Adoption and Satisfaction for Blackbaud’s Flagship Cloud Innovation Continues to Climb

Nonprofits and education institutions correlate positive mission impact to Raiser’s Edge NXT’s advanced capabilities, including SKY Reporting

Charleston, S.C. (August 1, 2016) — Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB), the world’s leading cloud software company powering social good, today reported strong and continued momentum with Raiser’s Edge NXT^TM, its smart cloud fundraising and relationship management solution, within just 12 months of general availability. The company also announced SKY Reporting, its latest new cloud capability designed to bring the power of business intelligence to software in the social good space.

Raiser’s Edge NXT, Blackbaud’s flagship fundraising and relationship management solution, was the first innovation powered by Blackbaud SKY, the company’s highly-lauded cloud built exclusively for the social good community. Throughout the last 12 months, Raiser’s Edge NXT adoption and satisfaction has rapidly grown, while Blackbaud SKY was expanded to power many more solutions as part of the company’s leading cloud portfolio.

“We believe best evidence that our R&D investments, our customer-centered innovation model, and our commitment to quality are working comes when the market speaks and tells us so,” said Kevin McDearis, executive vice president of Blackbaud Research, Delivery and Operations. “It’s been exciting to see so many new customers entering into partnership with Blackbaud by choosing Raiser’s Edge NXT, but what’s even more exciting is the remarkable results they tell us they’ve achieved. And among long-time customers who took advantage of our no-conversion path from our previous on-premises solution to Raiser’s Edge NXT, we’ve seen early evidence of noteworthy performance gains, including 15 percent higher donor retention, retained gift amounts increasing at a 52 percent higher rate, and 47 percent higher total gift retention, on average.”

Organizations of all sizes are sharing how Raiser’s Edge NXT has helped them discover new opportunities to accelerate their missions. Examples:

• Notre Dame de Namur University (NDNU), which provides professional and liberal arts programs that integrate community engagement, social justice and global peace, cited an average gift size increase of 881 percent. “Raiser’s Edge NXT has been a lifesaver, it helps my team ensure that we find the appropriate prospects to send to our major gifts team,” said Dino Hernandez, vice president for Advancement at NDNU. “By using the wealth rating system in Raiser’s Edge NXT, we were able to successfully meet with donors and confidently move them from a lower to a higher ask amount. One donor even went from $5,000 to $50,000!”
• African Wildlife Foundation, which works to ensure the wildlife and wild lands of Africa will endure forever, saw improved fundraising performance. “Raiser’s Edge NXT is helping us achieve our mission by enabling us to bring in new prospects, engage ongoing donors, and easily see where we have gaps to fill and navigate through our portfolios to identify who can give more,” said Emily Gray, major gifts officer. “I have seen an increase in donations based on understanding the donor better – when they give, how they give, and how often they give. Raiser’s Edge NXT also gives us access to institutional knowledge and history, and helps me manage our giving chronologically and geographically.”
• Water Mission, a Christian nonprofit that builds safe water solutions that break through the global water crisis, identified a massive opportunity to further scale the work to 100,000 more people in need. “Within minutes of turning on Raiser’s Edge NXT the built-in analytics identified a large number of constituents with the potential to give $1000 or more—constituents who did not yet have a relationship manager assigned,” said Rogers Hook, vice president of volunteer and investor partnerships. “Cultivating those opportunities would mean we can provide 100,000 more people with safe water for the rest of their lives!”
• Bridge2Rwanda, which encourages foreign direct investment and creates opportunities for Rwandan students to study abroad, cites noteworthy productivity gains with Raiser’s Edge NXT. Anna Phillips, co-founder and director of Development said, “We have a small team and we are committed to keeping down administrative costs so being able to have a way where we can do this all in one system is key. Raiser’s Edge NXT allows me to increase efficiency and spend more face to face time with donors instead of on administrative tasks in order to keep up with all the info and the data. Spending as much time in front of the donors and increased efficiency allows us to be out there more and sharing our mission more, sharing the impact that our mission has on the lives of our students.”
• Fanshawe College, one of Ontario, Canada’s largest colleges that serves close to a half a million people, lauds the role of Raiser’s Edge NXT in creating momentum around its five-year plan. “When we were first introduced to Raiser’s Edge NXT we almost started to cry because it gave us everything we needed to develop our program according to the five-year plan we had already created,” said Jason Drury, manager of Advancement Services. “Having mobile access was also extremely important to us, when fundraisers are out on the road or in meetings, they need to be able to turn their phone around and show donors exactly where their money is going, Raiser’s Edge NXT is helping us engage on an entirely new level.”

New! SKY Reporting Brings Unprecedented Business Intelligence to Social Good Software

Since its release last year, more than 10,000 customers are already experiencing the power of Blackbaud SKY, the company’s modern, open cloud for the social good community. Thousands of rapid, innovative software updates have been made available to customers as part of Blackbaud’s commitment to building best practices into its solutions and keeping customers on the leading edge. Among the newest of many advanced capabilities powering Blackbaud’s cloud solutions is SKY Reporting.

“Blackbaud SKY’s rapid innovation framework has enabled us to make thousands of updates to our cloud solutions in the last year while introducing new, advanced capabilities like SKY Reporting,” said Mary Beth Westmoreland, chief technology officer at Blackbaud.  “We designed SKY Reporting with the intention to bring business intelligence capabilities—often found in private sector software—to solutions that support nonprofits and other organizations leading the social good movement. Through a series of compelling dashboards and metrics, SKY Reporting offers customers easy-to-consume insights that help them efficiently track and analyze their overall performance, as well as quickly discover gaps and opportunities.”

Blackbaud’s first generation of SKY Reporting, which promises to benefit both individual contributors and executives, was made available to all Raiser’s Edge NXT customers as part of a seamless update. The company collaborated with customers on use cases and researched tens of thousands of customer-created reports to deliver best-practices to the entire market and to dramatically speed up productivity related to reporting and analysis.

“SKY reporting has definitely saved me time, and because it is user friendly, I am able to do much of the reporting and analysis myself,” said Andrew Schroeder of Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. “I had previously relied on other staff to collect this kind of information. SKY Reporting has allowed me to better assess where our gifts are being designated and has enhanced my ability to engage donors before they reach the lapsed stage. I showed the software to our President and CFO and they were blown away by how quickly we could access our data and how clearly it was presented.”

In Q4, the first generation of SKY Reporting will be available as part of Financial Edge NXT (financial management), Luminate Online (marketing), and Blackbaud’s K-12 ON products. The second generation of SKY Reporting will be available to Raiser’s Edge NXT customers in 2017.

To learn more about Raiser’s Edge NXT, Blackbaud SKY, or Blackbaud’s entire cloud portfolio, visit www.Blackbaud.com.

About Blackbaud
Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB) is the world’s leading cloud software company powering social good. Serving the entire social good community—nonprofits, foundations, corporations, education institutions, and individual change agents—Blackbaud connects and empowers organizations to increase their impact through software, services, expertise, and data intelligence. The Blackbaud portfolio is tailored to the unique needs of vertical markets, with solutions for fundraising and relationship management, digital marketing, advocacy, accounting, payments, analytics, school management, grant management, corporate social responsibility, and volunteerism. Serving the industry for more than three decades, Blackbaud is headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina and has operations in the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit www.blackbaud.com.

Media Contact
Nicole McGougan
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Except for historical information, all of the statements, expectations, and assumptions contained in this news release are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding expected benefits of products and product features. Although Blackbaud attempts to be accurate in making these forward-looking statements, it is possible that future circumstances might differ from the assumptions on which such statements are based. In addition, other important factors that could cause results to differ materially include the following: general economic risks; uncertainty regarding increased business and renewals from existing customers; continued success in sales growth; management of integration of acquired companies and other risks associated with acquisitions; risks associated with successful implementation of multiple integrated software products; the ability to attract and retain key personnel; risks associated with management of growth; lengthy sales and implementation cycles, particularly in larger organization; technological changes that make our products and services less competitive; and the other risk factors set forth from time to time in the SEC filings for Blackbaud, copies of which are available free of charge at the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov or upon request from Blackbaud’s investor relations department. All Blackbaud product names appearing herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blackbaud, Inc.