Transcript for "FutureCast: See What's Next for Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®": Welcome to the Raiser's Edge NXT Futurecast. So we're delighted that you're here with us to learn about the future of fundraising technology and Raiser's Edge NXT. In this broadcast, you'll see how Raiser's Edge NXT is transforming, delivering the fundraising tools you've dreamed of, and the tech you may not even know is possible. Blackbaud's mission is to provide technology that knows your job and is designed to help you do it more efficiently and effectively so that you can focus on the human side of fundraising, making those enduring connections that drive your mission forward. Futurecast is designed to give you a front row seat to three frontiers we're pushing forward to make Raiser's Edge NXT not just the world's most popular fundraising software, but the most powerful platform for the future. With Raiser's Edge NXT, you'll have confidence that you're accelerating impact, working faster and more efficiently with tools designed specifically for fundraising teams, leveraging connected experiences, having everything you need in one place to forward your mission, and benefiting from transformative technology, tapping into the power of artificial intelligence to amplify your team's work. Scott and I will show you how the product is evolving, and you'll hear directly from members of our product leadership team to inspire you about our long term vision for the future. If you're new to Blackbaud or Razer's Edge NXT, Futurecast was designed for you too. You'll walk away from this session knowing how Blackbaud can partner with you today and how Razer's Edge NXT will grow with you long into the future. let's do some quick introductions. My name is Scott Parrish, and I've proudly served the nonprofit organizations with the social good community for over twenty five years. I started my career as a fundraiser for United Way and then moved to direct development efforts for nonprofit organizations in Colorado focused on low income assistance. This is where I became aware of Blackbaud's The Raiser's Edge. Fast forward to now, and I've just celebrated my twentieth year as a Blackbaud employee, and I've worked with hundreds of customers in 49 states and nine Canadian provinces. And there's never been a more exciting time to be here. I cannot wait to show you what's next for Raiser's Edge NXT. I'm Kelly Marion, like Scott I joined the Blackbaud team after fundraising on behalf of non profit organizations for fifteen years. I've served a university, an international membership association, an advocacy entity, and the museum world with one constant, Blackbaud. In my roles as Director of Development and Membership Manager, I experienced firsthand how Blackbaud tools empowered me to transform my own community. I'm thrilled that you've joined us for Futurecast to learn more. We have our guest joining us. Nina Gupta Nadell is an expert in the field of nonprofit fundraising technology and leads Blackbaud's donor management portfolio. She drives the vision and strategy, turning big ideas and insight from users like you into the innovation powering the future of fundraising software. Thank you, Scott and Kelly, and I couldn't be more delighted to join the Blackbaud team and lead the Raiser's Edge transformation. We're driving such amazing momentum for our customers in the market, and we're incredibly grateful to play a part in helping organizations raise billions of dollars to power social impact and philanthropy. And we realize the next era of philanthropy requires even more powerful fundraising management. This ideal was our North Star in reimagining a fully transformed user experience and innovations for this next era. We've launched an entirely new and improved user experience that exceeds the original intent of a modern web view with streamlined critical workflows and a connected experience that delivers innovations across the entire product. We understand that a solution is only useful for our customers if it really addresses their greatest challenges. So we started the product transformation with dozens of discovery sessions with our customers and with our partners. They consistently shared that a partial solution or solutions that are too simplistic or a disconnected experience across disparate point solutions actually exacerbates their challenges. We decided to take a very purpose built and connected approach. Our solution covers fundraising, payments, donor management, and fund accounting as one seamless experience. It really is a different way of serving organizations who don't have the luxury of time or money to cobble together a solution or manage broken integrations. I'm also so excited to share that our AI powered innovation is delivering new and unmatched fundraising performance, decision analysis, and benchmarking capabilities built directly into the product empowered by Blackbaud's industry defining intelligence for good strategy. Customers tell us they have so much data, but it's a constant struggle to build consistent and faster data insights that improve their donor engagement and ensure they allocate time and resources efficiently. This is even more important when facing high workforce attrition and a younger staff that expects modern solutions. We're building and delivering revolutionary new AI powered productivity assistance to help organizations transform the way they interact with Razer's Edge NXT. Our Blackbaud copilot in AI assistance will offer insights, save time, and simplify complex tasks so that organizations don't have to sift through years of transactions, donor interactions, notes, and so many other assets that traditionally have been time consuming to create and maintain. I'm so excited to share with you, and thank you for the opportunity. Really exciting moves ahead. Thank you so much, Nina, for sharing that vision with us today. There's so much coming, but you don't have to wait for what's next. Razer's Edge NXT already delivers. Let's take a look at enhanced functionality that our users rely on today to increase fundraising by an average of 44%. We'll begin where our users do on the newly transformed Razer's Edge NXT homepage. It's packed with new AI powered dashboards and a reimagined navigation that enhances usability. Your work is personal and your homepage is too. The brand new experience is configurable for each user, allowing them to customize the front door of Raiser's Edge NXT with data visualizations, quick links, and more. As a development director, I might choose to personalize my home page with a configurable opportunity snapshot, wealth insights on potential prospects, and a view of year over year fundraising. My database administrator might configure her home page with her favorite queries and the updates tile for quick reference of all the powerful releases hitting Raiser's Edge NXT every few weeks. Other users on the team might select from tiles that track progress on current initiatives, like campaign performance and fund development. Partners also add options, like the bulletin board that gives admins a place to post timely updates and reminders to all staff, developed by Redarc and available in the marketplace. The data that's pulled through on these tiles and the dashboards, lists, and reports throughout Raiser's Edge NXT seem simple. In fact, they are simple to populate, filter, and get the exact output desired. That's because the system is designed to think and capture data like a fundraising organization produces it. Under the hood, we've designed the underlying structure and fields to store data out of the box for the highly specialized information you need to capture. Only Blackbaud solutions have this deep detailed data structure to support business critical analysis and visualizations like you're seeing in this dashboard example out of the box. This level of reporting provides insights only you can get through a true 360 degree view of operations. And all this reporting is available on all device types. That's one of the core principles of Sky UX, our design framework. Development directors on the go can access live performance data while having lunch with the board chair or potential giving capacity as they're on their way to a prospect lunch. Let's take a deeper look through the lens that's probably already on your mind, how you or your staff would move a donor through key moments of their engagement cycle. From identifying the best donor to spend your time engaging all the way through stewarding their major gifts, we'll peek at the functionality that drives each of these key moments. As a fundraiser starting my day, I'm going to log into Raiser's Edge NXT using single sign on and plan out where to spend my time using this key information. In today's case, that's identifying new prospects in the database that are worthy of a deeper review. Scott, can you walk us through how to identify our best prospects and pursue major gifts more confidently? Sure. As you know, major giving presents an ongoing challenge to any growing nonprofit. You need to continuously seek, qualify, and make meaningful contact with donors who have both the resources and inclination to support your mission. But most organizations have limited resources to mine multiple data sources and identify potential donors. But understanding that data is critical as major gifts from affluent donor households account for an increasingly large share of total fundraising revenue. In fact, a Blackbaud Institute report found that 20% of donor households account for 80% of revenue. So you need to know where to focus your efforts to get the best return on your fundraising time. That's where Prospect Insights comes in. Prospect Insights delivers powerful AI designed specifically for fundraisers, not data analysts. Integrated seamlessly into Blackbaud Raisers' Edge NXT, Prospect Insights was developed to help you achieve your major giving goals, including improving your portfolio, streamlining your operations, and raising more money from more donors more often. This gives organizations the ability to identify and prioritize the best major donor prospects without adding more support staff, harness the power of predictive modeling without expensive custom services, leverage artificial intelligence with recommendations that improve over time, and pursue major gifts more efficiently. Our fundraising data scientists designed this feature to help make information about wealth and capacity because data without insights or ways to make it actionable is just information. Prospect insights automatically scores all individuals in your razors edge NXT environment to identify and prioritize your best major gift prospects. Your existing scores get refreshed on a quarterly basis and newly added constituents get stored automatically within forty eight hours. If Prospect Insights provides access to more action oriented data analysis, what kinds of results have you seen, Scott? Our experts monitor results to be sure Prospect Insights fulfills the needs we have designed for it. And our team of data scientists have seen real positive impacts as you can see. Customers using Prospect Insights have seen the number of donors giving $10,000 or more increase by 13%. And then the number of recaptured donors increases by 19%, all while saving time over previous methods of qualifying prospects. Wow. Now that we've identified prospects to engage, let's see how you'll communicate with them. Modern fundraising organizations know it's essential to communicate with prospects and donors on their terms and see the results of that engagement in one complete profile. Razer's Edge NXT already sets the standard here with the level of segmentation within the organization's control. But we're raising the bar even higher to give you a full line of sight into all your communications and how they're performing. We're developing a new communications overview page, which will provide you access to track appeal performance and enable you to see all upcoming and recently sent communications across Razer's Edge NXT and partner solutions through our Sky API extension points. One example of a partner solution within the communications hub is Constant Contact. Users can activate Constant Contact within Razer's Edge NXT. Blackbaud is thrilled to bring Constant Contact on as one of our built right in your standard view partners to enhance the out of the box offerings that Razer's Edge NXT already offers. This is just one example of our goal to provide with you a centralized view of the communications that you have created, not just through Razer's Edge NXT, but also through any best in class marketing solution that you are utilizing. This results in automating powerful communication processes inclusive of all marketing channels with the capability to automate donor engagement journeys for these communications and immediately track performance at communication, appeal, fund, or even campaign level as it happens. Of course, no matter the communication channel for the ask, you need a way for your supporter to take action as part of their response. So next, Kelly will highlight how Blackbaud online giving options make it easy for your community to support your mission. Online giving continues to grow as a critical part of fundraising revenue. With the time and effort you spend on identifying new donors and attracting them through targeted communications, you need to feel confident that you have effortless experiences when it comes to making the donation and having it processed. It also needs to be easy for you and your team to set up and run. A system that doesn't need a dedicated staff member spending hours upon hours a week to deal with payment inquiries or manually updating expired credit cards, helping you save time and staff resources so that every dollar you raise goes further. We don't just say we help you raise more. We're proving it every day. For online giving, we look at three primary metrics to ensure our donation forms are performing. the average conversion rate for the last three months for our optimized forms sits at 36% which is three times the industry average. the average one time donation amount across both of our forms is $397 which is also more than three times the industry average based on the Blackbaud Institute's 2024 Charitable Giving Index. And finally, the average monthly recurring donations across both forms in 2024 was $93 also well above the $24 industry average. Based on these results, if you're not using our forms now, you should be planning your move to help you raise more for your programs in these uncertain financial times. You'll have access to two donation form types in Blackbaud's Raiser’s Edge NXT, The optimized donation form seen here, which has been designed to maximize conversion rates and transaction amounts. You'll also have standard donation forms, which are more customizable and allow you to change the field order, labels, colors, and add additional data collection fields. We're continuously tracking key metrics such as donor conversion, average gift amount, and what percent of overall gifts are recurring across Blackbaud's Raiser’s Edge NXT customers and are laser focused on those performance indicators on your behalf With no changes to your processes, communication, or programs, your form on its own when it's optimized for these performance measurements can help you raise more for your mission. Later this year, we'll be releasing a new type of website component called the donation reminder. When donors start a form and then abandon it at any stage, if they're still on your website or return to your website, a widget will remind them to finish where they left off, encouraging them to complete the donation. This is just one of the benefits available when combining Razer's Edge NXT with Blackbaud Integrated Payments, the integrated processor that handles payments using cards, direct debit, digital wallets, and more in a secure, cost effective platform. Upcoming additions to Blackbaud's Integrated Payments will provide even more payment choices, streamlining transactions and catering to a broader audience. Future options will include DAFPay, a secure and efficient way for donors to contribute using their donor advised funds, simplifying the donation process by allowing donors to give directly through our checkout without navigating external portals. Amazon Pay is also on the payment option roadmap, leveraging the trust and convenience of Amazon's payment system, allowing users to pay using their existing Amazon accounts. Now I know Scott wants to showcase how actual customers are achieving their goals with these tools. Let's take a break in the action and check out some of the extraordinary outcomes that users of Razer's Edge NXT are experiencing. Powered by RE NXT, Claremont McKenna College's capital campaign for responsible leadership exceeded their $800,000,000 goal and raised over $1,100,000,000 That's 12,000 donors and a 65% alumni participation rate. 23 new named professorships and chairs and 72 new endowed scholarships were created as part of this campaign. The Porter Goud School in Charleston, South Carolina serving grades one through 12 is utilizing multiple instances of Blackbaud's optimized donation forms. Recently, Porter Goud's Parents Association used the optimized donation form to collect funds for their sports programs ads, and they saw a lift of $10,000 more from where they were last year. Not only has the donor experience improved, but their advancement services manager has seen increased efficiency in gift processing time by utilizing integrated online giving with Raiser's Edge NXT. Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Foundation recently conducted their National Kids These Days utilizing our NXT CHEO Foundation can graphically show the regions in which gifts were received and become more strategic in segmentation for future campaign initiatives. Their business intelligence team is also configuring the new home page to help their fundraisers make data driven decisions. Fort Collins Habitat for Humanity has built over 370 homes since their existence. When they were looking to broaden their donor audience for their thirtieth anniversary campaign with Prospect Insights Pro enabled, fundraising identification and assignment automation removed manual queries and hours of time spent by the development office. It also provided planned gift insights such as planned gift likelihood and a predictive gift range for Habitat to launch a planned giving campaign. Forest Park Forever is an organization based in St. Louis with approximately 6,500 annual members. Forest Park Forever utilizes Raiser's Edge NXT to automate their monthly recurring program with simplified reconciliation through Blackbaud integrated payments. Forest Park Forever also participates in Blackbaud's early adopter program, which will incorporate direct feedback to inform Blackbaud's product innovations. Kelly, this is just a sampling of the stories our customers are continuing to tell us. The improved efficiency for gift processing really sticks out, and I know we're just getting started. What more can you show us in regards to our acceleration in gift processing? We've previewed how an engaged donor can make a gift online using modern payment options in our integrated forms. But what happens next? After the donation is made, the payment and gift details flow directly into our gift management queue for your team to put eyes on and approve for the next steps in your finance and stewardship workflows. Online gifts will be listed in line for review, and that's not limited just to gifts coming in through the Blackbaud donation forms we previewed earlier. Our partners, like alumni engagement provider, AlmaBase, have built direct integrations that take advantage of our integrated payment options. So gifts that come in through Blackbaud forms show up alongside alumni event registrations powered by Alma Base. Because this system is purpose built for fundraising, we know how critical data health is, specifically duplicate management. Gift entry staff need flexibility in the way they bring data into the system and how that data appends to records that already exist. Our online review tool was designed hand in hand with this audience and gift teams love these workflows that highlight potential duplicates coming in from online sources and power them to choose how those updates are made. Some of you might want Blackbaud to take that on using algorithms to find potential duplicates and match them automatically. Flexibility and design means that your team gets to determine the best approach. Don't forget the unique power of query, which pulls custom data to help you dive deeper into donor and gift details, uncover trends, track campaign performance, and make smarter data driven decisions that strengthen your fundraising results. We're also boosting productivity with shortcuts in our new high speed batch entry experience. Keyboard driven navigation will promote quick data entry alongside the automatic population of repeated data like gift date and fund. To help ensure accuracy, batch entry includes a validation and approval process. For example, if you save a batch missing required fields, you receive exception messages and can't approve the batch until you enter those missing details. As gifts are entered, critical details are captured to facilitate a seamless handoff to finance. What you do not see behind the scenes is that powerful data structure working in service of your development team. They choose the correct fund and gift type based on donor intent, but in the background those field entries tie to account numbers creating debits and credits that can be posted to your general ledger. Easy to use filters let you choose summary or detail posts and enable users to get more granular in the gift list. This means if your team wants to just post adjustments and reversals, we've got you covered. Layer on Financial Edge NXT to your Blackbaud ecosystem and this process becomes even more seamless. Instead of a post of general ledger file, your accounting team would see these details in an open journal entry batch ready for review and posting. This suite of technology also allows you to link fund records across systems which makes reconciliation simple and straightforward. This level of connectivity in your software provides the only true end to end fully integrated experience from pledge to payments or fund management to disbursement available in the market. When your finance and development teams are aligned on the same data and purpose your nonprofit has improved accountability, internal communication, and auditing procedures. You can manage more diverse revenue streams and greater transparency to your stakeholders. As we know transparency is fundamental to strong stewardship of your donor relationships. With razors at Gen XT you'll be equipped to manage every stage of your donor life cycle with ease and confidence. In fact you are likely to find yourself so successful you risk overwhelming your staff And that's why we're prioritizing tools that will help you streamline efficiency, even while gift volume and supporter engagement increases. That's where responsible AI can be a game changer. Blackbaud has a tenured history of introducing artificial intelligence components in our solutions in a responsible manner. Let's talk through some exciting new developments around Raiser's Edge NXT and Blackbaud Copilot that incorporates all the pieces we've seen so far. Blackbaud Copilot is a revolutionary new AI powered productivity assistant and coach that will transform the way you interact with Raiser's Edge NXT. We are excited to give you a preview of how Blackbaud Copilot will offer you insights, save you time, and simplify complex tasks. Blackbaud Copilot will be available throughout Raiser's Edge NXT by clicking on the sparkle icon. Let's start by asking one of the suggested questions. I'll click on what can Blackbaud Copilot do? As you can see, Blackbaud Copilot is not just a powerful productivity booster. It is helping manage tasks, quickly providing key insights into your donors, creating content, and even helping you understand and use advanced features of Raiser's Edge NXT. It is also built with deep insight into fundraising performance, drawing from the proprietary data and insight of the Blackbaud Institute and our forty plus years of market leading experience to be your strategic coach and guide. So let's try asking a question about measuring the success of our online giving program. Blackbaud Copilot draws from our expertise to return a set of actionable steps. Copilot will be available throughout Raiser's Edge NXT. So let's pretend for a that I'm a major gift fundraiser and check out Blackbaud in the context of a constituent record. One of my peers has recently retired and I'm taking over some of the donors from her portfolio. Let's start by searching on one of these donors, Robert Hernandez. Rather than sifting through years of transactions, interactions, and notes by my predecessor to get Robert's backstory, Copilot automatically offers me a helpful summary of Robert's history with our organization. Copilot also offers me some context aware options to draft a pledge reminder or help with some phone conversation starters. This is a great segue to our next guest, Carrie Com. As the chief data and AI officer at Blackbaud, Carrie leads the data intelligence center of excellence and is responsible for Blackbaud AI and data strategy, vertical focus product innovation, data science and informatics disciplines, and data governance and ethics. She serves as chair of the advisory council on methodology for the Giving USA Foundation and serves on the governmental affairs committee for the Nonprofit Alliance. Welcome, Carrie. Thanks, Kelly. We intend to harness the potential of Ajentic AI focused on the areas that demand the highest level of personalization and agility at scale to help our customers unlock new levels of effectiveness and deeper connections across critical fundraising operations, like donor cultivation, stewardship, and sustainer management. For example, imagine a built in AI stewardship assistant that could help you create optimized or personalized stewardship workflows, not only based on recognition programs, but for a wide variety of segments. Suggest segments that require additional stewardship activities, such as lapsing or at risk donors, rationalize planned donor outreach across multiple stewardship and cultivation plans, make updates according to actions records, draft content for stewardship activities to help fundraisers, suggest new stewardship activities to reengage donors based on interests and past trends and produce on demand personalized impact statements for past giving. Or imagine an AI assistant for recurring giving that could identify all donors who gave a single gift this month, compare those donors to a recurring gift upgrade model, create segments of likely or unlikely upgrade prospects, generate upgrade offer content specific to each donor, then send an upgrade ask to a donor with a personalized link, and monitor results and create segments based on responses, all while keeping you in control and allowing you to tweak wherever needed. These are the kinds of jobs you trust Blackbaud AI to help you do because we have the data and expertise to do it effectively and responsibly. Well, Scott, I think that's all we can squeeze in today. We've just scratched the surface on the powerful ways that Blackbaud can transform fundraising organizations with Razer's Edge NXT as it exists today, and thanks to peaks into the future from Nina and Carrie throughout the next exciting phase of innovation. I agree. Thank you, Kelly, and thanks to all of you for joining us. As Kelly said, we barely scratched the surface. So if you'd like to learn more, please use the widgets provided to schedule a meeting. We'd love to continue the conversation one on one at your convenience. Till then, Scott and Kelly signing off.