What’s Next for Social Impact

Everything Blackbaud Announced at bbcon 2026 to Power the Future of Social Impact

Blackbaud is building the most connected, intelligent technology platform in social impact to help organizations spend less time navigating complexity and more time advancing their mission. At bbcon 2026, we unveiled what’s next for social impact.

Mainstage Moments

While Blackbaud leaders shared the vision and roadmap for product innovation, technology leaders, customers and sector experts also joined the mainstage to dive deeper into responsible AI adoption and organizational transformation, and Blackbaud celebrated the achievements of customers and partners throughout the event.

Priya Lakhani, founder and CEO of CENTURY Tech and a leading voice on AI, innovation, and ethics, spoke about the importance of responsible and intentional AI adoption. Stephanie Mehta, chief executive officer and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures, publisher of Inc. and Fast Company, moderated a panel featuring Lakhani alongside Carrie Cobb, chief data and AI officer at Blackbaud, Renee Ducre, chief information officer at UNCF, and Tim Cerato, assistant vice president of constituent relationship management at Boston University. Tony and Grammy Award-Winning Leslie Odom, Jr., concluded the conference with a conversation on creativity, resilience, leadership and purpose, followed by a heart-felt live performance.

Whether you joined us in person, tuned in virtually, or are catching up now, here’s a look at the biggest announcements from the bbcon 2026 mainstage. And with our free bbcon virtual pass, you can watch the mainstage sessions on demand.

Top Announcements from bbcon 2026

Across fundraising, finance, marketing, education, giving, and corporate impact, we introduced new capabilities designed to help organizations identify opportunities faster, make smarter decisions, and take action with greater confidence.

Platform for Good™

• Platform for Good is Blackbaud’s unified operating system that brings social impact workflows together into a single connected pipeline, all working from the same intelligence. It does not require any action from existing customers; it seamlessly unites Blackbaud’s entire ecosystem of products under the surface, powered by a shared architecture:
  • The Data Core: This layer brings together differentiated data assets including the Blackbaud Philanthropic Dataset, research and industry datasets from the Blackbaud Institute, and Blackbaud Giving Search, creating a unique, sector-specific foundation for intelligence.
  • The Intelligence Layer: This layer is powered by Blackbaud’s proprietary Social Impact Signal Graph, which connects signals across the social impact ecosystem to surface patterns, relationships, and context, transforming data into intelligence grounded in how the sector works.
  • The Action Layer: This is where Blackbaud’s AI moves from intelligence to execution through AI-powered assistants, agents, and workflows that help organizations take action, with appropriate human oversight and control.

Lantern™

• Lantern is the first domain-specific language model purpose-built to optimize fundraising intelligence. It’s built on more than four decades of experience in fundraising workflows, decisions, and results, so it understands the rhythms of fundraising and can illuminate opportunities that might otherwise go unseen. Lantern will begin powering select Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® and Agents for Good™ capabilities in 2027, with broader availability planned across Blackbaud’s Platform for Good.

Agents for Good™

• Development Agent: Blackbaud’s first agentic solution, which is generally available for Raiser’s Edge NXT® users, is also coming to Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM™ customers with an Early Adopter Program beginning early in 2027.

• Data Health Agent: Blackbaud’s second agent is a Data Health Agent that will continuously monitor, clean and maintain trusted data with expert oversight at a fraction of the time and cost of manual maintenance, so teams can adopt AI and automation with confidence. US based Raiser’s Edge NXT customers can join the Early Adopter Program for this agent now, running through end of 2026.

• Accounts Payable Agent: The first autonomous AI agent within Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® will support the accounts payable workflow, reviewing invoice details, surfacing exceptions, and preparing cash-aware payment runs for approval—while keeping finance teams in control of every decision. It takes on the repetitive coordination work between invoice intake and payment, so staff can spend less time on manual steps and more time on judgment, oversight and mission.
• Admissions Agent: The Admissions Agent brings prescriptive, purpose-built AI to admissions—nurturing families who go quiet mid-application so no momentum is lost, and giving lean teams the leverage to deliver a high-touch experience at scale.

Donor Management and Fundraising

• Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®: Blackbaud announced the next chapter of the industry’s leading fundraising and donor management software, marking the culmination of a multi-year effort to rebuild it from the ground up as a cloud-native, AI-powered platform. Built around the way modern fundraising teams operate, Raiser’s Edge NXT combines connected data, embedded intelligence, automation, and extensibility in a single experience that helps organizations identify opportunities faster, deepen donor relationships, and operate more efficiently. The new and improved platform provides a flexible foundation for the future of fundraising that delivers continuous innovation without disruptive upgrades or data migrations.
• Additional enhancements for Raiser’s Edge NXT include:
  • Purpose-built AI embedded directly within fundraising workflows, helping organizations identify high-potential prospects, continuously evaluate donor capacity and affinity, draft outreach, and surface signals that indicate where attention is needed.
  • A new Strategy Assistant to extend that intelligence with fundraising benchmarks, performance insights, and AI-powered recommendations delivered directly in the flow of work, helping organizations interpret those signals and move more quickly from insight to action. Combined with more than $1 trillion in giving history tracked by Blackbaud customers through Raiser’s Edge NXT, this intelligence helps organizations turn data into action and advance their missions more effectively.
  • New online giving capabilities such as membership forms, constituent sign-up forms, AmazonPay, multi-level event registration forms, and fundraising pages are all available now or coming soon. Optimized Forms are helping organizations raise 15% more on average.
  • Dark mode coming soon, allowing a high contrast visual experience.
  • A re-imagined constituent record that includes performance enhancements and a tabbed view.
• Blackbaud Altru®: Blackbaud announced renewed investment and energy in its turn-key solution for museums, zoos, aquariums, gardens and cultural experiences. Customers will see a reimagined user experience for priority workflows as well as embedded AI to help teams see what’s changing, where to grow and what to do next.
• Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM™: Blackbaud announced new innovations and future investments designed to help large and complex advancement organizations modernize fundraising operations, deepen donor relationships, and improve fundraising performance. Blackbaud AI Chat will be coming to Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM later this year, embedding a conversational experience, along with future investments in AI-powered prospect management and revenue operations modernization. Blackbaud also shared its vision for agent-powered experiences coming to Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM beginning in 2027 as part of its broader Agents for Good strategy, helping automate tasks, improve data quality, surface insights, and support fundraisers in their day-to-day work.

Donor Engagement, Peer-to-Peer Fundraising and Payments

• Blackbaud Marketing™: Blackbaud announced an Early Access Program for its new Blackbaud Marketing solution, designed specifically for nonprofit marketers and fundraisers. Built directly into Raiser’s Edge NXT and connected to constituent data, Blackbaud Marketing supports campaign planning, performance optimization, benchmarking, and more.

• New Blackbaud TeamRaiser® Experience: With reimagined participant and event manager experiences, faster registration, and AI-powered dashboards and coaching tools, Blackbaud announced the largest TeamRaiser innovation in its history, available to all TeamRaiser customers by the end of 2026 at no additional cost.

• Next Generation Blackbaud Luminate Online®: Blackbaud announced the EAP for the ground-up redesign of Luminate Online’s admin and donor experiences. Participants can expect improved usability, AI-assisted design, modernized UX, and Platform for Good powered workflows.

• Blackbaud Integrated Payments: The Blackbaud payments ecosystem has expanded to over 60 integrated partner solutions for activities like peer-to-peer fundraising, giving days, auctions, and tuition. The Blackbaud Verified Network connects social impact organizations with corporate giving initiatives and includes over a thousand funders. Coupled with Expedited Giving, these offerings are designed to reduce time and friction between a gift and its intended impact.

Financial Management

• Payment Assistant™ Powered by BILL: Blackbaud announced a new partnership with BILL that brings BILL’s business payments network and payment-processing capabilities directly into Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® Payment Assistant. Finance teams gain expanded vendor payment options, simpler vendor enrollment, and faster payment delivery—all inside the connected, automated accounts payable workflow they already use, from invoice and approval through payment and reconciliation.

• Deposit Connect™: Deposit Connect automatically brings gift, fee, and disbursement data together across Raiser’s Edge NXT, Blackbaud Integrated Payments, and Financial Edge NXT, automating deposit creation and reconciliation to the general ledger. It replaces hours of manual, spreadsheet-driven reconciliation across three systems with a single connected workflow, so cash is recorded faster, more accurately, and audit-ready.
• Agentic Finance Ecosystem: In addition to the Accounts Payable Agent, Blackbaud is exploring other financial agents including: a Reconciliation Agent that clears your bank feed every night, a Close Agent that runs your period-end checklist, and a CFO Ready Agent that gives you answers at your fingertips.

Education

• Higher Education Connected Campus Solution: Higher Education has long operated with disconnected student, funding, and institutional data. Blackbaud unveiled the Higher Education Connected Campus solution, a new model made possible through our partnership with Student First, that brings the student lifecycle together with advancement, finance, awarding, and payments. This gives institutions a powerful new way to see the whole institution, act sooner, and connect every dollar to the student outcomes it makes possible.

Want a closer look at these innovations? Join us November 17-19 for our upcoming Blackbaud Product Update Briefings to hear directly from product experts and learn how the latest updates shared at bbcon are coming to life.