Name: Smarter Strategic Planning for 2026: A Practical Guide to Benchmarking Your Fundraising Performance
Uploaded: 2026-02-19T20:31:38.161Z
Duration: 49 min 12 s
Description: Smarter Strategic Planning for 2026: A Practical Guide to Benchmarking Your Fundraising Performance

Transcript for "Smarter Strategic Planning for 2026: A Practical Guide to Benchmarking Your Fundraising Performance": Hi. Welcome to today's webinar, Smarter Strategic Planning for 2026. We're gonna be looking at a practical guide for using benchmarks to help gauge and plan your fundraising performance based on past performance and performance of others in your space. So before we begin, I'm gonna go into a little bit of housekeeping. You've probably seen the slide, but there are people who may be new to webinars in Goldcast. That's a platform that we use. So first off, most common question we get is will you get a recording? Yes. You will get a link to an email an email with a link to the recorded session within forty eight hours, and there is no dial in number for this webinar. The audio is broadcast through your speakers. So if you have any issues with the slides seeming out of alignment with the speaker or not hearing the audio, refresh your browser window. That'll often take care of most of the, questions. Also, take a look at the top right. There are a series of buttons, chat, documents, q and a. Looks like my slide with the housekeeping tips doesn't match within your screen, but you can figure it out. Chat docs, q and a, and we've listed a lot of the documents that we think will be helpful. I'll go through some of those. Before we begin, though, I want to, I don't think there are any things in this presentation that are not already live in the product for, most of the people who have access to some of these specific features. But nonetheless, just in case there's something that is forward looking, I just wanna remind you that if we talk about, product features that are not yet released, to please understand that they are subject to change at any moment until the time that they are released into the product. So make any buying decisions based on functionality that is currently available. Now I get to introduce you to the team that will be leading this, the the presentation and also the back stage team because we have a number of people who are here on q and a in addition to our speakers. So I'll introduce you first to Lauren Enlow, who is a strategic consultant with Blackbaud, Melissa Wehman, somebody most people don't get a chance to talk to a lot. She is a data scientist who is working the magic in the background. And also Carrie Goldberger, who is a product manager for our analytics platform. And in the background, you'll see me, Catherine Hall, and Heather McLean, and Lindsey Ricks responding to q and a, as fast as we can keep with it. So to give you a summary of some of the resources that are available, because often these are questions that that come up, is, we may refer to some things like chat for Blackbaud AI. You may have questions about our policy about security and privacy around AI. Refer to these documents like the chat quick start guide, the Blackbaud trust questions. There is a section on AI questions and answers. It also includes answers to questions about how we derive our benchmarks. There are also blackboard terms and conditions for AI use. There is help for premium features to with for for benchmarks. There's also help for standard benchmarks in that razor side 10 x t. And then we'll talk a little bit about some premium features. There's a blog post I posted a couple days ago about premium features. So those are all in the docs tab. Alright. Enough of the preamble. First, to help our speakers understand who's in the audience, I want to open up a poll. And you will see, if you go to the polls tab, you will see, the poll. You'll see a pop up on your top, pop up in the lower right. It'll take you up to the polls in the top right panel. And just so they know who is in the audience today, this is a live presentation, so we can tune some of our content to who we know is watching. So it looks like we've got a lot of people who are in operations, data, and analytics. There are frontline fundraisers. Also, fundraising leaders make up the majority of of folks. And then a small smattering of people who are consultants, marketing, and engagement, and executive strategy leaders. Okay. I'm gonna give just another moment for a few more votes to come in. It doesn't look like we have too many more, so I am going to close the poll, and we will move on. Oops. Stop sharing. That's the button I need. Okay. I'm gonna move on from here. And I'm gonna turn you over to Lauren who will talk about benchmarking as a concept and how to use them. Welcome, Lauren. Hello. Hello, everyone. So what is benchmarking? Well, we know that today, fundraising leaders are being asked to deliver growth in an environment with rising expectations from boards and donors alike. Benchmarking is gonna provide a way to replace the guesswork with context, helping organizations understand whether performance trends are signals to celebrate, address, or navigate further. So with benchmarking, right, it's the practice of comparing your organization's fundraising performance against your peers, against your past results, and sector trends so that we can bring clarity to what's working and what isn't. It it helps you to cut through the overwhelming amount of fundraising data that we have access to in a way that reveals meaningful patterns and opportunities for improvement. Now it isn't about ranking. It's about clarity. When you understand how organizations like yours are succeeding, planning becomes more focused and more realistic and more effective. Can we go to the next slide? Oh, there we go. Okay. Oops. Alright. So what are we gonna learn from benchmarks? Well, first, we're gonna learn about comparing your performance to similar organizations. Peer benchmarking is going to allow you to compare your results to organizations that are of similar size, similar mission, and fundraising model rather than broad industry averages. This helps to avoid misleading conclusions. It can, help you shift how donors are giving, including changes in channel preferences and the growth of recurring giving models. Without peer comparison, these shifts can be easy to miss. Reviewing this data helps answer critical leadership questions such as how do we compare with organizations like ours? Are we investing in areas where others are seeing growth? And are we exposed to risks that others may have already addressed? Excuse me. Learning objective two, identify growth opportunities and potential risks. Benchmarking helps identify both growth opportunities and early risks by showing what's driving results beneath the surface. Metrics like donor retention, upgrading, downgrading behavior, and channel preference reveal whether revenue growth is sustainable or fragile. For example, growth paired with declining retention or frequent downgrades signal long term risk, while strong performance in specific channels can highlight where focused investment will deliver the greatest impact. This can help with, you know, growing your sustainer program. Right? That might be a space where, you know, you you thought you were doing well, but you might need to try something a little bit different. Learning objective three, building a realistic data informed road map. Benchmarking helps teams to build this realistic and data informed road map by grounding strategy in what's actually achievable. When you understand how your peers are performing, you can set credible goals, prioritize the right initiatives, and invest where the data shows the greatest opportunity rather than planning based on some assumptions that you've made or just last year's results alone. You can measure your progress against your peers over time, not just against that last result from last year. Oh, and Lauren, So I talk. you've got how to advance the slides? Yes. Okay. Good. I just wanna make sure. Leaving now. So these are some core benchmarks that can help translate data into insight by showing just how fundraising is performing, but also where momentum is building and where risk may be emerging. So let's take a look at these different benchmarks and talk a little bit more about them. So revenue growth. This is an easy one. Rev revenue growth is going to show me the overall momentum of my program. Are we trending up or are we trending down? From this big picture, I might be able to drill down to identify what's causing this trend. Did we attract more donors this year? Were there larger gifts that came in this year as opposed to what came in last year? Was there an outlier gift that caused this huge increase? Or are we lacking the large gift we received last year and that's what caused the decrease? In short, our growth is the result of a healthy program, or is it a short term spike that isn't sustainable? Active donor growth. Tracking active donor growth reveals whether an organization is expanding or shrinking, its engaging supporter base. This is another important metric to look at the big picture. Is my donor growth part of an overall trend, or is it something that's specific to us? Right? So when you're thinking about, you know, let's use an example of, the wildfires that happened in California. As expected, many relief organizations saw increases in donor and in revenue, but adjacent organizations may have also seen some growth like schools and animal shelters because they were directly affected by the wildfires as well. So tracking something like active donor growth can help you to see why did we have said growth. Revenue per donor. Revenue per donor is gonna highlight changes in donor value and giving behavior. When benchmarked with peers, this metric helps identify overall, reliance on a small number of donors versus a balanced well long term growth. We can look at this similarly to active donor growth as well. Right? Same kind of example. Because we saw this big tragedy happen, we saw an influx of revenue coming in from our donors. Is that something that's going to be sustainable for us? Is this a one time thing? And lastly, sustainer performance. Sustainer metrics show how much stability and predictability exists in your revenue stream. Benchmarking reveals whether recurring giving is underdeveloped or represents a majority excuse me, a major opportunity for long term growth. Recurring giving is a hot topic right now as organizations are being asked to do more with less. How can we increase our yearly revenue when our donor pool remains stagnant? I'm sure this is something that a lot of you are thinking about right now. And when we start looking at sustainer performance metrics, this can cause an organization to spend time focusing on identifying prospects and creating a manageable program to keep these donors engaged. Right? So if I've got these people that I know are coming back year over year over year, how can I grow that group, especially when they're locked in in one giving trend? How can I help that to grow? So now that we've reviewed what is what is benchmarking and we've identified some key benchmarks, Melissa is gonna join us and she's going to pull back the curtain a bit, on what Blackbaud's benchmarks are and what makes them so special. Thanks, Lauren. So I'm gonna talk about Blackbaud's really unique position to provide peer benchmarks that let organizations compare their performance to other similar organizations. Blackbaud's philanthropic data set, the largest of its kind, that can be used to create benchmarks from billions of dollars in giving across thousands of organizations. A large source of industry data is crucial for any benchmarking score. Without it, benchmarks can be limited in scope and their usefulness. So by drawing from the largest philanthropic data set available, Blackbaud can create benchmark scores that accurately represent what is happening in the nonprofit industry. Secondly, consistently measuring performance on key metrics across organizations is the only way to produce reliable metrics. Blackbaud is in a unique position to be able to standardize the parameters of the benchmarking analysis across all organizations, leading to more confidence in the comparisons of your organization's performance. We standardize things like which donors to include, what time frames to use, which gifts to include. And those are critical in developing reliable benchmarks. Your organization, for example, may have a unique way to calculate revenue per donor. But when comparing your performance to other organizations, it's important that all organizations calculate revenue per donor in the same manner. Blackbaud can ensure this consistency throughout all benchmarking metric calculations. And finally, Blackbaud's depth of sector knowledge and research allows us to calculate benchmarks that represent behavior in the entire nonprofit sector. By using data weighting strategies, we can ensure our benchmarks approximate the performance of all other peer organizations in the industry and don't overly rely on the performance of specific Blackbaud clients. So let's talk a little bit about how this all works. So Blackbaud benchmarks are created in four main steps. First, the performance for your organization is calculated, and then anonymized aggregated data is used to calculate performance for all other organizations using those consistent analytic parameters defined for the benchmark. Then your organization is grouped with peer organizations based on a few factors, such as what country you belong to, the nonprofit industry, and annual revenue size. For example, we create separate benchmarks for US organizations versus Canadian organizations, and we create benchmarks for higher education organizations, arts and cultural organizations, small revenue organizations, large revenue organizations, etcetera. Then Blackbaud calculates a variety of percentile scores based on the performance of all organizations in a peer group. Depending on the benchmark, we may calculate the scores at, say, the tenth percentile, the fiftieth percentile, seventieth or ninetieth percentile. This provides a score cutoff that allows us to compare performance within a group. So for example, a score at the seventieth percentile means that an organization whose performance is above this score is performing better than at least 70% of the other organizations in the peer group. Next, those percentile scores are then weighted to approximate the results we would expect to see from the nonprofit sector as a whole. Your organization's score is compared to the weighted percentiles in order to provide a benchmark that tells you how you perform in comparison to other peer organizations in the nonprofit sector, not just how you perform relative to other Blackbaud clients. And finally, the benchmarking scores will be simplified and summarized for easy interpretation. A summarized score makes it easy to see how you compare on a particular metric to other similar organizations in the industry. RZRZAGE NXT has a few good examples of simplified and summarized benchmarking scores. There are a few different versions out there of these benchmarking graphics. We've got some samples here. But you can see that it helps make it easy to evaluate your performance relative to that benchmark. Providing a summarized score along with a graphic that indicates performance can help you see just at a glance where you are overperforming and where you may need help. In the newly released RE NXT benchmarking tiles, you'll see a monthly trend indicating whether current month performance is decreasing, holding steady, or increasing against your peer benchmark. The monthly trend summary gives you an idea of how very recent performance compares to the peer benchmark, which helps you get an early evaluation on any process or program changes you may implement. And once you know your performance, you can use the strategic recommendations unlocked with the Suggest Actions button to provide tailored ideas for improvement. So now that we know how Blackbaud creates benchmarks and why those benchmarks are unique within the nonprofit sector, I'm going to pass it back to Lauren to review some key points and show some additional product examples. All right, so before we move into the product walkthrough, I want to land one key point about how to interpret what you've just seen. When you look at benchmarking, a score without a trend can trigger overreaction. We must or you might see a a low score and assume something is broken when in reality, you could be improving quickly. And a trend without a score lacks context. You may feel good about an upward arrow, but if you're still far behind your peer benchmark, that improvement may not be enough to change outcomes. Together excuse me. Together, score and trend are what make benchmarking useful for leaders because they support smarter prioritization, better investment decisions, and more confident planning. They help you decide what's genuinely a problem to solve now versus what's simply noise, seasonality, or movement that's happening across the sector. And this ties right back to our strategy leader objectives. First, benchmarking lets you compare performance to similar organizations so you're not making decisions off broad averages that don't match your model. Second, it helps you spot growth opportunities and risks earlier by looking beneath top line revenue into donor behavior, retention patterns, and channel signals. And third, it helps you build a realistic data informed strategy grounded in what peers are actually achieving. So goals and plans are credible and actionable. So now that we've covered how to read benchmarks in a way that leads to good decisions, let's pivot to the practical question. Where do you find these benchmarks inside Razor's Edge NXT? And with that, I'm gonna ask Carrie to join me on stage to walk through, finding your benchmarks in NXT. Great. And before we jump to that, I actually have another poll question question for everyone. So let me move over to polls. I'm about to launch that. And I am curious if you are looking at benchmarks just kind of in general, and you see maybe you're below the peer benchmark or below where you thought you were, what do you do first? What is your strategy? What do you think through when you maybe see that result? So in next to chat again is you should see a poll, icon. I'll go ahead and share as these results are coming through. And, also, if there's an maybe a strategy you use that's not one of these options, feel free to put that in the chat as well. I feel like this is a good opportunity to kind of learn from each other and see, what people do. But it seems like so far, overwhelmingly, the response is diagnosing the why. So trying to drill into the drivers that might be leading to that benchmark result. Excellent. Thank you for participating. I appreciate that. Let me stop sharing and go back to the slides. I will say too, that's my first time. I've done these webinars in the past. That's my first time with a poll, so appreciate you all doing that with me. Okay. So we wanna talk through not just how to interpret these benchmarks, but where do you find them within your Razor's Edge NXT experience. So underneath analysis, fundraising dashboard, you'll see a tab for benchmarking. And what I'm previewing here, it's available to all Raiser's Edge NXT subscriptions. And here is where you can compare your donor pool and giving to that of other organizations in your country. Like Melissa was referring to for an apples to apples comparison, the metrics include the same types of records across all organizations. Now to further narrow the focus, you can also use filters to choose which types and sizes of organizations to include in the benchmark, as well as the calendar year to include. So in this particular example, you can see that health is chosen as the industry and then medium for the fundraising revenue for the calendar year of 2025. So here, I wanted to focus on revenue per donor as a practical example. This value represents the average total giving by a donor during the selected year. You may notice in this view that each metric has a marker for average, good, and great. Average means your revenue per donor is higher than that of 50% of organizations. Good means you're higher than that of 70 of organizations, and great represents a value higher than 90% of organizations. Throughout the experience, but especially here, you'll see a little, I call it we call it a tool tip or that eye icon next to each metric name. And so you can click on those to open the documentation, and that documentation will be specific to that metric that you're reviewing just to learn a little bit more about what those metrics represent. Now those who have a, Razor's Edge NXT subscription that includes premium features, you'll now see the option to add new benchmark tiles to your home page. So when you go to customize your home page, you can choose the benchmark tiles in the tile type filter, which I show here on the screen. And that's where you'll see the new benchmarks that are available to you. The gauge on the home page shows where you stand compared to your peers. A half filled gauge represents the median of your peer group, which, again, is based on sector and organization size. Now beyond how you compare to your peers, you can also use the indicator underneath each gauge to see whether your metric is rising, falling, or holding steady month over month. Again, on each tile, you'll find the that little eye icon that I was referring to earlier, and that gives you more information about each benchmarking metric, along with some ideas on how to improve. So Lauren, I'm curious just from your background and your role, what are different strategies that you'd suggest to help organizations interpret and increase their revenue per donor? Okay. Well, guess I'm putting on my consultant hat here. One of the most effective ways that I've seen organizations use revenue per donor is as a growth lever rather than just a reporting metric. When teams are using this metric to create clear donor segments, they can align their messaging, their ask amounts, and and stewardship strategies to and and actual giving behavior so that there are no assumptions being made. That alone can drive more relevant donor experiences. I've also seen strong results where revenue per donor is paired with behavioral data to identify upgrade opportunities, especially donors who are giving frequently, but below the average gift size. These donors are already engaged, which makes them ideal candidates for targeted upgrade strategies focused on increasing gift amount, but not increasing solicitation volume. Finally, looking at revenue per donor across campaigns helps teams understand which channels and approaches are gonna generate the most value per donor. This insight allows organizations to focus resources where they'll have the greatest impact, improve improving both, donor retention and overall fundraising ROI. Thank you. So now if your organization has enabled the generative AI functionality, then you can also ask chat for Blackbaud AI for help. You may not get the same in-depth answer that you'd get from Lauren in working with her and her team, but it does provide some best practices. It's been grounded in fundraising best practices, and it also helps to point out information about your donors in your portfolio. So for an example here, I can see on that analysis fundraising dashboard, that benchmarking tab that I was talking to earlier, you can see my revenue per donor is well below my sector's average in this example. So I asked chat for Blackbaud AI to help me increase my revenue per donor. Here, it's offering suggestions based on those fundraising best practices and based on the functionality that I have access to within Razor's Edge NXT. Again, this first response is relatively high level, but because the chat is interactive, I can ask it to go into more detail on any of these suggestions. So I scroll through, and at the end, you'll see it also suggests some actions that it can take to help put these suggestions into action. In this example, it's suggesting I reengage my libunt donors, those who gave last year but not yet this year. I can click on that suggested action to have it create a list of libunt donors in my portfolio specifically. And here you can see that it's pulled together information about some of those LiveBunch donors in my portfolio. So the chat experience is pulling together all of the context it has and is applying it to my portfolio in this in this example. Now as you're reviewing prospects in your portfolio and maybe looking for opportunities to increase giving, another solution at your disposal is ProspectInsights. And if I didn't mention in the intro, ProspectInsights is the product that I work with most closely, but I'm coming from the product perspective. So, Lauren, again, I'd like to to hand it to you and ask how do you when you're working with clients and you're helping them with strategy, how do you advise and see organizations use prospect insights? So when I've been consulting with the our prospect insights clients, I've seen them use use the tool to increase revenue by focusing on actionable lists, especially the under giving list. And this list highlights donors who have higher target gift ranges, but whose giving history hasn't yet reached that potential. So rather than treating these donors like the rest of their their file, these teams can use this insight to be more intentional. For some that may mean tweaking their opportunities so that their ask amounts are more in line with their target gift range. And for others, it may mean assigning them to a gift officer, whether that's a major gift person or an annual giving leadership person based on the the current giving level in their target gift range. But when prospect insights is used this way, it becomes a prioritization tool, not just a data point. And that means teams focus time and resources on donors with the greatest opportunity for growth, which is gonna drive that revenue higher revenue per donor without needing to acquire a whole bunch of new donors. I threw in here too a quick preview. I don't know if y'all can see it. Coming soon to to this version of ProspectInsights, we will be able to filter by constituent code or by the ProspectInsights models. So that will be available for all customers with prospect insights just to help you further refine the that undergiving queue to find those individuals. But sorry, Lauren. I didn't mean to interrupt you. So once people have, you know, updated their their opportunities and their portfolios are feeling good, they can use the, portfolio quality report or metric, and it becomes a powerful decision making tool for them. Rather than just relying on intuition, the fundraising leaders can use this metric to objectively assess whether their portfolios are aligned with the capacity, the opportunity, and the organizational goals. For fundraisers, portfolio quality kind of provides a clarity and a confidence as to what's going on in their portfolio. It helps them understand the strength of their portfolio, and it prioritizes where to focus their time and have more strategic conversations with donors based on real potential rather than, again, that guesswork. Right? The leadership is looking at this metric, you know, in a way that, helps them to make sure that their goals are balanced and achievable. If they're if they are looking and they're seeing that their fundraisers portfolio quality is a little bit lower, that means they need to do a better better job of adding the right people into those portfolios. And using some of those lists and thinking about the benchmarking big picture is really gonna help them to ultimately gain higher revenue in in terms of their outcomes. Okay. So for this next section, I wanted to everything that that we were just talking through and we're just covering, are features that are available to all within Razor's Edge NXT. So for this next section, we'll look at how do you take action with those benchmarks marks on the home page that I was referring to before and some differences with Prospect Insights Pro as well. Again, if you've enabled the generative AI functionality, because that is an opt in process, then on the new benchmark tiles, you'll see a button to suggest actions. And if you click that button, it will generate a suggested strategy based on your benchmark in your data. At the start, it also explains the information that you're viewing and how you're trending. So in this example, it's telling me that I score a three on revenue per donor, and I'm trending down as compared to myself last month. Based on that, it's suggesting the top priority is to stop that decline and then deliberately move donors up in value. It then offers a series of steps I can take based on the features available to me in Razor's Edge NXT. So here, it's calling my attention again to that undergiving queue in this example in ProspectInsights Pro. But, again, undergiving is also available in, in all versions of ProspectInsights. So there, that will show me those individuals who have the potential to increase their giving levels based on our predictive analytics. And like Lauren's been talking about, that's a a direct connection to that revenue per donor metric. Here, it's suggesting I try different messaging for different segments of my donors. So I might try different, language, the message itself, or maybe different channels with each segment. And because the chat is interactive, I can also ask it to help me draft the content and the messaging that's most likely to resonate with those different audiences. Sorry. I froze for a minute. And then in this third example, now it's suggesting that I also look for opportunities to make blended asks from those who are likely to give a planned gift in addition to a major donation. So let's talk through how to put some of these actions sorry, some of these suggestions into action. I can use the constituent lists in Razor's Edge NXT to define my different donor segments for different appeals. In this example here, I have a list of constituents who are in my portfolio who have a tag to indicate that they are lapsing or at risk, and they also fall into the prospect insights pro queue category of a top prospect. So the highest priority prospects who are not, not yet assigned. I could also use this view to filter for those with high planned giving scores in order to find those opportunities for blended gifts like the like it was suggesting. So we've talked a little bit about prospect insights, but Lauren, maybe you can also speak to prospect insights pro and and how you've seen organizations use that functionality. Sure. So one area where I've seen Prospect Insights Pro being especially effective is in building a more intentional strategy around mid level giving using the emerging prospects list. This list is gonna identify donors who may have lower target gift ranges with they have lower target gift ranges than major gift prospects, but are people who are still showing a strong likelihood to give. For fundraising teams, this is gonna create a clear opportunity. Rather than treating these donors as general annual fund supporters, organizations can use this emerging prospects prospects list to be deliberately, to deliberately design leadership annual giving portfolios and tailored engagement strategies for this group. And because these donors are already showing strong engagement signals, fundraisers can focus on right sizing their ask amounts, refining their messages, and increasing meaningful touch points in ways that align with their capacity and their readiness. This helps move donors along the giving continuum in a sustainable way without prematurely pushing them into a major gift strategy. And when used thoughtfully, the emerging prospects list can allow teams to bring structure and strategy to mid level giving, And it helps to ensure that donors with growth potential receive the right level of attention, strengthens their portfolio design, and ultimately it's gonna support increased revenue by developing a new generation of high value donors. So there we go. Here we can see on this slide here the assigned prospects by category chart, which provides an immediate snapshot of how fundraising portfolios are structured, and whether they align with an organization's strategy. By showing how assigned prospects break down across Prospect Insights Pro categories, the chart helps teams quickly assess if high potential prospects are concentrated where they should be and whether portfolios are balanced to support major, mid level, or pipeline development. This moves portfolio assignment from just that intuition that we've been talking about to a more data driven clarity. More importantly, the chart, you know, turns insight into action. It helps organizations identify whether challenges stem from a thin pipeline or from portfolio discipline issues, supports more intentional assignment and reassignment decisions, and it's gonna bring structure to mid level strategies, especially for those emerging prospects. Used consistently, the assigned prospects by category chart strengthens portfolio quality over time, and it's gonna improve a fundraiser's focus and ensure that time and effort are aligned with the greatest opportunities for revenue growth. Alright. So let's, talk about, you know, building a strategy and an action plan going forward. Right? We've heard a lot of really great information about benchmarks, what benchmarks mean, how Blackbaud's benchmarks are special, where they're going to align, with what you're what's working for you, what's not working for you, how the system can be helpful. Right? So performance only has meaning if it has context. Right? Benchmarking provides the perspective needed to understand whether results signal strength, stagnation, or risk. Benchmarking reveals both opportunity and vulnerability. Looking beyond top revenue, top line revenue to donor behavior and channel preference the channel performance, excuse me, helps organizations plan proactively rather than reactively. Insight becomes impact when paired with action. When benchmark data informs priorities and investment decisions, organizations are better positioned to build sustainable fundraising strategies for the year ahead. So to recap, what should we be taking away from our conversation today? Right? Well, we should understand what benchmarking is and how we can use it effectively. We are identifying areas in your shop where key benchmarks can help you to review or revise your existing program. Right? We can create a strategy to attack these areas for growth using some of the tools Blackbaud provides like the chat or the strategy assistant. And then, of course, we're gonna be intentional when using tools like prospect insights to assign prospects who can be affected by your new strategic approach. You can even work with a consultant like myself, to really delve into using prospect insights or prospect insights pro and helping we can help with creating strategies, that will work best for your team. Those consulting hours can focus on, you know, creating general frameworks for your your, prospect management program or creating sustainable prospect management systems that are gonna move you forward. Or we could talk about specific things like building a portfolio for a new major gift officer. So I'm gonna bring our friend Catherine back, to talk a little bit more about the resources that are available. I'm wondering if Catherine had some technical difficulties. I just went backstage, and she was not there. So I'll play the part of Catherine for for this portion. Or maybe she just joined? Well, we're we're closing out. I know that we've been answering questions as we've gone along. I'll come back to it, see if there are any that we missed. And I see some questions in the chat as well. It is helpful if you don't mind putting those in the q and a, especially because it helps with follow-up after the fact. Also, Catherine's here. So Catherine, welcome. back. I'm like, what a time for my Internet to die. This is not what we need. So we've got the poll over there. I don't I I just got back on this moment. Life is funny in 2026. Anyway, yeah, if you do wanna talk to a strategy consultant, somebody like Lauren or Lauren's team, folks with incredible tenure in helping organizations assess their performance and make decisions based on this. Just put a yes in there, and we'll have somebody follow-up with you. Otherwise, check out some of these resources that we have. If got you questions about AI use, the terms and conditions. If there's a little bit of confusion about what is a premium feature and do I have access, you can go to the, the two lower, number five and six. And, also, there are a couple of there were a lot of questions about how do I get access to benchmarks in in Razor's Edge NXT. So the, everybody, every account should have access to the basic benchmarks that, Carrie and Lauren were showing you. So that is something that it'd be, either going to help documentation of the support to make sure you've got the right permissions to see those because those are available for everybody. And if you don't see the, benchmarking tile on your home page, that may be because you don't have access to premium features or you haven't been enabled. So to see if you have there's a description of how you determine if you have premium features. If you go down to that resource number six, a blog post that I published a couple days ago in the community, that'll let you know, how to determine. We put in a marker in your your account to indicate whether or not you have that. And if you don't have premium features, you can always hold back to the, the benchmarking that Carrie and Lauren were also going through that that is, available to everybody in Research Edge. And benchmarking is available in Canada, both the premium and the standard. Looks like somebody has answered that. The and the the Heather's has been working on that. Whoops. Sorry. Am I saying the wrong thing there, Heather? Okay. I may have frozen again. So I am just gonna wrap this up then. Oh, you can hear me? Okay. My gosh. This is like amateur hour at the at the farmer's market where we've got an open mic. We will so what I'll do with the q and a that has come in through here, the questions that have been responded to, some of the ones that were answered or not answered because they were in chat, I'll go through and pull all those questions. And then in the next week or so, post a a blog post into the community that summarizes the questions and gives responses. It's also a lot easier to share, screenshots in the blog post that we don't have that ability here so we can point out how to do things and where. So thank you very much. If you are there, Blake, can you wrap us up? Because I don't have the stop button, Blake. There isn't a level above I'm seeing some of the questions that are coming in through q and a. There is not a level above premium. Thanks, Kelly. Thanks, Kirsten. Thanks, everybody, for attending. Really enjoyed spending some time with you, sharing some information. Thank you. Yeah. We will send a recording, Melissa. Get that by email within the next couple of days, and I'll also have that blog post wrap up in the, in the community.