Name: Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud Agents for Good™
Uploaded: 2026-05-05T20:30:56.551Z
Duration: 38 min 56 s
Description: Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud Agents for Good™

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud Agents for Good™": Hi. Good afternoon. Good morning for some of you. Welcome to the agents for good product update briefing. I know we have a lot of folks just signing on, but I'll go ahead and go through some of our housekeeping, and then we'll dive right in. My name is Amelia. I'm the principal product marketing manager on the Agents for Good team. I will be joined today by Kelly Marion and Paul Goldstein. Kelly will lead us through, some of our current things that we've brought to product. Paul will tell us kind of what's coming up, and then I'll wrap us back up at the end. Before we get started, do want to do our safe harbor statement. This presentation does contain forward looking statements that involve inherent risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. It outlines Blackbaud's current plans and general product direction as of today, May 5, and when this product this presentation was created. Functionality described in this presentation that is not currently available is subject to change at any time without notice at Blackbaud's sole discretion. It doesn't represent a commitment to develop or release specific features within our the time frame discussed according to the presented designs or at all. Please make your purchase decisions based on features and functionality that are currently available. Phew. Legally is out of the way. The webinar audio is broadcast through your computer speakers, so, hopefully, you all are hearing me right now. If you would like captions on, 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 along the way, your slides freeze, anything like that, usually just a quick refresh of your browser is the best way to get it working again. Worst case scenario, leave and log back in. During the presentation, there is a q and a on your top right, and you can submit any questions that you may have. When submitting your questions, feel free to be specific. The more details we have, the better we can address your specific question. We have a really great team in the background who will answer these questions throughout today's webinars and highlight, may even highlight a few for us to bring up as well at the end. Next to the q and a, you'll see docs or documents. Please feel free to kick out click on this to access several, several links and resources about development agent, about agents for good, about our responsible AI. You may wanna access this and reference these today or going forward. You can open them on tabs so that you have them to take a look at. You can also adjust any settings that, here in GoldPASS by using the cogwheel at the bottom of your event space. And finally, you can use the tabs on the top of the event space to see today's agenda and meet your speakers, any of those things that you might just wanna take a peek at. So let's dive into it. Today, we'll be sharing a lot about the vision of agents for good. Like I mentioned, Kelly will give us a good live look at development agent, our first agent for good. Then Paul will share what's next for the development agent and across the agents for good portfolio, And then I'll wrap us up with a few other resources and events coming up that might be of interest to you. There'll also be a survey fan. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Again, if at any time you have a question, don't hesitate to ask in the q and a box to the right. You can go ahead and put in the chat who you are, where you're coming from. We'd love to know a little bit more about you. So first, let's talk about Blackhawk's strategy to leverage the potential of AI innovations in a way that ensures the social impact community gets maximum impact and takes on minimum risk. You might have heard about Intelligence for Good. It's our commitment to combine powerful, convenient, and responsible AI with exclusive sector specific data across our entire portfolio of solutions. Our tools will be convenient, embedded directly within the software that you already use. We will build complete, ready made AI solutions, like Agents for Good, that can be confidently used at the push of a button, and we'll encourage the availability of AI driven partner solutions in the Blackbaud marketplace as well. We will provide education and training to make sure that you have the skills you need to successfully adopt any of these new tools. Second, our AI tools will be powerful. They'll drive meaningful, measurable outcomes, and this is driven by things like the world's most robust philanthropic database. We're continually improving this through machine learning to drive real in real time game changing insights and combining with our deep sector expertise to understand where and how AI can most effectively enhance your day to day workflows. And then what is most important to many of you often, our tools will be responsible. By prioritizing an approach to AI that is grounded in fairness, inclusivity, reliability, and trust. Summing it all up, intelligence for good is about moving your mission forward through the combination of robust data, leading edge AI tools, and the expertise that understands not just your business challenges, but the sensitivity of your data and how it fuels relationships with your donors and supporters. And agents for good are just the next wave of AI innovation here at Blackbaud. Far beyond are helpful assistant tools that you might be using today at your workplace, like a Copilot or Insights. Agents aren't bots or automations. They're really digital team members powered by AI that work within your system alongside you. You can think of them as AI powered colleagues who show up every day to help your organization move faster, smarter, and more intentionally. They're designed to augment your staff, not replace them, and that distinction really matters. In the social impact space, we know human relationships drive outcomes. But we also know that everyone has resource constraints, and that can mean important work gets delayed or dropped. So agents for good is all about giving your team the capacity that you need so that you can focus on the human side of your work. And our first agent is the development agent. Blackbaud's development agent skyrockets your fundraising team's capacity, delivering individualized, scalable outreach to activate more donors without compromises. For those new to development agent or maybe agentic AI, totally fine. Let's learn a little bit about what it can help you achieve right now. We have just a little quick primer video before we dig in some more. Imagine connecting with more people who care about your mission personally. Meet Blackbaud Development Agent, your new agentic AI fundraising teammate. How can you reach thousands of supporters without burning out your fundraisers? Working securely inside your system, the development agent identifies donor prospects and communicates one on one at scale, expanding your team's capacity so your fundraisers can focus on high impact human to human moments and major asks. Getting started is simple. Share your mission and brand voice. Choose how you want your agent to engage and fine tune their first messages before ramping up their portfolio, just like a human fundraiser. Every discussion and donation is captured securely in your system of record without bouncing between tools, keeping data highly secure and up to date. And your agent even knows when to hand off the discussion to you for human manager support. Blackbaud Development Agent helps you do more with less while engagement stays personal. Request a demo today. Fantastic. So just a quick recap on what development agent is today before we even get into what we've been working on lately or have coming up across agents for good. Development agent works right inside Raiser's Edge NXT, which we'll touch on in a minute. It's coming to more of you, very shortly. And development agent works to expand your capacity so that your organization can offer personalized, relevant communication to every potential donor. And while the development agent was built to help you reach valuable untapped pools of potential mid tier donors. We have folks using them to reach lapsed donors, other specific groups like alumni groups that they wanna communicate with in a very targeted, specific, personalized way at scale. The development agent learns your organization and brand, has the ability and skill to prioritize and individualize each and every donor communication across email and text message, and logs their interactions along the way meticulously. And when something really needs a human, they know. Just like I might flag something for my manager that's out of my depth or requires high level approval or is ready to move to the next step, the development agent does the same. And the best part is is how easy it is. There's no coding. There's no importing. It's really easy to learn right inside your r n x team. Your agent shows up, works right alongside you, alongside your fundraisers, and is up and running in just a couple of weeks. Okay. Now that we're all on the same page about what the development agent can do, before I pass it to Paul to talk about the goodness in our road map, let's see development agent in action. I see Kelly has joined me and is going to show us some of the ways that the development agent works, including some of the new exciting capabilities we've added since we launched just about a month ago. Excellent. Thank you, Amelia. We announced agents for good at b b con last fall and the razor's edge NXT US development agent early adopter program, that's a mouthful, ran November to March. All along the way, we improved the product and added new capabilities as we continue to do so today. A month ago, the development agent became available to all US razors edge NXT customers. But Agentic AI is an emerging market, and so we continue to add and improve the development agent in three key areas. The true magic of an agentic AI solution is its superhuman scale. It's not just making your work smarter or faster. The development agent is a digital team member working alongside your fundraising team, reaching new donors you're probably not able to engage with one on one today. You manage your development agent, and it learns how your organization fundraises, and then it executes at a scale beyond what any one fundraiser could take on. Additionally, just like any new colleague, your development agent should get better at its job over time. There's a number of ways we continue to advance how the agent learns and improves as a member of your team, getting smarter with every interaction. And, of course, like I mentioned, this is an emerging field of technology. We're always looking for ways to ensure that the agent is working with the best models, guardrails, and underlying technology. Your team can be confident that the development agent is expanding and growing in its abilities, reaching more and more donors at every turn. If you haven't heard, AI moves fast. So let's take a look at the development agent with a focus on some of the recently released features. As we get set up here, there we go, I wanna start with a familiar moment. It's a Tuesday afternoon. A fundraiser opens their portfolio. There's 300, 500, a thousand mid level donors assigned. But, realistically, that fundraiser will only personally reach maybe 30 this month. The rest, they'll get a newsletter, maybe a year end appeal, not because they don't matter, but because time is finite. Now imagine one of those donors replies to a newsletter or a general outreach message. In a traditional model, that moment's really risky. If it's an automated outreach, that often gets no response. If it's a human brought in, it gets dropped into a queue. And by the time someone responds, the moment has long passed. What you're going to see today is a completely different model. This is not automation replacing human fundraisers. This is a new teammate embedded inside your fundraising system who can initiate, listen, respond, escalate, and keep the relationship moving forward even when humans are focused elsewhere. So as we walk through this demo, don't think of it as smarter outreach. Think of this as revolutionary. It's expanding your team in a way we simply haven't been able to do so before. So as we start our journey, you'll notice quickly the embedded nature of the development agent. Not only is the development agent embedded into your team, it's embedded into your current tech stack, reporting workflow, and navigation. We can see that here just on the homepage of Razer's Edge NXT where the development agent shows up alongside other members of our team to show off its performance. When you onboard the agent, it's going to light up right inside your other portfolio management tools. This was thoughtfully designed ensuring your team can quickly take advantage of the agent's capabilities without a heavy lift or significant change management. The development agent management console, which we see here, is where onboarding and oversight of the agent takes place. What you don't see is the agent crafting one to one engagement plans and executing that outreach autonomously. We're gonna focus on the human in the loop functionality where staff are a part of that process, but know the real work's happening while your team's executing on other tasks. Before your development agent can, get to go get going on its its work, you need to onboard it like you would any other member of your team. It comes ready to do its job, knows how and when best to communicate with constituents, but it doesn't know the makeup of your organization. You start that onboarding here, with naming your agent and then defining the frequency and outreach of the types of engagements you'd like the agent to perform. Contact frequency is one of the more recently released functionalities that we have here in the development agent and is a direct response of our early adopter program. You choose how often the agent communicates with constituents in its portfolio and the types of outreach that the agent is responsible for. When the agent solicits on your organization's behalf, it can link directly to a giving form like we see here, of your choice, ensuring the quick capture of revenue and no change management for processing those gifts solicited by the agent. Notice here we also see, both, listing of email outreach and SMS. So our agent's going to meet your donors where they are. Speaking of early adopter program, another recent change we've made allows for customers to define what mid level giving means to them. The development agent was built to identify, assign itself, and engage mid level donors. And while Blackbaud has a definition of what that means to us, we quickly found that nonprofits have very different thresholds, lower limits and upper limits, for what they consider to be mid level giving. By defining your definition here, you set the agent up for success. From here, the agent knows which constituents to start engaging with, of course, excluding anyone in that range who's already assigned or has opted out of email and text. The final piece of onboarding we'll highlight today is brand voice. Not only do you have control of the style of communication, concise, more verbose, organizations also control the information the agent has access to for creating its outreach. Content like annual reports, scholarship profiles, program descriptions can be added to this library, to give the agent awareness and insight. Paul's going to highlight some exciting advancements within this area when we move into the road map portion of today's presentation. The agent is onboarded and is ready to go now to begin its initial outreach. The assignment and engagement workflows were built to launch slowly, though, with a controlled approach of manual assignments. Directly start with maybe 10 constituents. Think of trusted donors, staff, friends to engage directly with the development agent before it's deployed to a larger base. After a week or so, depending on your trust level, add another round of manual assignments. When your team's ready to move beyond that initial test phase, larger segments of constituents can be assigned to the agent, scaling the size of the agent's portfolio to the needs of your organization. Think of this process very similarly to onboarding new staff. Managers assign more work when they feel confident in the output of an employee. The same concept applies to your development agent. Once the assignment takes place, the development agent can begin to craft its first thoughtful, personalized outreach in your voice on the right channel and at the right time. Let's take a look at what some of those communications look like. So first, we'll pop into our upcoming or prescheduled queue of engagements. This is the outreach the agent has, currently, teed up for members of your staff to review and provide input on. I'll pop into Ted's here to give us a little preview. And not only can we review this message before it goes out, we can also give feedback, a thumbs up, thumbs down, which offers quick, low friction signals that tell the agent what's landing and what isn't without requiring manual edits. We can also regenerate this content. One click produces a fresh draft that, again, doesn't require a huge lift from your team. Feedback flows directly into the overall knowledge base as well, so this is going to compound and ensure that the agent is making, more appropriate communications in its future outreach. All of this is retained and learned. So on day two of reviewing communications, you're gonna be much, in a better off place than you were day one. And as that development agent improves, you'll spend less and less time managing that outreach. But this isn't just about one off communications. The outreach prompts engagement and one to one conversations. We can take a look at that in more of our complete or even canceled list as we see here. I'm gonna go to Glenn's example because Glenn had a thoughtful back and forth conversation with the agent that actually ended in a human escalation, which we will go into next. Now Glenn here, first outreach goes to him, introduces the agent as we see in the paragraph highlighted. I'm calling this out because the first outreach, it is very clear that this agent is an extension of your team, but is powered by artificial intelligence. This goes back to something that Amelia introduced at the top of this call, really, targeting the trust aspect of this new tool set within your tech stack. We're also going to introduce, some of the ways that, our agent can be most useful to our donors and prospects and offer up a call to action for that conversation to take place. Glenn does, what any excited donor would do and responds and asks for clarifying information to which the agent responds within the same minute. So really, acknowledging that timely list, of the response. Now from here, the agent responds. Glenn comes back and asks an additional question that the agent actually isn't trained to answer. We feel that this planned giving question should be really escalated to a human member of the team, and that's what we're gonna take a look at next here. We move this conversation from the development agent to a queue where a human member of your staff can step in and decide how to engage with that individual. Now this needs attention queue is where staff managers will have oversight of those unanswerable questions or any opportunity to step in and take over that relationship. Here we see Glenn escalated with that planned giving question. And from here, we're able to provide any, details if we'd like an email to go out or or simply move this relationship again to someone else on the team to add Glenn to their portfolio and continue that conversation one on one. Now continuing with Glenn as our example, I wanna tie this all back to the seamless nature of the agent within your ecosystem, and that is seen here on Glenn's constituent record. Not only is every engagement captured, but we do so in a way that really consolidates each of those outreach efforts. We can see that communication that started last month with Glenn here, and we get a nice summary here, keeping the actions area of his constituent record nice and tidy, but making sure members of your staff don't have to do any of this work manually. We're gonna pop back into some slides now, and we're gonna start talking a little bit about our road map. But before we do that, I've got one more thing to share. Here we go. So, lastly, as AI improves and our agents expand what they're capable of, we're making sure every agent can deliver at scale with accuracy and reliability. We know that scaling uptakes work and trust on your part, so we make sure that's as easy as possible. Some additional recently released enhancements that you might not see within the demo that I do include automated quality evaluations to catch regressions or inaccuracies internally by our system before your donors are impacted, proactive observability, which enhances our internal monitoring so we can fix any stuck engagements, and brand voice validation, which adds new guardrails and checks ensuring that the content that your agent manager, gives the agent is sufficient, aligned, and robust to produce produce those quality on brand, conversations. All this work ties back to our intelligence for good commitment, ensuring that AI drives impact in convenient, powerful, and responsible ways. With that, I'm pleased to hand it over to Paul to tell us about what's coming next for the development agent as well as across the agents for good portfolio. Paul? Paul, you're muted. Man, There we go. tech issue on a pub. I was just thanking you, Kelly, for walking us through some of the improvements we've had, with the dev agent in such a short few months. I also wanna thank all of our customers that have jumped on board and were early with us. You know, they've hopefully been seeing a lot of improvement and a lot more to come. Really proud of our teams, and we continue to grow as you can see. Ajentic AI is truly still emerging, and you can expect that our agents will continue to evolve as well. We're still building and expanding on features to create the best fundraising agents for you. So what's next? Let's talk about a few upcoming features first. While your agent is a great teammate today, it's becoming a truly expert teammate getting smarter with every interaction. We're making this easier by improving the way they onboard and learn your organization. Today, the agent starts with what their agent manager provides them A mix of tone guidelines, mission statements, program details, and campaign context. It's a bit like giving you a packet of everything on day one and asking you to read it all and parse it all out. It's doable, but not as easy and efficient as it could be. We are working on three enhancement that break up the content and knowledge your agent works with. This gives the development agent a more structured onboarding so it shows up knowing your organization and can be directed towards real outcomes right away. Soon, a development agent will start with basic knowledge about your organization before you even take one action, prepopulated from the Blackbaud verified network. So your agent shows up on day one already knowing who you are and what your organization is all about. You can confirm or update it, but no manual steps are required. Then you'll also be able to contribute to an organizational general knowledge base that includes evergreen information about your organization that the development agent could always refer back to. Next, we're expanding controls for tone, including formality, warmth, and urgency. These settings are then used in tandem with examples you provide of your organization style of writing and content that you'll need to know to help you meet your specific goals. Speaking of goals, we're giving the development agent the ability to do more. For those of you who went to the r n x t pub, you know the razors edge team is working on a new feature for custom goals. Your development agent will be able to align with those goals as well. Additionally, you'll have the ability to set custom engagements for your development agent. You'll define a specific goal. Let's say you wanna set a goal of 200 attendees for a gala or move this front from $2,000,000 to $5,000,000. The agent identifies the right constituents and builds personalized outreach around that objective. An agent could even work on a few prioritized goals, reaching out to those who are the best fit based on the intel already in your system of record. These enhancements really bring your develop an agent from engaging donors personally in a general way to working towards exactly what you need to accomplish this quarter. Coming back to our expand with confidence team, we know if we have a development agent now moving into specific goal driven engagements, one or many, we need a way to evaluate their performance and understand what they're delivering. Development agent managers have a unique need for metrics. It's something you can't get in a typical one on one with a teammate. The new agent manager dashboard will give fundraising managers the data they need to get the most out of their agent and to tell their own story about the agent's success. Engagement metrics like open rates, click through rates, reply rates, and performance by engage types, outcome metrics, how much money did you raise with the development agent will all be available in this dashboard. And if you're watching today and thinking you're missing out because you're not in The US or you're one of the enterprise customers using Blackbaud enterprise fundraising CRM, well, I have good news for you. The development agent is coming to Canada, The UK, and our Pacific organizations in Australia and New Zealand. This summer, each location will have a limited early adopter program. If you're interested in being a part of one of those, please let us know. In addition, development agent is coming to Blackbaud CRM customers. Our early adopter program for US based customers will start this fall right around bbcon. And note, as with other AI features for bbCRM, the development agent does require Blackbaud cloud operation hosting. So if that's something you've been considering, now's the time to get the most out of Blackbaud AI. Looking ahead beyond this summer, we have even more planned, of course, for the development agent and across the agents for good portfolio. For development agents specifically, we'll continue to deliver on your agent bringing superhuman scale and delivering on a great culture, getting smarter with every interaction and helping you and your agent expand with confidence. On our road map, this includes features like custom segmentation and prioritization settings, adding a conversational avatar for those who want that multilingual communication, international messaging along with international general availability for those in RNXC and Blackbaud CRM. And a larger aperture, we have a lot planned for agents for good. We have a number of new agents that are currently in research and design phases For an admissions agent for our k 12 schools, to an accounts payable agent for f e n x t, to a data health agent to help prep your data and get the most out of your AI investments. We have a lot in store. We've heard you loud and clear. I remember being a bbcon, having customers come up and ask us for the data health agent. We're listening. We're trying to get that to market to you soon. So why a data health agent? As I said before, you told us so. The top concern you have for enabling AI tools, not just agents, is your data, and we get it. Yes. You do have a lot of data health tools available to you today, but our audits show customers often do not run tools like address finder, email finder, or phone finder regularly, resulting in missed opportunities to improve data accuracy. And if you do run them, it's hard to keep it on. For some organizations, upkeep can, require significant manual effort and time, or data health becomes one of those nobody owns it because everybody owns it things. And we all know how that ends. Right now, we're still in testing, but our prototypes at this time include features like agentic activation of tools like address finder, duplicate finder, and on a reasonable occurrence that balances data health benefits with resource stewardship and environmental impacts in mind. Policy aware intelligence, sector or vertical specific templates, and customization for data policy enforcement, transparent transparent reporting and audit logs, health scores trends, prioritize suggestions, visible audit logs, and leadership ready summaries to build trust and monitor agent performance. Remember, the goal of agents for good is to add capacity to your organization. It's time to start thinking big. What would you do if you could agentically be doing more already? If you'd like to learn more about agents for good or have questions, please let us know via the q and a. I'm gonna hand it off to Amelia to take you through some reminders and resources. Thank you, Paul. We're getting great questions. Keep them coming. Just a few reminders and resources for you. If you're looking to hear more from your peers about using agents for good, how you're managing agents, which is how we think about, your role if you bring on a development agent or any other agent, you are their manager, and all things AgenTek AI, there is a brand new Agents for Good Blackbaud community. Just went live last Friday. Big, big thank you to our early adopters who are bringing in as some of our first members. They'll have special little, badge you can look for. And thank you for joining the conversation. We also have a really fantastic monthly webinar series that is really about all things AI and change management, and it brings in thought leaders from inside and outside Blackbaud. You can sign up for any of these upcoming sessions really easily. There's also a link in the resource section. These aren't your typical product tours. These are really discussions about how to adopt change, how to adopt AI at your organization, how folks are fundraising. We bring in, different organizations and different experts across the field. We'd love to have you there. And lastly, BBDEV Days is coming. Registration for our annual, BBDEV Days is officially open. It's a virtual event that takes place June. It's designed specifically for developers of all skill levels to extend the value of their Blackbaud solutions for the organization. There'll be real world examples of how Blackbaud APIs and Sky platform and AI tools can be used to solve really practical problems that you're facing today. And the agenda includes hands on skill labs, demos, keynote sessions, all of that stuff, really tailored to different experience levels. So you can go deep where it matters most to you, find things that fit your needs. Community is a really big part of this as well. When you're part of BBDEV days, you connect with other developers, partners, and experts here at Blackbaud who are tackling similar challenges. These conversations often spark ideas you can take right back to your team, and we'd love to see how you're innovating as we continue to innovate at Blackbaud here on the agents for good team. That is what I have for you. You should see a survey pop up. We'd love to have your feedback about joining this product update briefing. Really, thank you for joining us today. We know this is a new area, and it's really fun to see what, what's coming up and what we're building. And we know that every organization has steps they're trying to take to just get up and running and get their day to day work done. We hope that Agents for Good can be part of bringing expanded capacity to your team in the future. If you'd like any more information about Agents for Good that you didn't get today, you can check out blackbud.com/agents-4-good or reach out on the q and a or book demo. We would love to chat more about what your needs are. Thank you for so much. Have a great day.