Name: Blackbaud Development Agent: Live Walkthrough
Uploaded: 2026-04-09T18:15:55.927Z
Duration: 31 min 24 s
Description: Blackbaud Development Agent: Live Walkthrough

Transcript for "Blackbaud Development Agent: Live Walkthrough": So to get us started, while you're here, Agents for Good. Our very first Agent for Good, the development agent, is built to expand your fundraising capacity. I will let Kelly share more about that in a second, but what is an agent for good, you might be asking. Agents for good is the next wave of AI innovation. Beyond Copilot, beyond getting insights, these agents are not just bots or automations. They're digital team members powered by AI that work within your system alongside you. You can think of them as, like, a powered AI powered colleagues who show up every day to help your organization move faster and smarter and more intentionally. And they're purposely designed to augment your staff, not replace them, and that distinction really matters. We know that human relationships drive outcomes. People give to people. But we also know that resource constraints mean important work often just gets put off or dropped or done not to the level we would like. So this innovation effort is all about giving your team the capacity you need so that you can focus on the strategic and the human sides of your work. So to dig in, our first agent is the development agent. This agent works right alongside you in our NXT to expand your capacity. They were built to help you reach those often neglected mid tier donors, though other some organizations are now using them to reach lapsed donors or specific targeted groups that they have in mind at scale. They learn your organization and brand, and they have the ability and skill to prioritize and truly individualize donor communications across channels, logging all their actions along the way. So what I mean by that is they literally talk one to one with folks instead of a mass email or a cookie cutter mailing. And when something needs someone really human, they already know. Just like I might flag something for my manager that's out of my depth, it's this is built in to how the agent works. Unless they're really easy. You're not coding an agent yourself or programming in any way. You're not importing anything, day to day. It shows up and works right within your r n x t. So what does that mean for you? What can you expect as an organization bringing on a development agent? You will engage more donors one to one, so not with those email blasts or mailers that look the same for everybody. You'll increase your team capacity for more strategic tasks, more relationship building, and you'll support your donor pyramid, reinvigorate lapsed donors, build strong pipeline for future major giving, and really grow your revenue. So with that, let's get to seeing it. So I'm gonna hand it over to Kelly to show us what this really looks like. Awesome. Thank you, Amelia. Let's pull this up here and get you all an idea of how the development agent can make an impact on your organizations. Right. Okay. Here we are. So this should look very familiar to everyone. We're inside Raiser's Edge NXT, and I'm gonna call this out first before we even get into the development agent because we've designed this to sit alongside the capabilities that you're already using on a day to day basis. You'll notice the development agent sits right here nestled between the work center and prospect insights. It just lights up underneath your other portfolio management tools. And that's really intentional the way that we've designed it that way. For instance, if I pop into my work center, I can actually see the portfolio, the actions, the gifts of my development agent alongside my other staff members. So we've really embedded this into the workflows, reports, and other operational, initiatives you have designed across your organization to make sure this isn't a heavy lift. It's gonna fit right into the other things that you're doing. This is also going to help, as I mentioned, when you're reporting. We'll look at a few things that we report specifically on the development agent in a moment. But just like I think Nancy pointed out in the chat, the actions get tagged automatically, and we're really excited about that. And you're gonna see all of the impact of those actions and outreach alongside your other fundraisers. So I have my development agent sitting right here. Looks like 97 emails have gone out, and that's gonna be in real time just like the emails that your staff send. Let's pop into the development agent itself and start to look at the components that help both onboard the agent as well as, once it's launched, keep it up and running to make sure that all of your, assigned prospects and donors get that impactful engagement. So this is what I call the, development agent management console. This is where we kick off onboarding. This is where we train the agent and where your staff are going to come and see those escalations or those warm handoffs to a member of your team, should we need somebody to step into that conversation. We'll talk about what some of those triggers are in a little bit, but we're gonna put those top of the the page that you can see exactly where you need to spend your time. But before the agent starts communicating and sending that autonomous outreach, we need to get it up and running. We need to spend a little bit of time developing the content and crafting the, kind of specific target that it's going towards. We're gonna do some of that during onboarding, and that's all included here in our settings. So some of the things that you'll configure in the agent include a name, so you'll give a likeness to the agent when it's reaching out to individuals in your community. You want everyone to understand this is a new member of your team that is working autonomously on your organization's behalf and that this is AI. So you're gonna name that affectionately. And also choose the type of engagement you want the agent to be performing on your behalf. So here you can see a nice list of options. We have, the ability for the agent to cultivate, to do informational updates and outreach, to solicit and to steward. And you get to determine which of these engagement types you'd like the agent to be working on in both email and SMS outreach. Another important component of getting the agent up and running for your organization is populating the brand voice and our knowledge base of the agent. So the agent comes fully trained to know how to do outreach. It knows the cadence. It knows what a solicitation versus a stewardship piece is supposed to look like, but it doesn't know your organization. And this is where you're going to come and populate that detail. You're going to provide things like, your annual report, maybe scholarship profiles, or initiatives that you're fundraising towards. All of that helps the agent understand what makes you unique and provides the basis for that initial outreach that the agent will start doing. Now there's some other configurations as well. We're not gonna go too deep into that today. But that onboarding really helps your team get comfortable with the type of outreach the agent's going to be doing on your behalf, as well as ensuring that the agent slots into all the other day to day work that your team's already doing. Once all of that is set up, we can start to kick off the outreach that the agent is going to, start communicating out to your audience. And we're gonna start that in a very slow and methodical way. So the onboarding process let me scroll down to this little chart there. The onboarding process is going to start thoughtfully. You're going to pick maybe 10 or so of your closest stakeholders. We think board members, committee members, folks on your staff that are really excited about this new initiative and are gonna help you test a little bit. Part of that is to really ensure that the knowledge base you've produced, all of that content that you fed the agent, is sufficient and nothing has been left out. After those 10 constituents that you're manually picking, kinda go through about a week of outreach, we're gonna pick another 10. And then once we feel like we've built trust and confidence in the agent's outreach, we have the ability to let the agent start finding the best prospects in the system and doing that outreach on your behalf. Now Amelia said, in her opening remarks that, some of our customers have a segment in mind that they're driving towards those, lapsed donors, perhaps, folks that we know would be really, interested in becoming sustainers. Right? They've been giving consistently, over a period of time, but haven't quite switched over to that monthly gift. Those segments, can be, assigned to the agent just like you would a member of your team, and you can kind of stay in this manual assignment queue. But additionally, the agent has been trained to go after the best mid level prospects in your database that are unassigned, find them and assign itself. So it really can work fully autonomously on your behalf. What we learned in our early adopter program is that every organization on this call has a different definition of what mid level giving means to them. And so one of the, quick changes that we made to the product, kind of coming from early adopter to our general availability, was building in the, option for all of your teams to determine what that mid level giving threshold means to you. So at Blackbaud, we consider that to be about a thousand to 10,000, give or take a little bit, but some organizations are on the lower end of that and some are much higher. By choosing this mid level giving definition, you get to, put parameters or guardrails around the agent and then it can go find those best prospects in the database, assign itself to anyone that isn't already, assigned to a gift officer in the database and then start communicating with those individuals to hopefully lead to additional engagements and solicitations in the future. Now the one thing we haven't looked at, which I think is the most important piece, are the communications itself. So we're gonna switch over here and look at both some prescheduled communications as well as some completed conversations that have gone back and forth with the agent. Now starting with the kind of prescheduled outreach, I love that I see so many of my colleagues names here in this list. We have the ability to preview every prescheduled communication up to seven days in advance. So that means as the agent assigns itself or you've found that perfect segment and, assigned those constituents to the development agent, you're gonna be able to come in and spot check that initial outreach that's scheduled for those constituents before they go out. So for Ted here, sitting in the background helping answer some questions for us today. I can come in and look at, sample outreach that our agent has scheduled for him, and then I can provide feedback on this in the moment. So I can give a thumbs up if it's looking good. I can give that thumbs down and ask the agent to change some of that content. And when I provide those details, we're going to be able to regenerate that and preview the content again. So this is constantly learning from us and improving these messages based on the feedback that you provided in the moment. If we wanna remove TED or we'd like to maybe just cancel that message altogether, we have those options as well. So we can always remove somebody from that portfolio or even just delete a message in the series. Now the real power comes into play when our constituents start engaging with the agent. So while this message is wonderful, I think that the engagement that comes from our constituents responding is where the real magic happens. So we're gonna come in here and take a look at a few examples of kind of that back and forth outreach, that some of our, Foggy Valley animal rescue constituents have had. I'll start with Elaine here, and these are some email, examples. We can see here that Elaine was messaged, last month, welcoming her to our organization, and just using a simple call to action to reply to this email, let the agent know how it can be, more helpful to her in the future. Now, Elaine, in our best case scenario, immediately responds and asks how she can support the organization. We know there's probably a few more back and forths that happen, in that conversation. But the agent is trained and knows how to grab that link to a donation form and responds promptly not only with that link, but really, articulating the best place for Elaine to focus her energy. So the initiatives that would be most impactful for Elaine. So we can see this conversation going back and forth over a few days period, and we're gonna capture that all within this record and track it back, to actions on a constituent record, which I'll show you in just a moment. I mentioned as well that we have SMS available. So I showed examples of email, but we're gonna see this exact same exchange when we think about SMS. So, the opt in process is a little bit different. We know that emails, can be opt out, but text messaging is actually opt in. So the first message we're going to see is, confirming that our constituents want to engage in this way. And then Scott here, does a lovely kind of back and forth conversation with our agent. You'll notice shorter conversations because of that character limit. But again, the agent is really prompt in its responses, actually all responding within a few minutes time. So you're gonna feel that conversational nature and not be sitting and waiting five minutes for a response. I love this example because it actually pulls out real impact here, articulating how many animals were rescued within, the last fiscal year and how many were adopted. So, again, pulling that information from the agent's brain to provide a response to Scott in real time. And of course, they go back and forth for a while here. We're not gonna dig into all of those, but, all of that interaction can be seen both in our engagements overview here, as well as, when we go to a constituent record as an action. Now tying this all up with the bow and knowing that we need to get to some questions that the audience has for us today, I I wanted to kind of pop back into the Raiser's Edge side of things. We're on a constituent record. Again, everyone on this call is probably very familiar with this screen. And as you can see, we've got our constituent, Elaine, here, with her action tile pulling in the outreach from the development agent. So we can see that this was assigned to the development agent because that is tied to a solicitor in Raiser's Edge. And then we can also see this summary here of the conversation that Elaine had back and forth. Now instead of kind of junking up that actions list, we're gonna consolidate the entire conversation into one action. And if you wanna see that back and forth, detail, we can pop back into the communications log that I sent. I'm really excited about this part because I know, having been a user in the past, you can quickly add hundreds of actions with every email exchange or text that goes back and forth, and this really consolidates the conversations to one view. Now something I didn't mention that I know will come up in q and a, so I'm gonna answer it, right off the bat, is, you know, opportunity to opt out of these messages. And we'll we'll talk a little bit about constituents that, might not want to interact with the agent anymore. We're gonna see those in our escalation queue when I go back into the agent as well. But just know that all consent is stored separately from your other outreach, channels. So if you have a newsletter that goes out and you have folks opt out or opt into certain channels that way, that's gonna be held completely separate from the development agent consent. So if somebody decides to stop receiving communication from the development agent, that does not impact all the other appeals and outreach that you're doing on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis. Now I'm gonna pop back in for our last screen here and just talk a little bit about our needs attention queue. So we walked through examples of, perfectly articulated conversations, but we know that that's not always the case. We know that sometimes, we haven't provided the information to the agent for it to answer a question. And then also the agent shouldn't respond to certain questions that it receives. We want humans to step in for those more prickly conversations or when it's more meaningful for a human to respond. So we've got quite a few examples here to walk us through. The first one being, this example from Glenn. And Glenn asks a question about planned giving. So he's already had a couple of back and forth conversations with the agent, but we've pulled this through to our escalations because this type of conversation is really better had with a member of the staff. So we're using this as a warm handoff to alert the staff that there's an opportunity to have a conversation with Glenn about planned giving. Now certainly, we can provide a link to our website and, direct folks to a planned giving kind of landing page. But in this type of example, we probably instead assign that to a person on the team and have that conversation then led by a major gift officer or an executive director. Additionally, if you've forgotten to give information to the agent, Kira here gives a a great example asking about events and fundraisers. Well, I've forgotten to link to information on our site about our upcoming events within my knowledge base. This not only allows me to provide that missing content to Kira, but also reminds me to go back into my knowledge base and add that additional content for the next time someone asks that question. Additionally, if we see bad sentiment or personally identifiable questions, asking for things like social security number on file. We're gonna escalate those as well, all an opportunity for your team to engage one on one and have those warm handoffs. Alright. Amelia, I'm watching the time. I am going to stop sharing my screen. I'm sure we have a ton of questions that we need to pull through. So let's pull our slides back up. And before we do that, actually, I think we have a few road map slides to talk through. Yeah. And I'll just hop in. and say, I think we had a one or two folks raise a hand. We've sent you a message, but use the q and a button, and that's the easiest way peep our folks in the back are Perfect. are answering furiously. I'll try to pull slides back up. I'm try You're trying. Let's see. Maybe I can get it to our timeline. I'm trying. No. You're trying failing? to share slides. Something is going on the back end. You know what? We'll just talk it. We know this. Okay. We do have more features coming through. it. I love it. Yeah. We do have more features coming up for the development agent. As Kelly mentioned, we are continuing to learn from the organizations using this today that have come on board and add more we've had asked for. Hey. We want a little bit better, like, clearer, more direct reporting. Great. We're putting that in. Things like that that we're working on. Anything else you wanna call out there, Kelly? You know, our roadmap so small. really robust, and I think we're just really excited that our early adopter program had such great feedback for us. And so a lot of what we're putting into the product is a direct reflection of our customers' feedback. So I think the rapid response and the, you know, additional features that we're gonna be talking about at our pub that's coming up is that yeah. I figured you wanted to talk about that. That's coming up next month. We're gonna be sharing a really detailed roadmap, but a lot of that was informed by our initial customers that were involved with us. One of the things that we didn't talk about today was our our dashboarding tools, but I'm really excited that we'll be launching a more robust dashboards so that, you can see the performance of the agent, you know, on its own syncing through, both dollars raised, but also influence that the agent has had. You know, while a direct solicitation might not bring in revenue, that agent is having an influence on, constituents across your organization, and we're gonna be able to really, showcase those those measurements in a impactful way. So more to come on that. Yes. And it's a perfect, enter to pubs, which air in the slides. If you go into the docs, you see the slide that we cannot share. But, it's May 5, and we'll make sure that in our follow ups that you are getting invited to those pubs. You can sign up, pubs, product update briefings. Apologies for the acronyms. If you're using RNXT today, there's sessions for RNXT specifically about the core functionality as well as all of the many AI that, features that come in are in Xt and are used in some of the complete packaging, and then we have an agents for good, products update briefing as well. They're on different days, so you can spread them out. There's a link to pubs in the docs. Shall we answer a question we have? things in multiple places. This is foolproof. Yes. I'm gonna take a look at our q and a and just look at some I know our team in the background is furiously answering these, but I wanna pull a few forward that seem to be, maybe asked a couple of times. You know, there's a couple of questions here, Amelia, about, mid level giving officers that I wanna pull forward. So, it's a really good question. I see Richard posed that, but I think a few others as well. We see this actually working hand in hand with mid level giving officers. So we know that mid level giving is, always a bigger pool than one person can't manage. And so the agents able to take a larger portfolio. And then just as we saw that warm handoff, for maybe major gift officers with a planned giving ask, we've got that same opportunity with a mid level giving officer as well. So think about just this additional capacity to, help that individual if you do have someone on staff already in that role. This is just gonna be a sidekick to help to find the best prospects because we know that humans only have so much capacity. This is able to step in and and provide a little bit more, support on that side. Yeah. A university comes to mind that we're working with. And someone said, my portfolio is 1,500 constituents. And I said, that is too many people to talk to. And he said, yes. Yes. It is every day. So that's how they're using this agent so that he can make those big s. But that they can get the person's getting every one of those 1,500 people is getting one on one engagement Another question I'm seeing, and I know that, our our colleagues in the back. answered this a bunch, but someone else could have that question and not have asked it out loud. So, I mentioned email and SMS, both are included and are unlimited. And we didn't actually say that, Amelia. The portfolio size of the agent is unlimited. So just say that again. No limit to the size and texting is included. No additional cost. Yes. So the development agent does have a price has an additional cost. We've had some questions specifically. Feel free to ask them. So you do have to bring the agent on, and that has a cost. But then everything it can do anything in employee. It's really you know, send emails, send text messages. There's no block on how many emails I can send. So that is how, the agent works as well, but much faster, frankly. I'm gonna bring up one more question, Amelia, and then maybe we, wrap up here. I think folks are still getting responses in the back but one important question to answer, Nicole posed this. How will constituents know that they are talking to an agent? Great question. We didn't necessarily point this out and it might have shown in Elaine's example, but the first outreach to every constituent includes a paragraph that this is powered by AI. So, trust is a a main pillar of our kind of AI strategy here at Blackbaud, and we want to build trust with you, our customers, and for your donors and prospects as well. So, every constituent will know that, this is AI that they are speaking with, and then there's always going to be a little line at the bottom of the email and text that says powered by AI. So, it's included in multiple places. We're we're always gonna make sure that's top of mind so that, it's very transparent who your constituents are speaking with. And I'll just piggyback. I did see some how do peep how half people responded. There's been a few folks here and there who don't but, honestly, people have been really positive. It's really, it's a good experience. It's conversational. It's, the agent is very responsive, and folks haven't really had a lot of like, we haven't had the pushback I think people ask about or anticipate. That's that doesn't really come into fruition. People are really excited to have one on one communication with an organization that maybe they felt disconnected from or less engaged with, and to be prioritized like that is great. And then that it leads to this ongoing relationship back and forth. It really builds that. And, again, to Kelly's point about a mid level giving officer, there's always that human that will then engage with them as they become closer to the org. Right? If they're close to a gift, you can decide if that's a human ask or an agent ask. There's lots of ways to do this so we work with you to find the best answer for your organization. But people like having someone to talk back and forth with. Alright. I I love it. The team in the background is just throwing them up. This is a great question. So how does the agent decide how to escalate issues, and does somebody monitor those to know, to flag them? So when we talked about, at the beginning, the training of the agent. The agent comes, you know, trained and ready to do its job to your organization, having some of those escalations or guardrails in place. So, it's not going to, communicate more than a certain number of times per day, right? If somebody starts to rapid fire communicate back and forth, it knows to escalate that. It knows not to answer questions about personally identifiable information. So it has all of that built in already with the foundational, components that we we've structured this agent with. Additionally, we've built the agent to have all of Blackbaud's forty five years of fundraising experience, and knowledge alongside of it. So, when I showed the example of planned giving, that's something that Blackbaud brings to the table. Right? Planned giving is a human conversation. And so it knows to escalate those, more nuanced conversations as well. So we've got kind of, two different sides of that coin both from a fundraising escalation standpoint as well as just a I'm not supposed to answer this as an agent standpoint. It's gonna come, fully developed and know how to to raise those to you. Escalations happen in that queue. So, on a daily basis, you might be popping in to see either what questions the agent couldn't answer or shouldn't answer. Alright, team. I think we are at the time we have promised, maybe a little bit beyond. So thank you for those of you who hung on and have so many good questions. As long as you're on, folks will keep answering questions. I hope that we see you at upcoming events. We have the product update briefings, as we mentioned, May 5. We have a thought leadership, webinar series that's ongoing about AI fundraising and and technology in general. We don't necessarily always talk about agents even. Sometimes it's about how do you do change management. Sometimes it's how do we think about expanding our team and managing, agents. Right? It's there's all kinds of topics about fundraising this era, so we hope to see you on those. And thank you. Thank you for joining today. So many great questions. Thank you all. Have Yeah. We'll see you soon. Take care. a wonderful day.