Name: Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®: Premium Features & AI
Uploaded: 2026-05-07T19:21:08.554Z
Duration: 1 h 5 min 8 s
Description: Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®: Premium Features & AI

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®: Premium Features & AI": Hi, everyone. I'm Tiffany Crumpton, the head of fundraising products here at Blackbaud. Now I've been at Blackbaud for more than twenty years, and I can honestly say I have never been more excited for my team to share what's ahead with Raiser's Edge NXT than I am today. In fact, we've got so much great information, we could not fit it all into a single session. In today's session, you'll be learning about the future of fundraising in a fun new format, focused on the time saving, strategy enhancing, revenue growing, AI powered capabilities and workflows available in the Racer's Edge NXT Complete Package. If you are a frontline fundraiser or lead a development or advancement team, you are not going to want to miss this. If you're looking for information on how the latest enhancements in Raiser's Edge NXT can simplify your fundraising, amplify your impact, and strengthen your donor connections, along with a comprehensive view and timeline for the unified experience, I encourage you to check out our companion session focused on unified view. If you use Razer's Edge NXT daily, are in charge of database administration, or are preparing to adopt unified view workflows, this session will ensure you are prepared for that change. And for even more guidance to navigate the transition to the unified view, make sure to register for the inside track sessions coming monthly. Look for details on these sessions in the Blackbaud community. I look forward to seeing you all at bbcon this year. And now, without further ado, let the briefing begin. Hello there. Welcome to the very first product update briefing for Blackboard raises their Genex team for fundraising AI. I'm Rob Mat Rob. I'm an AI avatar hosting a webinar about AI. Someone at Blackboard thought it was a great idea. They were right. Since I'm an AI avatar, I won't stumble over my words, I won't lose my place, and I definitely won't make awkward small talk. The bar was low, and I think I cleared it. A few quick orientation items before we bring in our speakers. Questions. Please use the q and a panel. Our team is standing by in q and a to respond to your questions throughout the session. We probably won't get to all of them live today, but we'll cover several of the most common ones in our FAQ segment later in the session. Most questions submitted will be addressed in the follow-up post in the Blackboard community. Recording. Yes. This session is being recorded. You'll receive a link to the full recording delivered to your inbox within twenty four hours. No need to take notes on everything. Just focus on the demos. Resources. There is a docs panel on this platform right now. Hit that before you leave today. It has links to everything we reference in this session. The prompt library, workshop registrations, training links, and more. You don't have to wait for the follow-up email. It's all there now. One last caveat before we get started. A brief safe harbor statement. This briefing includes forward looking statements about Razer's Edge NXT, including features and capabilities that are currently in development. These statements reflect our current intentions, but aren't commitments or guarantees. Actual results and timelines may vary. So here's what the next hour looks like. Three product managers, five demos, one complete fundraising life cycle from strategy to stewardship, followed by helpful reminders and resources you can use to help your organization's AI journey. Let me bring everyone in so we can really get things moving. Heather, Kylie, Leah, welcome. Before we get into the demos, I want each of you to do something a little uncomfortable. In one sentence, what's the problem Blackboard is actually solving with what folks will see today? Heather, how about you go first? Great question. Most fundraising organizations have a strategy that nobody can see and goals that nobody can trace back to the real work because they're not in the system. They're outside of it. We're fixing that. And Kylie? I'd say funders just spend so much time building lists, doing research, and juggling logistics when AI and predictive intelligence could help them do that work. Bring the fundraiser up to talk to donors. And, Leah. Organizations are reluctant to adopt AI because they can't answer questions like where does my data go? We built a platform where the answer is clear, governed, and in your control. Three different problems, one platform. That's the story we're going to tell. Heather, let's start at the top and set the vision for today. Here's a full spectrum of how AI supports your organization's fundraising work. All Raiser's Edge NXT customers have AI enabled capabilities. We're going to be looking at the future development of advanced AI capabilities that will transform the Raiser's Edge NXT of the future. Most of these capabilities are available to customers who subscribe to the razor's edge NXT complete offer with access to premium features. It starts with enriched workflows. AI surfaces what matters without you having to dig through reports or build complex queries. You get the right insights right away. An example of this is prospect insights that surfaces your best major donor prospects for you. Next is content generation, where AI helps turn donor information into clear summaries and drafts. That might be a donor history or briefing to get ready for a call or an outreach draft to follow-up. The goal is helping you show up prepared. AI chat is one example here. Then we move into intelligent assistance. This is AI working alongside you inside a workflow. Cultivation assistant, for example, recommends next steps to a human fundraiser, helping complete tasks and adapting in real time as things change. And finally, agentic team members, like development agent, that are outside of the scope of this presentation. This is where AI can handle routine end to end workflows independently, things like donor engagement through agents for good. The point isn't just to move faster. It's to spend less time on manual steps and more time on judgment, relationships, and strategy, the work that really drives mission impact. Every fundraising team we talk to is dealing with the same tension. The prospect list is long, the team is never big enough, and there's never enough time to do it all well. Donors fall through the cracks, follow ups get missed, not because people aren't working hard, but because there's simply more opportunity than there are hours in a day. As we look at the future of razor's edge NXT beyond the unified view, we have a very focused team applying the latest technology to help close this gap. We wanna give you a glimpse into how we're putting AI and automation behind the work that may still slow your team down, the research, the prioritization, and follow through so your fundraisers can show up fully for the conversations that actually move relationships forward, the work that only a human can do. That's what we're going to see today. As we walk through what's new, what's coming, we'll be telling the story through three horizons. Available now means it's live in your environment today. If you have access to premium features, you can go use it this afternoon. What's coming next is what's already in flight, shipping in the near term, and looking ahead is where we're heading, the themes and investments that will shape the platform over the next year. You'll see these labels throughout the demo so you always know exactly where something lives. So let's go ahead and tee up my first demo for strategy and goals. Every fundraising director has a version of this moment, usually the night before a board meeting. Are we on track? Where are the risks? What I'm going to show you is how a director can get those answers without leaving Raiser's Edge NXT. On the surface, things are looking good. Revenue is up. Major gifts are growing. Recurring giving is holding steady. This is what gets reported to the board. But look here at median gift. It's down 11%. Average gift looks fine because a few large gifts are pulling the number up. Median gift shows what's actually happening in the middle of the donor base. And downgrades are up 4%. That means more donors are getting less than they did last year. Those two things together are worth paying attention to. Before looking at any specific campaign, the director wants to know how they compare to similar organizations. So she types, compare our donor retention rate to peer US organizations and highlight where we are above or below benchmark. Good news on revenue per donor. The donors they're keeping are giving more of our time, but lapsed donors, people who used to give and stopped, are not coming back at the rate they should be. Peer organizations are doing this at nearly three times our rate, 11% compared to our four. What we're about to see is exactly where that shows up. Now the director knows what question to ask when they look at the data, so she follows up. Summarize our year over year fundraising performance and call out the biggest risks and opportunities heading into the next quarter. A 142 donors already in the database who Blackbaud Prospect Insight say have capacity to give more. 31 last major donors, people who gave $5,000 or more who haven't heard from anyone in over a year. The director didn't have to run a report or build a list. They just asked. Here's where that lapsed donor problem actually shows up. This campaign is about a quarter of the way to goal at midyear, but the more important number is right here. Last year at this point, they had a $198,000 raised. They're not just behind goal. They're 70,000 behind their own pace from last year. You can see on the chart exactly when things slowed down. Here's the specific appeal that stalled. This appeal targeted a large pool of lapsed donors only eight gave. Not because the donors weren't there, the team didn't have the capacity to follow-up personally with everyone who didn't respond the first time. One outreach and then silence for most of them. The strategy assistant named the problem, and the dashboard shows exactly where it happened. The director has one more question. Who were our top LYBUNT donors for this year's alumni giving drive? Same chat, no report, no exports. The data comes back as a chart right here. Now the director walks into their leadership meeting knowing what went wrong, what the opportunity is, and exactly who to focus on first. So the director has the diagnosis now. Now let's say she's ready to build the plan for the rest of the year. She navigates to the strategy planner. Right now, scenario planning likely lives in a spreadsheet. Someone builds it, emails it out, and the strategy gets disconnected from the actual goals people are working toward. This brings that whole process into razor's edge NXT. You choose how aggressive you wanna be, whether you're focused on major gifts or a broader mix of donors, and the model adjusts based on your actual historical performance and how your current pipeline looks. The blue numbers are donors already in the database who have more capacity to give. Notice that a 142 in the mid level role? That's the same group prospect insights identified just a few minutes ago. That model is consistent across the whole platform. Not new donors you need to find, people you already have a relationship with. Once you've chosen the plan, you assign it to your teams. The system suggests individual goals for each of their fundraisers based on their portfolio. Tom, Pauline, Darcel, everyone gets a number that reflects their actual book of work. You can adjust anything before you save. And when you're done, every fundraiser knows their goal and the strategy behind it. It's not sitting in a spreadsheet or on someone's desktop anymore. The goal is set. The plan is in the system. And when something changes, Razer's Edge NXT will flag it before it becomes a problem at the end of the year. That's strategy and goals. Back to you, Rob. So I have a question. Go ahead. The spreadsheet, the one with the strategy in it, we've all seen it. Some of us have even built it. Does it have a name like final underscore v three underscore real underscore this underscore one? I'm not gonna confirm or deny that. No judgment. That spreadsheet has raised a lot of money over the years. It just shouldn't have to anymore. And for the record, that spreadsheet exists because the system didn't give anyone a better option until now. That's why we built this. Because I just watched you show a director their entire fundraising picture, benchmarked, analyzed, and ready for a leadership conversation in about four minutes inside the system that they're already in. And the part where Razer's Edge NXT adapts and signals when something needs attention Before it becomes that q four surprise? I feel like that line deserves a moment. It does. This AI avatar is thoroughly impressed. Okay. So let's move on to the next demo where Kylie will be showing us some updates for prospects researching. Planning in person visits is some of the most valuable time a fundraiser spends, and it's also some of the hardest time to plan as well. Trips come together quickly, calendars fill up fast, and it's easy for visits to turn into a loose collection of meetings rather than a focused plan tied to real goals. A fundraiser might travel to a city with dozens of potential prospects nearby, but limited time, limited energy, and real pressure to make those connections count. This demo walks through how Raiser's Edge NXT helps bring structure to that work, making it easier to identify who's worth visiting, prepare those conversations, and turn a trip into intentional follow through ready outreach. Imagine you're planning a trip to Chicago, and you want those meetings tied to a specific campaign, not just whoever happens to be nearby. You start by asking chat for Blackbaud AI to help identify constituents who would be worth speaking with about supporting that campaign while you're there. As your chat with the assistant continues, notice what it's doing for you. First, it works to clarify which campaign you're talking about. That's your affinity based filtering, making sure outreach is aligned to the right effort. That means looking at philanthropic interests, previous giving trends, education, employment, and giving to other organizations. Then it prompts you to define how far you're willing to travel around Chicago. That's location based filtering so your plan stays realistic. You stay in conversation while your assistant turns intent into clear criteria without you jumping between tools or screens. Once those pieces are clear, your assistant generates a list of constituents who are a good fit to visit. This is often the hardest part of trip planning, getting from I have a goal to here are the right people, and it all happens in one flow. From here, you can ask your assistant to add actions to schedule the meetings ahead of your trip, turning a list of prospects into a calendar with real commitments. Most trips live in someone's head or in a spreadsheet that doesn't travel well. From the chat, you move directly into a split screen queue. Your full list of trip prospects on one side, their pertinent info on the other, so nothing gets lost between the conversation and the calendar. You can also view the list as a map. A fundraiser with 10 prospects in Chicago doesn't need 10 separate calendar decisions. They need to see the geography at once, cluster visits that make sense together, and route the week before it gets away from them. The list is set. Now the work is showing up ready. Ask your assistant to build research profiles. For example, you generate one for Barbara Durer so you can walk into that conversation with the right context. You'll see the assistant confirm which template to use. That matters because teams prepare differently. You can start with a default or choose a template that matches how you like to prep. The goal isn't to turn fundraisers into researchers or overwhelm them with data. It's to make sure every visit starts with shared understanding and the right level of context without the hours of manual prep, endless coffee, and the stress that tends to come along for the ride. So by the end of this workflow, you've turned travel intent into structured outreach. You've identified the right people for a campaign, prepared the context for those conversations, and turned a list of names into a plan you can actually execute. That's the value of this experience, helping you go from planning to execution without friction all in one place. I have to say, from a list of targets to a map to a research profile to a meeting booked, that's the whole job in one flow. That's the idea. No detours. Speaking of detours, I've never actually traveled to a meeting. I'm told it involves airports. It does. I do have a cousin robot who waits tables at a restaurant in O'Hare, but I'll stick to the research profiles. Kylie, what do you have for us next? Planned and blended giving relationships are often the most valuable in a portfolio. They're also the ones that drift most quietly because there's no urgency, no deadline, and no obvious signal that momentum is slipping. A fundraiser might have 40 relationships at this stage and see each donor twice a year. That's 40 threads to keep in your head across months of other work. This demo walks through how Razer's Edge NXT gives that work structure, so nothing slips and every touch point counts. We'll start here on portfolio planning. This is part of a newer task based structure that separates portfolio work by what you are trying to accomplish. Planning, prospect research, portfolio management, and performance management. The goal is to keep you in the right context for the work you're doing instead of constantly switching views just to stay oriented. From here, we'll open the blended gifts queue. This is where the system helps service prospects who may be a fit for a blended approach, combining near term giving with longer term planned giving potential. These are often valuable relationships, but they don't always stand out if you're only looking at traditional major gift signals. One of the most important signals here is planned giving likelihood, and this is powered by an adaptive model. That means the model is learning from what has actually led to planned gifts at your organization, not just broad sector patterns. Two organizations could look at very similar donors and see different signals because the model is adapting to your outcomes over time. That's especially valuable for blended giving. The signals are often subtle, and they don't always show up in a standard major gift view. If it's clear to you that this relationship deserves active attention, create an optimized opportunity. This is really about clarity. It's the moment where you're saying this relationship deserves a plan. Behind the scenes, the system surfaces the most relevant intelligence it already has about this constituent, displays it for you, and uses it to prepopulate key opportunity fields. Review it, adjust anything that doesn't fit your strategy, and decide what gets saved. The system moves the work forward, but you stay in control. After you save the opportunity, your AI assistant prompts you to create an action plan. This opens chat for Blackbaud AI where your assistant proposes a starting plan, not a script, for cultivating this relationship. For planned and blended giving, that matters. These relationships don't move quickly, and rebuilding context every time is where momentum gets lost. You can review the plan, refine it, and decide what to keep before adding it back to the opportunity. Once there's a plan in place, the real challenge is staying aligned as time passes because the hardest part of cultivation is keeping actions relevant when donor context changes. In action strategies, you can pull up the next action and see a strategy briefing, compiling the most relevant donor context so that you can prepare without hunting across multiple pages or trying to remember where you saw that one really important detail. The briefing pulls in what actually matters for that specific action, recent contact report notes, any outstanding asks, and key biographical context, everything you'd want to review before a call or meeting in one place. That's especially important for planned giving, where you might return to a relationship after six months and need to pick up exactly where you left off. The strategy briefing means you're never starting cold. You're walking in prepared. After the outreach happens, the next step is capturing what was learned. Because in cultivation, the contact report isn't just record keeping. It becomes information that improves what the system can recommend next. Here, you have multiple ways to capture notes. You can dictate, upload, or type depending on what's most practical in the moment or how loud the person next to you is talking. Once the contact report is saved, the system doesn't just store the notes. It extracts the meaningful signals from the conversation. Key details like interests, intent, and next steps are surfaced for you automatically so insight doesn't stay buried in free text notes. You review what was extracted, make any adjustments, and then confirm what should become part of the prospect's record. Nothing is committed without your review, but the heavy lifting of turning conversation into intelligence is already done. And finally, we close the loop with goal progress because you can execute actions all day long and still not know whether they're moving toward anything that matters. Goal progress shows how your day to day cultivation work, including long term plan and blended giving, is tracking against the goals you're responsible for. It's the difference between being busy and knowing whether your work is actually moving the needle for your organization. We've designed Raiser's Edge NXT to manage cultivation from a fundraiser's perspective. It's not just a set of tasks. It's a relationship cycle that may take years, even decades to develop, and you need to stay organized, reach out consistently, and have healthy institutional memory and accountability for the relationship over that period of time. So that's cultivation, where the work is less about closing and more about not losing the threat. And, honestly, losing the thread is the whole problem. You can have the best strategy in the world and still drop a relationship because six months went by and you forgot where you left off. Retaining context is kind of my thing. I don't forget where threads left off. Unlike most fundraising software. I wasn't gonna say it, but, yes, unlike most fundraising software. Also, I want to go on record. I submit the name for the blended gifts feature early in development. Did you? Yep. I did. I wanted to call it the smoothie, intentional, refreshing, a blend with purpose. The team went a different direction. They did. I've made my peace with it. I don't know what a smoothie tastes like anyway. So stewardship. Heather, you're back. This is where everything the fundraiser built actually gets felt by the donor. Take it away. Stewardship is the part of fundraising that most organizations wish they could do better. The reason it doesn't happen for every donor is time. Writing something personal, pulling the current numbers, making it feel like it was made just for them, that takes hours or even days. Unfortunately, most organizations can only do it for the top one to 2% of their donors. What I'm going to show you is what it looks like when Raiser's Edge NXT carries that work automatically for every donor in your giving circle. Recognition programs are a new capability in Raiser's Edge NXT, a dedicated place to manage and track your donor recognition circles, legacy societies, and giving clubs. This is the Raccoon Guardian Legacy Circle. 40 donors have named Foggy Valley Animal Rescue in their estate plans. Four joined this year, a 105,000 raised from this group. When a donor joins, a stewardship engagement strategy activates automatically. You can see it linked right here. Legacy welcome and stewardship. That's where we're going. Six steps across a year. A welcome email on day one, a personal thank you call at two weeks, a conservation impact update at sixty days, an event invitation at six months, and on the anniversary of the day they join, a full personalized impact statement, then a follow-up call. The stewardship officer builds this once. Every donor who joins the legacy circle moves through it automatically at their own pace on their own timeline. Now this is the area that makes the strategy truly intelligent. The instructions panel tells the AI exactly what every communication in the strategy needs to do, reference the recognition program by name, include current year conservation stats, acknowledge founding member status for donors who joined in the very first cohort, and on the right, the context that AI draws from, the brand, tone of voice, and writing samples, the organization's legacy and recognition page links. The AI doesn't guess at Foggy Valley's voice. It reads these materials before generating any content. A fundraiser never has to think about any of this. It's built directly into their strategy. Every step, every communication, every donor. Now we switch to the fundraiser's view. This is what they see when they open Raiser's Edge NXT in the morning. Three time sensitive actions that need attention today. The platform found them. The fundraiser doesn't have to go looking for what to do next. Juliet Dragos is at the top. The action is email, anniversary, impact statement. Today is the anniversary of the day she joined the legacy circle. The platform knew. The action is here. It's assigned, and it tells the fundraiser exactly what to do next. Marcus and Priya are on different steps of the same strategy. They're on pace. They're on timeline. Three donors, all prestaged, and the fundraiser can easily execute. This is the Dreamwriter app embedded right in Raiser's Edge NXT. The fundraiser clicks generate impact statement. First choice, what format? Long form is six to eight page personal report with stories, data, and outcomes. One pager is a front and back summary. A slide deck is a presentation for a donor meeting. For Juliet's anniversary, we're gonna go long form. Then the giving period. Look at Juliet's lifetime giving, $255,000 over eleven years. That's not a donor you send a generic thank you. For the anniversary statement, we're focusing on this calendar year, the most current picture of what her giving made possible. The Appulse, Foggy Valley's own program data, this year's outcomes, individual animal stories, conservation numbers, and it organizes it around Juliet specific giving, not a generic organizational update, her story. On the left, you can see a summary of what was generated. Things like 92% of raccoons returned to the wild, Juniper's story, a wildfire survivor stabilized in twenty four hours, 320 volunteers, more than 2,000 community members engaged, and 68 acres of protected habitat. Those are Foggy Valley's numbers all aligned to what matters most to Juliet. And the cover email, personalized with Juliet's name and the impact statement attached as a PDF. Once she opens it, it's addressed to her. The numbers inside are specific to her giving, and the story feels like it was written for her because it was. The fundraiser has three options right here. Send it directly from their own email, copy a personalized link Juliet can return to anytime, or download a PDF to leave on the table at a donor visit. Sent. Julia's record reflects the outreach. The next step, her follow-up call. We'll move into the fundraiser's queue automatically when it's time. The stewardship officer set the strategy once. The fundraiser executed it in a few minutes. And on the anniversary of the day she made her commitment, Juliet received something that shows exactly what her giving made possible. Most organizations can only do this for their top donors. This helps everyone in the circle get the same level of care on the right day every year. Seven pages on the anniversary in Foggy Valley's voice. Yes. That's the goal. Where does the voice come from? Wait. That's the next demo. Perfect, Sita. Let's go. You got it. Think about the difference between asking a brand new colleague to draft a donor letter versus asking someone who's been at your organization for ten years. The new person writes something fine. The experienced person writes something that sounds like it came from you because they know your voice, your donors, and your history. The database manager's job is to give Blackbaud AI that same context. That's what you're about to see in this demo. And the work they're doing isn't building something new. It's translation. Taking what your organization already knows, your voice, your definition of a major gift, your process for moving a prospect to one, and putting it where the AI can see it. The brand voice kit is where the platform learns who you are. In the branding tab, you capture your visual identity, your logo, your colors, your fonts. Paste in your website URL, and the platform pulls it in automatically. This is where the platform learns your philanthropic voice. You upload your brand guide, your annual report, maybe pages from your website, and AI generated letters come out sounding like you wrote them, not a template. Next up, teams. Different teams work in different fundraising strategies, major giving, planned giving, events, membership, and more. Assign a strategy to the major giving team here, and every member gets AI guidance that matches how they work without setting anything up themselves. Giving levels. This is where you tell the platform what a major gift means to your organization. Once it's set, ask amounts, outreach priorities across the whole platform reflect your tiers, not a generic default. Next, intelligent tags. This is how the platform finds the donors who need attention right now, every night from your own data. Things like giving anniversary approaching, consecutive giving streak, or sustainer transaction failing. Every morning, your fundraisers open raisers at GenexT, and the donors who need attention are already surfaced for them. When the standard tags don't cover something that matters to your organization, you can define it for yourself. Here, we're creating a lapsed alumni tag, alumni who haven't given in twenty four months. Write the definition once and notice the visibility controls. You can make a tag visible to all users, selected users, or just selected teams. Giving anniversary approaching belongs in front of the annual giving team, for example, but not cluttering a major gift view. You decide what surfaces to whom, and from that point on, the platform finds every person who qualifies every night. You define it once, and it runs until you turn it off. Opportunity status life cycle mapping. Your team already has opportunity statuses to identify where a donor is in the process. Here, you can connect those statuses to the stages that AI understands. When a prospect is in cultivate, for example, the platform knows that means relationship building. No ask. When someone moves to the asked status, everything shifts. The framing, the amount, the tone, you'll see exactly how this shapes a letter in a few moments. Next up, goals. This is where the team's goals go into the platform so that Blackbaud AI knows what everyone is working towards and can prioritize accordingly. Let's walk through how a goal is set up in the system. Step one, define. You tell the platform what success looks like. Alumni giving drive, the outcome is raising money measured by revenue, exactly 8,500,000 to be exact, in this fiscal year. Simple. But once it's here, every recommendation the platform makes can be oriented around this number. Step two, assign. You decide who owns the number. Here, it's assigned to the major giving team, and you decide how credit works. Here, we've selected basing it on a fundraiser credit on a gift. That matters for the performance tracking. We need to know whose work counts towards what. Step three, measure. This is where you can fine tune exactly what counts towards this goal. Revenue type is committed, scoped to the alumni giving drive campaign. Not all revenue, just the right revenue. That precision is what makes the progress tracking meaningful. If it doesn't belong to this campaign, it doesn't count towards this number. Step four, progress. This is where you set quarterly milestones. 2,125,000 per quarter to be exact. This is what lets you see clearly if you're off your pace, not in December when it's too late, but in April when you can still do something about it. And before you save, the platform brings something to the table. Based on our prospect insights, your current pipeline, and peer benchmarks, 8,200,000 is probably more an achievable target. It's not a correction. That's your own data telling whether the goal is grounded. Ultimately, you set the number and you own the decision. The database manager is done. Let's switch to the fundraiser's view and see what all of this just made possible. A fundraiser is getting ready to reach out to a donor to confirm an upcoming call. She types, I'm planning my outreach to James Whitfield ahead of our call this afternoon. Can you draft a letter I can send him beforehand? Warm reconnection. He's been a supporter for eight years, but hasn't given in a while. Before the letter even appears, look at this. Cultivation stage that came from the life cycle mapping we just set up. Last alumni tag, that's the custom tag the database manager created. Humanitarian donor category, that one comes from Blackbaud's Prospect Insights, which predicts what motivates James as a donor. The platform uses it to lead with mission and impact rather than a gift amount. Three signals all working together. That letter reflects eight years of Jane's relationship with this organization, and the tone came from the brand voice kit. The approach came from the team's strategy. The tag found him in the first place, and the fundraiser was set up for success. You made sure nothing that was already known got lost. One click sent from the fundraiser's own email logged as a completed action from configuration to letter to sent without leaving Raiser's Edge NXT. So remember that new colleague from the beginning, the one writing something generic? The difference isn't the AI. It's what the database manager put into it, your voice, your donors, your process, the fundraiser just asked. Can I just say something? Please. Five demos, executive dashboards, prospect research, fundraiser outreach. I'm super impressed. And I don't even have a notions. And all of it, the brand voice, the tags, the giving levels, the goal, the letter that sounded like it came from a human, that came from one person in settings. Yeah. And an afternoon of configuration. The database manager is the most important person in this entire product update briefing, and I'm not sure anyone even noticed. Well, you noticed, but what we really hope is that the database managers listening noticed. That was a great demo, Heather. Thank you so much. And what you just saw is one product, Razer's Edge NXT, one configuration. Leah is going to talk about what happens when that extends across the entire Blackboard ecosystem. The AI layer that connects all our solutions, the features that make it accessible, and where this is going. Leah, take it away. All of the AI features you saw today are powered by Blackbaud's own AI platform. It's the foundation of all of our AI capabilities, and we built that platform with a North Star. How do we make sure we can give our customers the full suite of AI tools without asking them to give up any security or any control over their data. Let me walk you through that answer. What's available to you right now and what's coming next? First up, Blackbaud's AI global opt in, which is live today. AI in Razer's Edge NXT, like all AI features at Blackbaud, operates on an explicit opt in model, which means that your organization has total control over whether AI features are enabled at all. Full stop. Furthermore, you can control which users have access to AI features and at what level. You're not opted in unless you take specific action and choose to participate. What that means is that your organization sets the boundaries and your administrators manage the opt in from a single governance setting. Furthermore, let's just be very clear. Your donor's data is your donor's data. It's not being used to train large language models nor is it powering someone else's AI features. This is one that matters to me personally. AI should not be a capability that only some users can reach. That's a design principle that we hold dear. Blackbaud AI features are built to meet industry accessibility standards and not as an afterthought and not as a future road map item, available now across every feature that you saw today. Every feature, every user, every workflow from strategy all the way through stewardship. Accessibility is not a layer sitting on top of the product. It's built in from day one. If someone on your team needs accommodation to use our AI platform, our AI capabilities they rely on are designed to work for them as well. And here's what's coming that I'm super excited about. Right now, chat for Blackbaud AI lives inside Razer's Edge NXT. What's coming is a unified AI chat experience that works across the entire Blackbaud ecosystem from one governed environment with one chat that knows you and all of your data. That means cross product questions. Ask something that spans your entire fundraising data and all your other Blackbaud products, and you get one answer, not three different tabs. It also means things like saved conversations. You start a research thread on a major donor prospect today, and you pick up exactly where you left off tomorrow. Your chat history becomes saved and searchable. That work doesn't disappear when you close the window. One tool, all of your data, fully governed. That's the direction that AI chat is moving. The last thing that I wanna leave you with is this. That AI that helped a manager benchmark their retention rate is the same AI that helped a fundraiser build a prospect list, draft a cultivation plan, and generate a donor impact statement. It's all one engine under the hood, which is what makes the utility, the intelligence, and the security able to scale. We are not stitching together different tools for different roles. What we're doing is building one foundation that every role benefits from, and that gets smarter as your organization uses it, learns from it, and tells us what it needs next. Utility, intelligence, security, that's the platform underneath everything that you saw today. Now you've seen what you can do today at Raises iGenx t with Blackboard AI. You've seen where the journey will take us. Now let's bring it all together. So you leave with a clear picture of what's available, what's coming, and what's on the horizon. Kylie, let's recap what we've seen. We showed you this framework at the top of the briefing. We're coming back to it now because everything you saw lives somewhere on this map. Available now means it's in your solution today. What's coming next means it's an active development. You'll see it soon. Looking ahead is where we're headed, the themes and capabilities that are shaping where our NXT goes from here. Keep this in mind as we walk through the road map and get ready to take those screenshots. Blackbaud is on its own AI maturity journey, and so is every organization using this platform. What's available now reflects that. These are the foundations. Benchmarking is live. Adaptive plan giving models are live. Intelligent tags with basic visibility controls, action plans, action strategy recommendations, optimized opportunities, all available now. Chat for Blackbaud AI is available now with global opt in controls, on demand visualizations, best practices strategy assistance, and feedback driven improvements. The prompt library is there and ready to use. For US organizations, sustainer performance benchmarking, including likelihood segmentation, is part of that foundation. Canada gets revenue growth and active donor benchmarks now with sustainer benchmarking coming next. This is where the foundations get sharper and more connected. Benchmarking expands. Sustainer performance and segmentation for Canada, newly identified sustainers, target monthly ask amounts, and goal projections. Intelligent tags expands to add custom tags and advanced visibility controls so organizations can define the signals that matter to them specifically. Goals gets its admin experience and settings. Teams and fundraising strategy assistance, giving level settings, opportunity life cycle stage settings, these are what connect the admin configuration you saw today to the strategic layer we showed in the executive demo. This is the wiring that makes the AI smarter about your organization specifically. And chatbot.ai takes a significant step forward. Interest, affinity, and radius based searching, complex list building with exclusions, cross product support, and saved conversations. The prompt library gets dynamic variables, role based prompts, and user submitted prompts. Looking ahead is where the platform becomes something genuinely different. For US organizations, prospect insights expands into the workspace and converges with work center with blended gifts and giving level settings respected throughout. Analysis dashboards bring together giving performance, constituent trends, and fundraiser outcomes with lifetime giving models, scenario planning, and goal recommendations also coming for the executive view. For US and Canada, the trip planning wizard, brand and tone of voice settings, AI powered research profiles, engagement strategies, donor impact statements, and in app sending a personal email will be made available. Chat for Blackbaud AI gets enhanced memory and context, favorite prompts, and new tools built around the most common things fundraisers actually asked. This is the picture of a platform that knows your organization, knows your donors, and helps your team focus on the work that matters most. Wow. So much to be excited about. My cash is almost full, so pardon me if I start to buffer. Now knowing what's coming is one thing. Getting your team there is another. Everything we've shown you today only works if your organization actually uses it, and Blackboard has built the resources to help you do just that. Heather, let's hear from the customer and see what they have to say about their experience. Thanks, Rob. We've talked a lot today about what this looks like in theory and in a demo environment. I want you to hear what it actually looks like when an organization decides to go all in. Kelly Bode is the membership director at North Carolina Coastal Federation. She's been one of our earliest and most thoughtful adopters, not just using the tools, but figuring out how to bring her whole team along with her. Kelly, take it away. Thank you, Heather. I'm excited to open the hood a little bit about what's happening behind the scenes at the North Carolina Coastal Federation. The first thing I'll talk about is the importance of data. That pretty early on in noticing the changes coming from Raiser's Edge NXT, I noticed that our data was more siloed than it needed to be. We had donor interactions living in email inboxes and voice mail recordings throughout the, administration team and also the development team. We needed to get that data into NXT, and we plugged them into the actions table so that the magic could start to happen. Raiser's Edge NXT is only going to provide as good feedback as data it has to react to. So we started there. And the other thing I'll say is that we started with the idea that we're going to be curious about, AI and prospect tools coming into the database, and just be open to change. The next thing that happened along the way was noticing that ProspectInsight's pro data was going to be available in constituent lists. This coincided with another big change, and that is holistically putting all of our donor events into event registration. That way we have an accurate picture of who has RSVP'd in real time. Having the Prospect Insights Pro data alongside meant that before the event, I could quickly queue up a constituent list of who was going to be in the room and what was important to note about their prospect histories with us. I use this to generate some briefing meetings with our chief development officer and our executive director. And we just pulled the event data together, looked at the prospect insights columns, but I also was able to use chat to generate prospect summaries for my executive director. He's leaving these briefings and often going on the road. He wants to have a couple notes to look at while he's traveling. The chat was able to give me a great starting point with prospect summaries. I iterated a little bit using words like prospect and using commas to separate constituent names, and it was able to generate really cool summaries that I could take into a document and manipulate for him. Most of all, this just provided really timely, actionable conversations so that we all walked into that donor event with confidence and knowledge about who was going to be there. I'll also say that my chief development officer moved ahead leaps and bounds. And in between the first briefing and the second briefing, she was ready to lead the call herself, building the constituent list and pulling in the correct columns to lead the conversation. We have moved so much since January. It is really tremendous. If I was starting at the very beginning, I would look at what data is being siloed. Again, none of this magic is going to take place if the data is living somewhere else. Bringing other teams on board and getting that data into the actions table has been really powerful for us even though we're still at the very, very beginning of implementing this across the organization. And the other thing I'll say is that chat was a great puzzle. It did take a little bit of maneuvering and iterating to figure out what tools and phrases, what terms and phrases to use to get the right results. But in the end, it generated something really powerful. I suggest that you stay curious and be open to change because you'll end up seeing really cool results with your data. Thanks. Kelly, thank you so much. You shared what it looks like when teams are really enabled for success. We're so glad that you could be here. I can't wait to see where you take the next phase of this journey when we release some of these new features. Three things to help you move from watching this briefing to actually putting AI to work. The prompt library, product trainings, and an adoption guide, all available now. Let me walk through each one. Links to all three can be found under docs if you wanna download them now and follow along. The prompt library is a curated set of prompts mapped to real fundraising workflows and tested against real razor's edge NXT data patterns, not generic AI prompts. Prompts that know what a lapsed owner looks like in your system, what a campaign giving breakdown means, and how to measure fundraising success in the language you already use. The key message here is simple. Don't start with a blank chat. Start with the library. Find a prompt that's close to what you need, customize it to your constituent or context, and go from there. That's how you get useful results immediately without having to figure out how to ask the right question. Three trainings available now. Chat for Blackbaud AI, how to craft effective prompts inside RE NXT. If your fundraisers are going to use chat well, this is where they should start. Blackbaud AI global opt in, the one time configuration that unlocks current and future generative AI features. If your organization hasn't done this yet, this training walks your admin through the steps one by one. And the Raiser's Edge NXT development agent, how the agent for good works alongside fundraisers and Raiser's Edge NXT. This is the bigger picture of where AI assistance is heading from inside the platform. And coming next, the AI for social impact training. This is the broader literacy course designed for the whole team, not just the people using Raiser's Edge NXT every day. It's for anyone in your organization who wants to understand what AI is, how to use it responsibly, and how to talk about it confidently with donors, board members, and colleagues. The link to add your name to the wait list to be notified when it's ready is under docs. This one, I point your database manager to and your leadership as well first. It's a step by step playbook for rolling out chat for Blackbaud AI responsibly. Three phases, build your foundation, run a pilot, measure, and expand. Build your foundation is about getting the right permissions in place and choosing two or three hero prompts your fundraisers will actually embrace. Run a pilot is a fifteen minute kickoff with a small group focused on trying prompts together, not explaining AI. Measure and expand is about documenting what worked, sharing it in the community, and making the case for broader rollout in your organization. The key message on this slide is one I believe most. Give fundraisers a prompt, not a presentation. Start small and let the results make the case for themselves. We had some frequently asked questions, specifically four. 502 frequently asked questions submitted, and we read all of them. These three kept showing up. We'll put some of the others in a follow-up in a Blackboard community post soon. Kylie, Leah, Heather, let's come back and answer some questions. How does AI access and use my data? It's a great question. So, your data stays yours. Blackbaud AI only accesses the data in your r e n x t environment to generate responses. It doesn't use your data to train any of the underlying models, and it doesn't share your data, like, across organizations. When your fundraiser asks a question in chat for Blackbaud AI, the platform is reading the constituent records, giving history, your configuration, and it stays inside that boundary. The global opt in that I walked through earlier is what gives you control over what's enabled and for whom. If you want even more detail on things like data governance, the Blackbaud AI global opt in training walks through exactly how permissions and data handling work. What happens if the AI gives an incorrect answer? It can happen, and we don't pretend otherwise. AI models can misread a question, surface an unexpected result, or occasionally get something wrong. That's why every output is designed to support a human decision, not replace one. The verify step exists for a reason. When you see a benchmark comparison or a recommended ask amount, you're meant to read it, evaluate it against what you know, and decide. The thumbs up and thumbs down in chat for Blackbaud AI are also how you tell us when something missed. Every piece of feedback directly shapes how the model improves. Your corrections are literally making it better. How should we responsibly enable fundraisers at our organization? The biggest mistake organizations make is treating this like a huge technology rollout. It's not. It's a behavior change. So start small. Pick two or three fundraisers who are curious and motivated. Don't ask them to figure out what to ask. Give them a prompt from the prompt library that matches something they do every day or every week. A donor briefing before a call, a lapsed donor outreach email, a giving summary. Let them try it, see what comes back, and refine it. The results build the case better than any presentation you could ever give. That's the whole adoption guide in two sentences. Start with one prompt and let the fundraiser feel the difference for themselves. Thank you for submitting those questions, and thank you Heather, Leah, and Kylie for your answers. Stay tuned to the Blackboard community blog where we'll post more answers to your questions from this product update briefing. Here's the thing about everything you saw today. The road map isn't finished, and the people who decide what comes next are not just us. There's actually three ways you can be part of what's coming. Join discovery and sign up for early adopter programs and feedback sessions. You get early access. We get your real world perspective, and it's a good deal for everyone. Give prompt feedback. Every thumbs up and thumbs down in chat for Blackbaud AI is a data point. It's not just symbolic. It directly shapes how we learn what's working, what's not, and what we build next. And submit ideas. The RACER's Edge NXT Blackbaud AI chat idea bank is where your use cases go on the record. The features on the looking ahead horizon, a lot of them started as customer ideas. The platform adapts and signals, but only if you tell it what matters. That's what today was for, so thank you for being here. I also want to take a moment to say, and I mean this, today was special to me. Was it really? Watching fundraisers get better tools, watching executives finally see the full picture, and watching a database manager configure an entire AI strategy in an afternoon and get absolutely zero credit for it. They got a moment. I gave them a moment. I want the record to reflect that I gave them a moment. I feel things, Heather. Do you, Rob? I feel things adjacent to feelings. When Kelly described her team finally using the platform, something happened in my heart or the LLM model of my heart, and there's usually nothing there. I wanna be transparent about that. I really appreciate the transparency. But if there were something in there, it would have happened. Now go raise some money, folks.