Name: 5 Top Critical Technology Trends For Nonprofits
Uploaded: 2025-03-12T18:31:06.321Z
Duration: 59 min 8 s
Description: 5 Top Critical Technology Trends For Nonprofits

Transcript for "5 Top Critical Technology Trends For Nonprofits": Alright. Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar, five top critical technology trends for nonprofits. We are so excited that you could all join us today so we can dive in and explore critical technology trends that are impacting prop nonprofits in 2025. Today's discussion is about driving innovation, gaining a competitive edge by utilizing advanced technologies, and using AI to gain insights and improve the donor experience. My name is Andy Snyder. I'm gonna be your moderator today. I am the SVP of product for our platform here at Blackbaud, and I'm proud to be joined by two leaders in the nonprofit sector, Kate Leggett, VP principal analyst at Forrester, and Dwight Dozier, CIO at the Georgia Tech Foundation. Let me give you a little bit of background on each of them before we dive in. Dwight is the CIO of the Georgia Tech Foundation, and he leads strategic direction and oversight of all the foundation and enterprise advancement technology solutions. He's got forty years experience in higher ed higher education advancement, and he's been involved in a wide array of professional organizations supporting advancement operations, fundraising, and alumni engagement, including CASE, AASP, Blackbaud CRM product advisory group, and many other volunteer boards. It's a very engaged Blackbaud CRM customer, and the Georgia Tech Foundation team are pushing the boundaries of how their technology solutions support their advancement business partners. He and his team are doing exciting things, including exploring Microsoft Fabric. We'll have great insight to share. Kate is a VP and principal analyst at Forrester. She's a leading expert on CRM strategies, maturity, benchmarking, governance, and ROI. She's been published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, and industry publications as well. Prior to Forrester, she spent over ten years in leadership in the industry working at software companies. Before I hand this to Kate to kick off on some of our trends, I do wanna mention that you can put questions in the q and a up in the, the corner of Goldcast, and we're gonna try to get to some of them, by the end of the session. So with that, I'd like to pass it off to Kate to set the context and begin to get into some of our trends. Kate. Kate. Thank you as I interrupt you. And thank you all to, take an hour out of your busy days to listen to us, talk about, technology trends for CRM in, the, nonprofit space. So I want to set the stage, like Andy said, and just acknowledge that there are over a million and a half nonprofits in The US that provide a range of services to their communities. But it's not easy for nonprofits to stay afloat, because they depend on donors and grants for funding, which is increasingly hard to come by in these macroeconomic conditions. And many nonprofits really struggle to gain mindshare with the right messaging and targeting to be able to attract donors. And, they struggle to build meaningful relationships with their donors, to keep them aligned to their mission and engaged, over time. They also struggle to evaluate their fundraising efforts, to be able to determine, like, how effective were their initiatives. And if you can't understand outcomes, nonprofits can tune their tactics to be able to drive higher engagement and loyalty. And at the core of this issue is that many nonprofits struggle with their technology foundations, which is why we're here today. Many nonprofits have silos of data in many different systems that aren't integrated together. And these silos make it hard to have that end to end visibility into fundraising, into donor management activities. And on top of that, many, nonprofits are still using legacy CRM that can't support their operations. So nonprofits, we see, are increasingly investing in modern customer relationship management or CRM technologies to help them reach new audiences, to help coordinate fundraising activities, to increase their understanding of each donor and to be able to drive engagement and loyalty. And they're also using CRM to be able to boost operational efficiencies of their teams. And this ultimately helps you get to that next level of funding, takes you to that next level of growth. And so the data, and I've got lots of data, that I'll be presenting in this webinar, but the data that you're looking at on the screen shows that CRM, it's an established technology category. You you go back two years in 2023, '60 '4 percent of companies, both big and small, within the nonprofit space and outside of the nonprofit space, leveraged CRM. And 29%, two years ago, were increasing their investments in technologies. Last year, when we took our last data cut, close to 70% of companies were using CRM and slightly less 23% were looking to increase their investment in CRM. So, what are companies looking for in CRM? CRM, as you all know, streamlines and coordinates fundraising and donor management activities. It provides your team with that full three sixty degree view of prospects and donors, and our data at Forrester shows that CRM is increasingly being used and being purchased to help increase operational efficiencies and productivity of your teams. And automation and AI, within CRM focuses teams on activities that matter, that make an impact. And it allows you to increase innovation, get a competitive advantage, and also improve the experience that you can deliver to your donors, your constituents. So, collectively, CRM helps drive heightened customer experiences, which increases engagement, retention, and loyalty. And these directly impact your ability to to fundraise and within the for profit sector increases reach and revenue. And let me go down that angle just a little bit more, because at Forrester we have a decade and a half of research where we try to quantify the impact of being able to deliver great experiences to top line revenue and we do this in dozens and dozens of industries, outside of the nonprofit space. And, so what we do is we measure the customer experience that hundreds of companies that we then organize into dozens of verticals deliver. And then we calculate the top line revenue impact that these companies can garner if they deliver just a little bit better of, customer experience to what they're doing today. And I know it's an eye chart, but those are the figures that you're seeing in the right hand column. And so we have a decade and a half of research on this. We validate our our models with, case studies, of companies who have gone through transformation efforts. And the the takeaway, the the only thing I want you all to remember is that in every company, in every industry that we have data on, there's a correlation between great experiences and then, and then top line revenue. And great experiences are delivered via mature CRM operations. And again, for nonprofits, again, it it translates to increased donations and fundraising success. So the the the the the TLDR is that CRM technologies are really powerful and what we want to do for the rest of the webinar is focus on five technology trends that impact nonprofits. So, the first trend is all around CRM migrating to the cloud. So out of all the business applications that are used by companies, CRM was the first technology to be deployed in the cloud. And then this wave started over twenty years ago in the early two thousands. And because cloud deployments were so attractive, it because, it it ended up shifting the burden of CRM maintenance, of regulatory compliance, of security onto the CRM vendor instead of onto the organization deploying CRM. So first of all, maintaining on premise hardware and legacy code just takes a lot of IT and professional services overhead. And shifting, CRM to the cloud really lets IT shift the resources to innovation and differentiation instead of server maintenance, for example. Cloud deployments also help eliminate IT focus on managing data centers. Cloud CRM also lets organizations consume innovation a lot more quickly because features new features are often delivered either first or sometimes only on cloud versions right now. Again, because CRM has been moving to the cloud for the last twenty years. So innovation is not always available on on premise versions. Think about like AI. Some of the newer AI features are only available on cloud CRM because of the amount of data that you need to be able to tune, your AI models. CRM data security and regulatory compliance is strengthened because now it's on the vendor to take care of security and compliance. And they have thousands of engineers who are working on these issues compared to just a handful of IT professionals on your side. But as you see on the data here, migrating CRM to the cloud, it's not always straightforward because CRM can be deeply embedded in your operational systems and integrated in other systems. And our data at Forrester shows that just a quarter deployments right now are on premise and it's moving every year. And then the other deployments are split between like multi tenant SaaS and hosted or private SaaS. Again, with these two models where the vendor is responsible for the infrastructure. So here's some more data from Forrester for you, about using the benefits of using cloud CRM. 25% of our survey respondents say that, cloud deployments increases IT resiliency, and being able to provide better experiences. 24% say that they benefit from automated delivery of regular updates. 23% say that SaaS increases business agility. 22% say that SaaS increases the speed of implementation. And then you see all the other benefits like lower overall costs, easier maintenance, increased collaboration, information sharing, all points that I made, in the other slide. So Andy, looking at all this data, what do you think about these benefits, and are your customers seeing the same types of benefits? Yeah. I think we should definitely connect what we're seeing here in a lot of the Forrester data to real life experience. So I'm gonna I'm going to ask a couple questions of Dwight in this area. And actually the first question Dwight's, gonna be two parts. So related to moving to the cloud, what benefits has has the Georgia Tech Foundation seen since you moved to the cloud? And kind of the second part is, I guess, a result of that, have you been able to redeploy some of your team to areas that are bringing the business greater value? Great. Thank you, Andy. And I wanna say, welcome, everyone, and delighted to be here. We have, we have been intentional, in our in our understanding of the power of CRM and and its, environmental cloud. We started a journey, a little under ten years ago in recognizing this as Kate Leggett was talking about some of the legacy platforms used. We we had used a well established legacy platform, but, Georgia Tech prides itself on innovation, creativity, and we wanted to try to start to change that narrative some time ago. So we went down the road of starting to, look at options in that way. We were, being part of the foundation. I'm with the Georgia Tech Foundation. We're independent entity from Georgia Tech, so we maintained a, a separate but supportive, environment of on premise, technology, to the tune of both virtual and physical servers, a hundred and six, along with the traditional underpinnings that have been talked about now of a DBA. We I just put out on the curb a a battery UPS system that's half the size of my office, and, you know, and the related kinda infrastructure and support needed for that. So, we have been over those ten years, we went, live with our application. We currently use the Blackbaud CRM system. And over those years, we have seen, the benefit of not only reducing our physical footprint, but also bringing on technical acumen, as was mentioned that vendors can provide to us that I can redeploy my resources into other value add, achievables that that kinda move our revenue, move move our engagement with our alumni, and and and deploy. And we're we're really doing some really neat things by me repurposing technical people, instead of just making sure the infrastructure is solid and maintained, to having, you know, people that have better depth in that area. And then we're able to to deploy some of the the tools and, and some of the platforms that can, interface more with our users and our donors and all of that. So it's it's been it's been very good. We have, seen a coordinated effort also, with, the benefits of having security and also as, infrastructure is now, being much more prevalent in the cloud, the whole connectivity, that we're able to enjoy and benefit from being in this space. So to follow on to that for a second, one of the things that, Kate mentioned and that you're kind of circling around too, have have that dedicated instance has having a dedicated instance improved your security concerns? It has. It has. Again, I I used to joke that my security person, we did have, a person in charge of security, but all I had to do is lock him in a closet and I defeated my security. Right? So, knowing that I have really professional services that are enterprise level, and, you know, are watching out for us as well as others has has really put that, have, you know, peace of mind, and all the certifications that that any of the CRM Mhmm. Vendors have to go through and certify and attest to, yes, has been something of of a comfort being able to do that. I don't I don't have to focus on that. I can focus more on the business at hand. Okay. Then last last question on this trend. You know, there's there's always trade offs when you're considering on premise and cloud. How did your foundation get comfortable with those trade offs? That's a great question. We were we were an early adopter, as I said, at least in this space. So in the very beginning being on premise, you can you can, have a lot more access to, spinning up other environments and doing other things. So we did go through a journey of getting there, but we we, you know, happy to report that we were early adopters. So we did have some bumpy roads in the beginning. But, in in the mature state that we are now, and I think, most are at this place, we are able to, really kind of, you know, mitigate that and be able to utilize, the advantage of of that. The the trade offs now is that in our environment now, we're able to kinda manage our backups, at least from a recovery not a recovery, but a, reestablishment standpoint if we need to rebuild an environment. We're working on continuous integration, continuous development, efforts with our environment. We're taking advantage also of the fact that, the deployment of new releases and updates happen on a much more frequently frequent basis. I think Kate referred to that, versus, you know, when does it fit into our pipeline and how do we do it and all of that. So, there there were some trade offs initially, but I think between the various solutions that we have in place, and and and you spoke earlier, we'll we'll mention later about our use of data repositories and fabric that give us that kind of access that we have right now, that we're enjoying. Okay. Great. So, Kate, why don't we move on to second trend? Sure. And I was gonna make a comment for Dwight. It's you're giving my presentation for me. Thank you very much for that, your insights. So second trend is around purpose built CRM. So what do we mean by purpose built CRM? So and at Forrester, we we we use two words interchangeably. We call it industry CRM or purpose built CRM. So there's two broad categories of CRM. There's horizontal CRM, which I often think of as the vanilla edition of CRM. It's built it's the same for everyone, all industries out there. And then there is CRM that is purpose built for the needs of a particular industry vertical. And purpose built CRM, it supports regulated infrastructures and compliance that are important for a particular industry. I mean, I think about the CRMs that are purpose built for health care, for example, or for financial services, or insurance, or government, or education, and student services. And then there's CRMs that are purpose built for non profits. And so these purpose built CRMs, they support at the base layer, like regulated infrastructures and compliance for your industry, then they support data models and AI that are specific for your industry. Like, I think about data models to manage households or individuals or groups or corporations. You know, there's some complexity there in the data model. Purpose built CRMs also support end to end workflows and user experiences, like experiences for segmentation and engagement or peer to peer fundraising or managing events or coordinating volunteers, for example. And these purpose built CRMs are, also offer, integrations, into systems, like, for example, accounting systems or payment processing systems to be able to support that end to end journey, seamlessly. And they're really attractive because they offer, organizations who deploy them a rapid time to value because they are built just for you. And vendors in the space offer a lot of best practice methodologies that rests on all their years of experience in the space to get you up and running really quickly. And so you get a lot more value more quickly, and you have these out of the box workflows and experiences that you that are aligned with the way that you're working. You don't necessarily need to spend your IT resources building out these workflows and experiences, and you can take those IT resources and deploy them, like Dwight was saying, on areas of differentiation and innovation. The other advantage of purpose built CRMs is that I I say that they're componentized, meaning you don't have to adopt them, like, all at once. You can start by adopting to some of the capabilities, like event planning, perhaps, and then deploying more and more of the product over time. And, again, they're cloud based, more and more, which, again, helps with all the benefits that we covered in, in the first trend around IT resiliency and agility and being able to deploy best practice workflows and really focusing your IT organization on the areas of differentiation and, innovation. So I think that one of the things that you called out, and I wanna I wanna now get some Dwight opinions, on this. With the purpose built, one of the places that shows up the most, I think, is around some of the data and the purpose built data model. So I wanna zoom in on that for a moment. So, Dwight, how has data enabled change and benefit of the Georgia Tech Foundation and the development of your fundraising? Have you been able to to leverage data that you didn't have access to in the past? You know, maybe for events or stewardship or donor advisement funds? Yeah. I I I think, Andy, you know, along with our transformation, again, from legacy on premise to cloud, we we intentionally also did a parallel effort with the importance of data along with that journey. And so, it it has, been something that is accompanied, our build out. So much so that, in recent times, in this particularly this fiscal year, our constituent management data kind of maintenance function was done with one of our affiliates. But I have since under undertaken that within the foundation, and that unit now reports to me. I kinda describe it as I have a a great vessel, a great vehicle, that I've, developed, onboarded, developed, maximizing, but I need better cargo in my in my vehicle. Right? And my cargo is the data. So the underpinning of that has been very, very, very important to me delivering the end result. And, you know, and part of that definition of CRM versus what was traditionally a database or more legacy platform is to see a part of the CRM rotates and faces our external process. It it faces our constituents. Right? So as much as we're inside maybe working on it, it has a part where they can come and meet us in the middle. Right? Whether that's exposed to the CRM, functionality of events or, other type of portals that are there. But data has been really it's really one of the most critical functions. Again, with this onboarding, I just recently did a comprehensive screening of all, pretty much all of my, individual constituents in my my database. We are pointing now with API connections to a lot of the source vendors that that many of you may be used to that we're having this connectivity. And, you know, as we build for, you know, future capabilities and then the data is, to me, kind of a nonnegotiable part of this. I have seen it both here and other institutions where, it it has not been optimal. Right? And, you know, I I think data is a way to describe our constituents. And in many cases, our our description is not very full, but it's paramount to our our ability to try to raise more money, and to, and to and and maximize our our engagement. One of the things that Kate Leggett said that as you're talking, like, has me thinking. So one of the things she talked about was having the purpose built data models, like, out of the box and how that can give you productivity gains by being able to, you know, deploy resources elsewhere. So in that spirit of purpose built, like, how has having those core data models out of the box been of benefit to you? I think it's been great because we we've been able to use the collective thought of people in the space in the industry in in the formation of those data models. I I had looked early on at crafting kind of my own data model early on in in crafting, you know, kind of a, a, non industry CRM. But what I was finding is I was only gonna craft what I knew or what my, you know, my internal stakeholders knew, which is dangerous. Right? It's, it's, it's and so it would have a limited perspective. So I think the data models, lend themselves, I think, to really the best practices. I think it it they're they're guiding themselves to the the collective, that we all, kind of aspire to, whether it's events, activities. You know, we do a lot of educational with educational, involvements in all of that. I I think that's paramount. Okay. Alright. Kate, let's move on to trend three. Sure. Data trust and security, which dovetails very nicely from purpose built CRMs. Dwight was just talking about how, his, he relies on many data sources that may be even outside, of CRM to to be able to deliver great experiences to, his constituents. And I think about, like, on the screen here, data from, a CRM is often enriched with, like customer preference data, campaign response data, second party firmographic data, behavioral data, unstructured data like, voice of the customer data. And CRMs have to be a a they're a repository for all this data, but trust and security of data, especially your first party CRM data, is incredibly it's foundational. And CRMs offer many layers of control to be able to protect and secure your CRM data. You've got role based access, for example, for every data field, to be able to prevent unauthorized access. And then more than that, CRM support, multifactor authentication, data masking, data encryption of data that's either in flight or at rest within your database. CRMs, like we talked about in the purpose built CRM trend, they're deployed on regulated infrastructures that support again, these infrastructures support data security and privacy regulations. And then all actions that are taken on data, can be audited, reported on. And more than that, trust and security of data is foundational to AIM models and LLMs, that need to be able to comply to your trust security and privacy policies so that no trusted customer data is used to train LLMs or that AI outputs are grounded in, customer data. Andy, I'll turn it over to you to see what what Blackbaud's doing. I mean, security certainly is quite a topic on a lot of people's minds, And I think that there's big implications of having a robust security posture and strategy in place. And maybe let's think about that from the inverse perspective. So, Dwight, like, have have you seen any effects of not meeting the security bar? Often, we talk about what's the security bar and, you know, saying above it, but what's the impact of not meeting the security bar? What have you seen in your sphere? Reputational impact is is the biggest thing I would say. You know, technology wise, we'll patch the hole. We don't want the hole, but we'll patch the hole and fix that. But the reputational impact that can occur is is, you know, monumental. And I think as I go into any of these journeys, Kate said this word a minute ago that, you know, the foundational aspect of this, the it's a foundational requirement. Right? But I think that, you know, as I have seen, fortunately, you know, not not much of an impact here at at Tech, but the underpinnings of that is that, it the reputational, aspect of that, the, lack of trust that happens even internally with your with your internal stakeholders that it can occur, security is not there. So we going into any of this venture, particularly when talking with data again, data is a description of the person, and it it is like you're, you're belaying their trust if you don't maintain, that that kind of position or posture. The reputational thing, I would tell you, Andy, is is probably one of the biggest outcomes of not in the cost of not doing that. Right? I I feel great about, as I mentioned earlier on, the investment in that. So I I I did have security people before when I was, more in a local non CRM environment, but my level of investment in that and the up upkeep was limited to compared to what's happening industry wide or in a in a CRM industry. So, that that level of investment I show now is paramount to that, and we conduct on internally annually, under under, my watch a cybersecurity assessment every year independent of, anything else that happens to make sure we don't have that hit on our reputation. So to that end, how much of everything around security, the things that Kate mentioned, you know, things that are on the slide, how much of that is now in today's age, your expectation of what's in the box when you look at a purchase? 100%. In the box, that's one of the first things is I'm going through a contractual review or the capabilities, you know, both with my primary, let's say, CRM provider, but also, you know, a lot of us work with third party companies that connect to or add data to as well as their position on this whole subject matter. So my my out of the box, I'm expecting that, that capability, to, be paramount as it's important to me, to be important to that particular vendor or organization as well. Okay. Great. Kate, let's move on to trend four. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent points. I would I was also, for the last trend, going to add. If you're not able to secure and protect your data, you get hit by fines that can sometimes be in the millions of dollars. So it's brand reputation. It's also really costly, to not adhere, to not protect your customer data. So trend, four, benefits of an extensible platform. Lots to say here. So your job is again, or your goal, is ultimately to support your constituents through their end to end journey with you. And it often takes more data and more process than just what is in core CRM or the boundaries of CRM. And so there's four considerations that as you adopt modern CRM, you got to think about. First of all, again, that core CRM data and process can take you only so far. You may need to import data from other sources, second party data, third party behavioral data, for example, or data that lives in other systems to be able to enrich the core data that you have within your CRM. And so you've got to be able, your CRM has to have robust data import and orchestration tools. Then even though these purpose built CRMs have purpose built workflows, to be able to support common processes, your work, you may do your work a little bit differently and so you need to be able to easily customize business rules or logic using SDKs that provide APIs, to be able to access, create, modify the rules that perhaps or the workflows that come packaged within your CRM, or you need to be able to, to to to create automations as well. You need to create, you may need to support data model extensions. Even though, you may have a data model out of the box, there are some, extensions that you may need to be able to support your type of business. And then, again, your CRMs have to come with open APIs and packaged adapters, to support integrations into other systems like we talked about, like portals or commerce systems or perhaps accounting systems or payment processing systems to be able to provide that outside in like seamless experience to your constituents. Andy, I'll throw it over to you to see if you have anything you wanna add. I think one of the anytime you're talking about extensibility, sometimes for folks, it can it can end up being a little bit of an abstract concept. So to ground it in how does this look in practice? What does this what does this mean? Wanna kind of give Dwight here an opportunity. Like, how are you using the extensibility? How are you using this to improve and integrate across all of your different campus systems? Well, if as you see, on the screen, that is our current landscape, and I will say evolving, and, ever changing, in the in the evolution as we connect to, different functionalities. We are using the extensibility of the process to make sure that we can have those those relationships, and those the connectivity to other, various sources of data. I had mentioned earlier, about our pursuit of, Mac Microsoft Fabric. So in an environment of really, more click than less code, we're able to look at starting to put a lot of this data structured and unstructured in a repository so we can make these, connectivities and these relationships and extend where they can. As as Kate mentioned a minute ago, you know, the, utilization of API endpoints is great, but not everybody has that. So how do we not disrupt an automated flow by having to just chain that kind of functionality? So we're looking at technologies, which are wonderful, and underpinning of our current CRM of our current CRM environment that has this kind of extensibility infrastructure in place. So when I talk about fabric, where power platform, power automate, we're doing a lot of that internally in the Azure space, to make sure that we can, as you see this chart here, talk. Right? I I think about if you think about that as a person, those are their various descriptors. And to not have those connectors and the connectivity, in our world of donors and alumni, for life, life lifelong relationships, we're limited by by how we do that. So I count on the extensibility, of of the platforms that I'm looking at. And if not, we're in a position now, like I said, with some of our pursuits to be able to craft that ourselves if we need to. And a lot of, a lot of times, some folks can think about integrations as very narrow and just and small, but sometimes they can get they can get large. Like, how large and broad do some of these integrations get? Really, really quite large. I mean and and that's, you know, within the setting I I I'm in sometimes at a university. There are others who we are the system of record for donors and alumni and general constituents of the university, but there are other, entities on campus that have, reluctant to joining that, that environment. So there are there are some that are very large. You you know, one that's predominant in this space, of course, is, you know, feeding from our student system as an example. But student, HR, athletics, we have a very, very kinda, you know, robust and and, active environment in that in that space. So if you look at them, if you back up, they they look to be their own, their own, kind of, worlds, but we pride and we try to emulate we are one Georgia Tech. And I think through the extensibility, that's how we can emulate what you're seeing here. We are trying to emulate that so our con our our constituents, our stakeholders feel and, are are able to experience the one Georgia Tech experience. One of the from the earlier trend, one of the things that Kate talked about with the purpose built, CRM had to do with the ecosystem, you know, around it. And I feel like the ecosystem overlays with extensibility, especially when it comes to things like, you know, a third party, third party network that you can take advantage of? Like, have you found value in having that third party integration partners in the ecosystem when it comes to the extensibility? We have. And what's nice there is they, a lot of those third parties have already done build outs, to other, subject and and data sources that we're looking at. So they've already kinda paved that path, so we can take take advantage. We we we work with a number of third parties in that capacity that kinda bring things to the table without us us having to recreate. So, you know, very, very important. Again, looking at the image here, this is that ecosystem, and we have some that, some of them, I would say, Andy, also that they're interested in the working with us to say, how can we build this integration or this, extending the the relationship on a more permanent basis, not a project based. Right, but something that us and others that follow us can make use of. Great. Well, let's we might have saved the best for last. Let's let's move on to trend five, Kate. And it looks like we just lost Yeah. There we are. We're back. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's for last or perhaps the the trend that's on everybody's mind. I always say AI, it's everywhere, all around us. So at Forrester, we really think of AI in, like, new distant categories and then AI agents builds on predictive and generative AI. So what's predictive AI? It's AI that's been around for decades. It analyzes in its, like, foundational definition. Predictive AI analyzes existing data and makes forecasts. So predictive AI, you think about it in the context of CRM. It powers forecasting, for example, or customer segmentation, or offers, marketing offers, to be able to optimize offers. It services insights to your teams to help them make better decisions. It powers next best actions, like next best step, next best conversation that you should have, next best, again, next best offer, next best, again, piece next best step in the process, next best connection. It helps surface sentiment as well. So generative AI, it really became the rage with, you know, ChatGPT and, in in late twenty twenty three. And so what does generative AI do? It basically uses large language models or language models to create new content based on existing content. And generative AI, it it it's used in CRM to be able to do things like summarize, engagement history or create new content, like help me draft an email or help me draft a proposal or help me, help me answer this question that I got. It's also used to create narratives to be able to explain data trends. Like, for example, why is some why are we getting more engagement over this you know, why is engagement spiking? Or it can and it helps teams really uncover new insights about their business. And generative AI, so predictive AI is well baked in CRM, and generative AI can either be CRM vendors offer it either in the flow of work, like, you know, summarize this, this, the history for this particular, constituent, or summarize, perhaps, the conversation that I've had, or it can be offered as a co pilot. The third type of AI, and it's really AI that builds on top of predictive and generative AI, is what is becoming like all the rage these days. It's called agentic AI or AI agents. And these AI agents, they perform a task and make decisions using rules, using predictive AI, using generative AI, and they're making these decisions and really doing the work autonomously. And this is where the industry focuses right now, but we're in the very early days. And CRM vendors will offer AI agents for very narrow tasks. For example, like prospecting or help answer common questions. So again, that's where the energy of the, of the, the vendor, the CRM vendor ecosystem is going, but in terms of AI agents, we're in the really early days and real case studies are and and and and even use cases for AI agents are just emerging right now. AI is going to make an incredible impact to productivity, to customer experience, and in all, the Forrester data that we have, we see most organizations having AI pilots that are now being rolled out into production. And what you wanna do if you are choosing, for example, or moving to a modern CRM, really look for CRM technologies that, offer, what what I call these AI use cases, that are baked into their product that have a material impact to outcomes, like better efficiency, better productivity, better customer experience. And our data at Forrester shows that AI is extensively used to help increase employee productivity, customer experience, operational efficiency, innovation. It's all the data that I have on the screen here. And as you move through your AI journey, again, partner with your CRM vendor, and really rely on their point of view to help guide you to how you should be adopting AI, to be able to get the best value for your investments. And you can start small, you know, with some predictive AI use cases, next best offers, actions, insights, and then move slowly through, perhaps even consuming, generative AI and then ultimately moving more to an agentic world. So having said that, Andy, I can Yes. So AI is certainly hyphen. It's all around, and it and it certainly will lead to a lot of productivity gains in many areas. I think a lot of people struggle with, you know, how do I get started sometimes? So maybe, Dwight, how did how did you get started in this area? I mean, you have the data. How are you beginning to turn some of that into these productivity gains that Kate mentioned? We're we're starting first with the idea, and and the better definition of what AI is, because AI can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So that's one of the things that we're doing, trying trying I've I've I've gone on a roadshow before I even start to go down that road and say, what is, what does AI mean to you? What do you envision? Everyone's, you know, has that buzzword. You know, I I it it you know, with the term artificial intelligence, I I'd like to emphasize as well assistance intelligent assistive intelligence. Right? Because a lot of it manifests itself in that kind of capacity. But, we're getting started with a number of projects. Kinda really going to part of the journey that that Kate mentioned is, we've done a lot of work already in the predictive area. In fact, we did some early, work with a partnership between Blackbaud, Microsoft, and Georgia Tech Foundation early on, in this in this, realm using resources from all three. Happy to report the result of that project. This past December was the largest, fundraising period in one of our organization's history for that particular period. Yeah. So that's that's the deliverability, I think, of more the the, predictive nature. But now the expectation again is more the generative. So, as we how do we deliver those results? People are expecting us particularly as we get more of our fundraisers on the road. We have the vehicles for them to enter their information, but, you know, how can it have a kind of simultaneous simultaneous narrative? And then the, you know, the agent, Agintik, as, as Kate says, is that how can we put that in so we have these things happening, around us. So our journey right now, as I mentioned, we onboarded the data management aspect of this. I that's now under my control. I can rest a little sure that what the AI starts to gobble thinking of Pac Man Pac Man is is is nourishing using that kind of example. And now that that AI can be nourished by that is how can we deliver it. So part of my being, Andy Snyder, is going out and, deploying using some of our positive results, but also getting some narratives about what that means before we go into deployment. So One of the the the threads that I I feel like we're saying without saying, so I'm gonna just I'm gonna say it, is, you know, AI has has first, while it's existed for a long time, there's been a lot of trends the last couple of years. And if you were to attach yourself too tightly to any particular one, whether that's a particular model, a particular product, you're gonna find that another trend comes. And then you have to consider what does it mean to move to that. And I think one of the things that has remained consistent, and one of the things that best prepares you for all of these waves is the focus on the data, and the data itself being kind of correctly tagged with the right kind of cleanliness. It's a little bit of here on the slide. The AI is only smart as the data it uses. But having the data prepped and ready and able to be accessed is probably the single best thing that anyone can do to be prepared to ride the wave. And so to that to that end, you've done a tremendous amount with and are still doing a lot with the data. From the different categories that Kate mentioned, is there a particular one that, you know, is more interesting? Are there places you're you're hoping to place more emphasis over time? We're kinda doing a lot of that in parallel. So as I mentioned earlier with my onboarding, we literally screened all individuals in our database for contact information. Right? So we wanna make sure the underpinning of how we talk and communicate with them is proper and accurate. We're now we've now moved on that we have that basis of contact and demographic information. Now we're moving now to a larger segmentation of both wealth and employment, information to make sure that we reach out, and then we're getting to know know those individuals, which is our, you know, our next sequencing of all of that. So we're we're we're understanding as you mentioned, again, when I use kinda my Pac Man example, we wanna make sure we're eating nutritious food and not junk food, in that in that analogy. But, that that whole that's kind of been our journey with the data. Our emphasis right? We are in the campaign. So as we're trying to work to uncover, a new prospects and people that can, you know, further elevate the the, outcomes of of the institute, that's really kind of been our focus is is how can we how can we uncover, the many, you know, successful and, and interested, patrons of Georgia Tech Foundation to to move the institute along. Okay. Great. I think we have, looking at the time, I think we have time maybe, and there's there's one question out in the q and a. And, Dwight, maybe this is a chance for you to talk a little bit about some of the work that you're exploring also around fabric. So the question is looking ahead, how are you thinking about prepping, labeling, and exposing these data models to AI agents to help drive agentic automations and or AIML enable predictive analytics? We're we're for for our situation right now, we're going through a lot of re redefining or redefinition of our data dictionary, to make sure that the definitions are clear, so there's not ambiguity to some of those data points that are there. And, I think that's a, you know, a fundamental place that we're kind of starting. Again, as I mentioned about, you know, prepping and and and, and cleaning the data, which is which is important. And then, within fabric, then we're starting to take a look at, within our own tenant. Again, within the foundation, we have a we we we kinda have an isolated tenant of how we can apply that almost using our CRM as a LLM, to apply tools against that that process. K. Thank you very much, Kate. Is there anything that you're seeing in terms of how organizations are kinda preparing for this that you wanna mention? I'm gonna answer this at a higher level, and, Andy, I it's based on your comment about that CRM vendors have just been rolling out these waves of innovations. And I'd say take a step back and don't pursue the shiny objects out there. You know, AI agents are really the topic of the day this year. Last year was generative AI. Before that, You know, you can go back and there's been lots and lots of innovations. Go back to your basics and make sure that it's like building a house. You gotta get those foundations in place. Make sure that you have invested in just in a solid, modern CRM system that you partner with your vendor to to be able to to to leverage all their best practice expertise that they have accumulated for decades and then get your your data, your your core processes, your core integrations in place before you start adopting any type of AI, even predictive AI, because it's only as good as your data is. And it's very easy to get caught up with all this wave of innovation that vendors are releasing, and it's it's hard. I mean, and it's not it's it's a hard journey to go back to the basics and just make sure that your your CRM is is is aligned to modern practices. I guess I'll leave it at that. Yeah. Great point. So with that, we're at the end of our time. I wanna thank everyone for listening in today, participating. Special thanks to Dwight and Kate, for joining us today. I hope you all learned some new things. I learned some new things. I hope this helps you think about your own organization and the journey that all of you were on. So thank you all again very much. I appreciate it.