connecting, and we will have the foundation ready for that, to work with them when they're ready. Now the other thing Exchange could help with is maybe you have another system or reporting entity you have to do. It's gonna be that plumbing, that API engine and transformation engine that we'll provide. So that will be a new product that we'll be offering, this year. And, of course, we're gonna continue to offer what we call services. At at School BI, we use the term data artist services. So if you've been on the call and there are schools that might know this term, this is the concept where you may need for two years to outsource your, institutional research, you know, work to somebody that, can help you bridge that gap, either because you can't afford to hire a full time one or you realize that, hiring one might not be what you need to do full time. So this will be similar to what Blackbaud calls their managed services. So I'm trying to get better using our new nomenclature, but I'm just bringing that up. We're also exploring how to provide a series of advisory plus services. So it's still early there, but we do believe there'll be some advisory plus services in addition to the managed services that we'll be able to offer. So I'm really excited about that. But the other thing that I you know, just looking at the time because I for those that know me, I could talk about this for hours. What does it mean, like, in next steps? And so I'm gonna hopefully, Elizabeth and Mark will keep me in line because while I've, been here and I've got a ton of knowledge about what goes on at Blackbaud, I'm still learning. I've only we've The transaction closed in November, and you can figure holidays, like, I'm still thinking of we're gonna essentially opt offer an EAP, starting in April. And so there's a couple of key things that everyone on the phone or sorry, the the the webinar needs to know. And that is our single school EAP will be limited. There will be a cost associated to that, and we believe we will open it up in April. The EAP probably will last about a year. I don't know yet when it will end and there's a lot of variables on when it will end and why it will end, but we're going to keep it open for about a year. Our multi school offering is first going to go through a client tech preview. Again, that will start in April and then the EAP will be towards the middle of the summer. It's a little bit we're going to wait and see when the actual official EAP will start on that, but it'll probably be the summer. And then our School BI Exchange EAP will also start in April. And so, one of the things we're asking is if you're interested at all in any of those, there's a QR code on the screen. You can take a picture. It'll take you to a form. The form, I can't remember, might have, like, 10 to 14 questions just asking about you, the school, kind of your appetite. Have you, you know, worked with EAPs before? What technologies do you use? It's pretty straightforward. If you don't know the answers, just do your best. And that's a way to kind of raise your hand and say I'm interested. It doesn't mean you will officially be in the EAPs. It just gives me a chance to look at if there's trends, if there's groups of schools because again we want this first year to be really successful and we want to make sure that we're delivering on the EAP as best we can. But I encourage you, if you're at all interested, fill the form up and there's a link in there that will take you to the form if the QR code doesn't work. Now before I kind of turn it back to Mark, Elizabeth, if I missed anything, I do wanna talk a little bit about things that we're thinking about moving forward because this is a really exciting time, for Blackbaud and for School BI and most importantly, you as schools. Right? We believe that unlocking that agent AI feature will allow native exploration for you across all of your products at Blackbaud and other data sources included. We are not replacing any of the amazing products that, that you have. We are reporting an analytic in insight tool. Right? There's a big difference. And sometimes when we talk with customers, we find out that what they're really asking for is maybe a little bit of an enhancement in the core product. And so sometimes through our discovery, what we realize is and I could give you two examples. But what you really want is a better list in admissions. Right? And that is now amazing because we can actually walk down the virtual hall and say, hey, the school is trying to answer this problem with a reporting tool. It really is something. And so there's an incredible collaboration. But I do believe in this agent based AI experience specifically for reporting and insights. The other is that we believe that this common data model allows us to do what I would call very flexible peer cohort benchmarking analysis. This is not like what DAZZLE provides. DAZZLE provides an incredible wide breadth and deep rich across your organization. What this would do was that this would be complementary to take Dazzle potentially as a data source and take your five schools that are talking about I'm gonna use an example that I just read. The Granite Five up in Northern New England are looking at, you know, how much money they have for tuition and and endowment, and they want to look at a larger dataset. So this idea of being able to create peers or cohorts and having some sort of flexible analysis is also on our mind. And then last but not least, it's the forecasting and predictive modeling that this allows for. And I know a lot of schools have what's the right word, very passionate opinions of whether predictive modeling should be in the k 12 space. And I think what we're realizing is that predictive modeling and forecast modeling, in general, has a place in k 12. It just might not have a place yet in every area of your school. And I say this because I think the vast majority of people on the call are technologists. You know, admissions offices are very cautious about having any system tell them exactly that this kid is a match for the school because they don't have the confidence yet that the data that we're collecting is there. But we're getting closer. And we're going be working with schools over the next, you know, I'd say twelve months if you are on the call today about actually looking at predictive models that allow a report that shows you here are your applicant pools, who's going to be accepted, and then who's going to enroll. And, eventually, the dream of all dreams is not only do they get accepted and enrolled, they accept your offer, but will they be an impact student? Meaning, like, will their lives be transformed outcomes? And we believe that that journey is really what we're here for, and we're excited to go through that process with schools, and the like. Now I will say, again, just because I have everybody as a captive audience that, remember, EAP for single schools will have a limited release this year. We we really wanna be tight. There's there's a lot of things we need to get done. Unlike other EAPs at Blackbaud, we're we're operating as a startup within Blackbaud. Right? So, you know, we're a little earlier to the to the product, capabilities as maybe if you were part of an EAP for an add on for an existing product that's been around for fifteen years. So all I suggest is if you do raise your hand, be very aware that the EAP will be, highly engaged. We will ask you to provide feedback, be critical, be thoughtful, be patient as well. So that's what we're looking for. And I couldn't be more excited. And just on a personal note, I've been in this industry now for several different companies. When we first started talking about this concept of School BI, we did always envision it being closely aligned to a strategic partner who would bring a lot of capabilities to fruition. And so finding a home as part of a bigger organization at Blackbaud couldn't have been more ideal for us. And we do when we when we made this decision to be, to to become part of the Blackbaud team, Mark, made a several great points. But we the best points were that Blackbaud's vision in this area aligned to where we thought the market was gonna need and go. And I think it was a direct correlation to how much they're listening. And and I know that comes across maybe as, you know, surprise to some of you, but I do believe that Blackbaud is listening to this need, and we're we're investing heavily in data and AI. And this is just an indicator to it. So we couldn't be more excited to be here. You know, I get to work with lovely people like Mark and Elizabeth. But the team is, as you all know, is extensive, and we're we're really excited. So I'm gonna pause, take a sip of water. I don't know a wise. So Ryan, you were on a roll there. You were saying a whole lot of nice things about me and EBAT, so we certainly didn't want to stop you. And clearly, much more so with Elizabeth than for me. But nonetheless, I'll just kind of echo a few statements here. We're really super excited about, Ryan, you and your team. I agree with everything. Like, when we first met, I remember in Atlanta and VOA and and Atlas even before that. Excuse me. That was, yeah, in Grand Rapids. I'm going way back there. I love, you know, where you were going, the ideas, the concepts you had, and certainly looking forward to how working with, you know, here in Blackbaud, how we can make a lot of that into reality and then and then beyond that. So it's kind of a repeat. Obviously, we're really excited about the EAP launch. I know a few of you I'm I'm I'm already getting buzz from a few who are interested, which is fantastic. Kinda reiterate what Ryan says. It will be limited release. So Ryan and the group will make those decisions, and we'll make sure we get back out to you as quickly as possible. And just, Ryan, just thanks for this. I think there's a there's a lot here. And by the way, got a lot of q and a, so I'm I'm I'm giving. you a little bit of space here, by the way. So if you haven't noticed, go into the q and a section. There's a lot of questions you might wanna answer, and I think, Elizabeth here just joined. She's got a couple of other announcements to give you a little bit more time, Ryan, to. get to gather me give gather two minutes to look at them. I'm sure I I sure I could find them. Go for it. Awesome. Go ahead, Elizabeth. Alright. Well, just a a couple of quick callouts while we let Ryan take a look at things. But we wanted to make sure that everyone on here was aware of the launch of the AI Coalition for Social Impact. You'll see that Atlas is a part of our group here, but this is a collaborative initiative uniting organizations and innovators that are committed to advancing ethical AI solutions within the nonprofit and education sectors. We are really honored to welcome Atlas as a representative from our sector into the coalition. The inaugural program is a complimentary certification that's designed to equip participants with essential AI skills. So if you look in the docs area, there is a link to our wait list so that you can sign up for when the course opens up. And again, it's a free certification. It's open to everyone. We are really excited about what's ahead and supporting everyone as AI continues to evolve. Hopefully, you've been reading my emails because we've been sending them and seeing the posts on LinkedIn and everywhere we can possibly make sure that you know this, but we are thrilled. We are so excited to announce that the k twelve UC, the user conference, if you haven't heard that terminology before, is returning in Boston, July. Early bird registration is open through March 10. This is a transformative multi day experience that is designed to inspire innovation, empower strategic leadership, foster meaningful connections across the k twelve community. So whether you are in admissions, academic, IT, advancement, finance, or school leadership, we want to make sure that you know that this is the place to be to get the latest in educational technology. We will have amazing keynotes. Those information that those drops are coming soon. We'll have hands on workshops, opportunity to engage with our products team, the return of the unconference, and unmatched networking. So if you have not already, please visit the docs area, click on the link to find out about the user conference. And know that we also do have a group discount because we know that this is a great opportunity for you to bring your team together. And with that, Ryan, hopefully, gave you a few minutes to take a look at the questions. So I will go ahead and kinda turn the slides off and let you address what you can. And then we'll follow-up thereafter with anything that we need to that we aren't able to get to. Yes. Absolutely. So I did kind of quickly scan the questions. I'm gonna try to true test on my brain's ability to group them and try to answer them as best I can. I will say that if we don't answer them, we will right on this, webinar, I will try to take, these questions and create an FAQ that we can share later or, try to answer them individually depending on how they are. So I will review all of them at some point in more detail. The other thing I will say is that I don't know about everybody on the call, but I am thrilled about the UC. I was part of the original UC programs back in the early days, prior many, many years ago, and it's it's it's such a great event and I'm excited for it. So when you when you brought that up again, Elizabeth, I got excited. Okay. So let me try to answer some of these out. Some of them are pretty detailed. I'm gonna try to answer about data sources quickly because there's a couple about the data sources. So fundamentally, we believe that we will have a catalog of data connectors that are prebuilt in there that you could use and turn on. Those data connectors will use primarily API or simple configurations to connect the data. So I'll just give you an example. We believe that, you know, that might have 20 or 30 data connectors for the most popular products out there over time. Right? It it's gonna take us a while to get there. The EAP, the people who participate in EAP will help us gauge which of those data connectors are a priority, right? And so we did build out data connectors for Ravenna and Veracross, but we may have additional data connectors. Some of those data connectors that you would like to have may not have easy ways to connect to them. I'll give you an example. You could be using an FA tool or something else that does not have a public API for us to connect to, but you wanna get FA data into the, say, enrollment management report, and it's you're not using the Blackbaud FA product. We can absolutely ingest data through a CSV or an Excel file or a Google Sheet. So that's usually the workaround. Now that's not the ideal workaround because, ultimately, what it means is we are taking off pressure of said vendor to actually get us, the data, and it's easier when there's data connectors. So there there will be like a running list of the ones that we do and that we're focused on, but I think you should really think about this as we're starting from already having a prebuilt connector with Blackbaud and a and a prebuilt one for Ravenna and Veracross, and we're looking to expand that. And working with schools over the next year to two will help us prioritize those. So I think that answers that question. The. I'll add. to that too a little bit, Ryan. I think one of the benefits that as the EAP goes and as Ryan's team, the technology team gets a little bit more, I'll use the word infused, ingrained, maybe a better word with Blackbaud. Like, you're now on the other side of the the. the curtain as it were. So Ryan is already Ryan and his team are already plugged in with our our core team, our data team, and looking for opportunities beyond the APIs that are available to expand the dataset that's available through your Blackbaud products to make sure that that information is now seamless. That's that will be a part of the original EAP or initial EAP. Yep. But one of the one of the that's one of the I won't say I've given you the keys of the kingdom, Ryan, but you are. You're on the other side now. So giving. you access and having you access to a much broader set and a richer set of data available to you through the Blackbaud products is something that we intend to incorporate into latter phases of EAP. Yep. Yep. Perfect. And and this will I'll answer this. There's a couple of serious questions. Like, how does the how does it work with the UI? Well, fundamentally, we right now, let's just say for the next year, there will be a different URL that you would log in to to see all these charts and graphs. Behind the scenes, we will be working with a different a series of different internal teams at Blackbaud to start the journey of bringing that more natively into the larger, Sky UX environment. Right? So, the good news is is that because we're a data analytic and reporting tool, you know, that's it it seems to work okay. This isn't, like, in your workflow and you're going to another tool. This is I'm I'm actually looking at reports. I'm gonna go to this URL. I'm gonna log in. More information on how we integrate into BBID and all those things over the next year. But for the first part of the year, the best way to think of it is that it's going to be separate. And the reason is because we believe that there's some things we can do quickly and get it done in tandem work to be integrated. Now the the other thing I will mention is that there will be a price to this. We we charged as, a price for this before. We will we will charge a price for this moving forward. It will be similar to adding a model oh, sorry, a module or set of feature sets from Blackbaud. We're in the middle of defining that. It's way too early to say what that cost will be, but it'll be in line to, some of the things where if you added another module at at at Blackbaud. There was a bunch of questions that I'll just quickly talk about. They asked a little bit about what is the data storage like or how are you storing data, and how are you using it with different l l sorry, LLMs and other analysis. So we we store the data. I mean, think of it if, you know, for folks that really wanna get technical. We we create a a data warehouse, and we create that data warehouse, and we ingest the data separately from your core Blackbaud systems. Now it's in the Blackbaud environment. It's managed owned by Blackbaud toward hearing all those standards and security, but it is not in the core technologies that you're using on a daily basis. So it is in a, for lack of better terms, taking you know, if Blackbaud transactional the the core systems take, you know, have 10,000 tables to manage the process, we're reducing it to essentially 10 or five. And we're storing that, and then we're running all of our ETL on top of that. So, it is separate, but it's part of the larger umbrella. I just wanted to answer that. The difference is someone asked this question because I think it's really important because you wanna sign up for the EAP. The biggest difference is there is a single school EAP, there is a multischool EAP, and there is a exchange EAP. Almost everyone on this call is from an individual school. I didn't look to see if anyone was from the, you know, the Association of Lutheran Schools that was on this call. We I didn't see exactly who all the people. If you're a school that wants to solve this problem, you're interested in a single school, and then you might be interested in the data exchange product, which would allow us to connect to, some state reporting or DAZZLE. So if those two things are of interest and you're a single school, you're gonna click the single school checkbox, and you're gonna click the exchange checkbox. I think it says school BI exchange. And don't worry. If you get it wrong, we can always go back. So, mostly, I'm gonna guess that 90% of these people are fundamentally going to be you're all gonna be single school and exchange. I think there was a question Mark, did you say there was a question about security? I just wanna make sure I answer that, but I can also get back to them. I didn't a quest one. okay. Just double. just confirming. It it says you're you said it is covered and owned under Blackbaud Security. Yep. I think talk about that. I just wanted to double. check. Yeah. So the short is is that, you know, we we are we are like, we have been for the last three months building out our product, what we would call under the Blackbaud umbrella. So we took a little bit of a quiet time, and that's why the EAP isn't immediate. We're continuing to do that. So, it won't be in the same, tech stack as what you're used to when you log in. That's why I was saying it's under the umbrella, but it's not gonna be in the Sky UI is what I was trying to say. So it will be it's we're fully under the kind of security standards and security rights of Blackbaud. Yes, I see that question now from you, Julie. Yeah. So, to Ryan's point, we are, Ryan and his team have been working with our cybersecurity team, you know, in all full transparency since before the acquisition to. ensure that the platform, the product, which uses a lot of the same underlying kinda cloud infrastructure, frankly, that the Blackbaud products use. There's a lot of familiarity and similarity there, but I digress. But the whole point of that is our cybersecurity team is going through and authenticating and making sure that the platform meets all of our strict security requirements. Yep. Yep. Yep. Thank you, Mur. The other there there was a question. I can't find it, but there was a question I just wanna answer. So if you can it asks, like, do you need to be a Microsoft Blackbaud school? And the answer is no. Actually, what we're trying to do is we're trying to, create this so that you fundamentally could be any type of school, and you'll be able to use us. So, to answer that question specifically, there was a follow-up question about will you be able to, make your API available to a school? That is on our road map. It is not something we're gonna do initially. So if you can remember the slide I had where you had the green bubble, the data coming in the green bubble, and then the data coming out and had visualization tools, you could envision, and this is our versus our plan, is that in a bubble on that will be, lack of better term, Scooby API. And you may not use any of these visualizations, and you're gonna be doing a bunch of stuff on that. We'll actually be doing that for those visualizations. What we do, technically, all of our integrations with those data visualization tools are actually opening up API endpoints that they connect to. When we when we publish the Looker plug in and when we published an app in the Power BI, we're we're actually just using an API for those calls based off the school's permissions to get to the data. So, yes, the answer is eventually. But you do not need to be we actually believe fundamentally, you should be able to run any office productivity suite. And for those I'm gonna laugh. Maybe the question came from this. I run a Mac OS. Right? You can envision how hard it was for me to actually try to test and use Power BI just in our own environment was miserable. Right? Because I've gotta do a virtual machine or I had to have a little desktop. And so we don't want you to be in that, situation. So it will support all sorts of different users. It will use more of a browser based technology. But, hopefully, I answered that idea that eventually, you know, there will be a School BI API endpoint that you would call. Again, it's going to be different than this. It might be incorporated into the Sky API, like, the way it's provisioned and connected. But the data the data in there is going to be very much I don't think this is a word, but flatter. And the idea that it's going to be compressed and transformed based on the rules and rights you set in School BI product. I didn't go into a lot of that, but one of the also benefits here is this story of, I like to tell about the fact that you all probably have this problem wherein the core data, it might use different names that are not used today for, say, self identified race. I use the term because it it's real. It's happened. I'm I see it all the time. In your core data in Blackbaud, you might have used the term Anglo for white. You might have used white American. You might have used, Anglo Saxon. So when you run a report, you sometimes have to put a filter on the report in Power BI or transformation on the Power BI engine there to say whenever it says those things, the standard now from NAS is white. Right? Or vice versa. If it you have, Filipino, Pacific Islander, and you want it to say Asian. Right? There's there's all these issues. Those rules will eventually be in the data warehouse that you set for all your reports. So you don't it it's a scalable way. So our API endpoint will have those rules. When you make the call, you won't have to do all those work, but you will not be calling the actual endpoints that are stored in Blackbaud. That's a really important thing to to know. But we're gonna go on this journey together, and we're gonna figure it out, but that is part of the kind of the vision. And then there's a bunch of other, questions, which I'm I'll kind of look to put in the FAQ. There was we we don't share school data with with other schools. That's not the point. There were some questions with the LLM. I'll probably put that in that FAQ. It's real technical. I think that those are the big ones unless I'm missing oh, yep. There's some specific questions around getting okay. This is a really interesting point, Mark. There's some questions here about, like, a school struggling to get data out of a certain area of Blackbaud to do some reporting. Mhmm. And, when I'm just gonna mention how we were built in the beginning. and now that we're on the other side. We we. did build out our system to use the Sky API, and Blackbaud has done a great job building out different technologies around the Sky API access points. There are times when we can't get to it to the Sky API. We before the acquisition, we had a few tricks that we could do, build an advanced list. We tied it out. We'd pull it in because those endpoints are available. We would do a few other things. We can ingest it. But now being on the other side of Blackbaud, we're we're learning how to get to those data points even in a different better way. So I'll just answer it with there's more to come on that if you're having an issue with a particular endpoint. So I can't answer specifically, but that's kind of what we're doing now. that we're on the we're on the other side of the fence, so to speak. Yeah. I I see your comment, Rick, that you just came in. For now, but I think back to my previous conversation that now that Ryan and the team are on the other side of the curtain, he now has access and will be working with the, data in our core teams with access to that data. That's not gonna be initially part of the EAP, but that will. be a phase that we will open up a greater set of data as influenced, obviously, by the feedback from the EAP schools. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Rick, and there's we we can expand on that if you wanna chat. We're happy to get. on the phone and chat. on that. You. should. Yep. Yeah. And I see also your comment, Rachel, here. I'll I'll take that one. This this doesn't this is this is complementary in many ways to common, Mark? records. Mhmm. Yeah. Yep. I was gonna say, let's just set the table of, like, what the context of the question is to make sure everybody knows what we're speaking to. Yeah. Sure. I'm sorry. Yeah. The question is Blackbaud moving towards common records engine, which, if you haven't heard, right, is our as our utility that, allows, basically connects the records between, Education Core as well as Raiser's Edge. And and the question, I think, is is and also similar connector and connections, improved connected systems with Financial Edge as well. How will School BI affect the connectors? And the answer is it won't. So School BI is really kinda extracting out the data so you can, you know, obviously run visualizations, ask questions about it, inspect the data, not only within and across Blackbaud products, but also, you know, inclusive of non Blackbaud products as well. And as Ryan had highlighted, you know, push that data elsewhere, whether it be DAZZLE or other type of state exchanges. The connectors are fundamentally intended to help ensure that there is, you know, synchronization and commonality, across the various datasets, across the different Blackbaud products and total school solutions. So in many ways, it's complementary. And with the connectors and with the common records engine, it'll actually just, you know, fundamentally improve the output of a solution like School BI or data warehousing solution can make around a set of schools that's looking potentially to look at trends across their advancement and their fundraising data in addition to some of their data out of their SIS or their enrollment system. Yep. I'm gonna be the the timekeeper. We are right at the top of the hour. I know that there are questions that either we didn't get to or that Ryan is gonna take a look at, and we will put together, you know, an FAQ. We appreciate everyone's attendance and enthusiasm and excitement. We will continue to share information as we have it. A reminder that the link for the EAP interest form is also in the docs area. There's a version, a PDF of the presentation if you'd like to refer to that as well. A link to Mark's post back when we first announced it along with the AI information and, of course, the user conference. So more to come. So thanks, everybody. We really appreciate you. Ryan and Mark, thanks so much for sharing your time and expertise. We hope everyone has a great rest of your day. Thanks, Thank. you. Take care. Bye. bye. Stay warm, everybody.