Development starts with identifying the right donors and knowing where to focus limited fundraiser time. AI can help turn connected data into intelligence and action, giving fundraisers greater capacity to identify, prioritize, and engage promising prospects.

From Data To Signals To Intelligence

Every score, recommendation, and agent action described in this paper is only as valuable as the data it is built on. Understanding how that data becomes actionable intelligence starts with three distinct layers:

• Data is what happened.

• Signals are what those observations may mean when connected.

• Intelligence is the useful insight or action produced from those signals.

It starts with data. Blackbaud combines an organization’s own data with highly relevant data from across the social impact sector, including:

• The Blackbaud Philanthropic Dataset, drawing on giving data from more than 7,500 nonprofits and over $66 billion in cumulative fundraising revenue, weighted against Giving USA benchmarks so it reflects the sector proportionally

• Research and industry datasets from the Blackbaud Institute

• Licensed data

• Blackbaud Giving Search, the largest searchable database of philanthropic behavior

• Product interaction data from daily use of the platform

But the value of data grows when it’s connected. Blackbaud connects billions of signals across the entire social impact ecosystem through our Social Impact Signal Graph™ to reveal patterns, relationships, and context that that individual datapoints alone cannot provide.

Connecting those signals also depends on knowing when different records belong to the same person or household. Blackbaud’s Persistent Key capability delivers individual- and household-level identifiers through the SKY API, drawing on a referential dataset so each organization’s own records can be matched and linked consistently across its systems, chapters, or campuses.

From there, connected signals can become actionable intelligence. By drawing on donor history, sector benchmarks, and relevant signals, AI can deliver insights grounded in the realities of a fundraiser’s work.

Intelligent Tags in Raiser’s Edge NXT® provide one example of how intelligence shows up in a fundraiser’s everyday workflow, turning raw records into interpreted cues that fundraisers and AI can draw on together.

This progression from data, to signals, to actionable intelligence is the foundation for the AI-powered capabilities explored throughout the rest of this paper.

Data Health Agent: Duplicate Detection And The Case For Clean Data

AI is only as good as the data it draws on—duplicate constituents, stale contact information, and unflagged life changes (a marriage, a move, a death) quietly erode prospect scores, outreach quality, and reporting accuracy.

Duplicate records are rarely the product of a single mistake. They accumulate from manual data entry errors, batch imports that narrowly miss existing matches, and constituents who give through multiple channels—an online form, a peer-to-peer page, an event registration—each of which can spin up a parallel record if the underlying systems cannot recognize the same person twice.

Standard duplicate-prevention logic compares new records against existing ones by name, address, and similar fields at the moment of entry, but name-and-address matching alone misses subtler duplicates, and it cannot match a record saved as an organization against the same entity saved as an individual, since these are treated as fundamentally different constituent types.

That’s why Blackbaud takes a more holistic approach to data quality, addressing it across three main areas:

• Prevention: Constituent matching at data entry compares name, address, and related fields to catch likely duplicates before they’re saved.

• Resolution: Identity resolution (Blackbaud’s Identity Thread, powered by LiveRamp) matches records across every data source to a master referential database, returning household- and individual-level keys that catch duplicates simple name-and-address matching misses.

• Enrichment: AddressFinder, EmailFinder, and PhoneFinder append and verify mailing addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers—including National Change of Address screening.

Together, these capabilities make data health a continuous process, one that autonomous agent support can help manage at scale.

The Data Health Agent runs autonomously inside the fundraising solution to identify duplicate constituent records, confirm contact information, and resolve constituent life changes, helping fundraisers spend less time maintaining records and more time acting on reliable information.

Prospect Insights: Automated Intelligence Inside Raiser’s Edge NXT

With a stronger data foundation in place, the next challenge is knowing where a fundraiser should focus their limited time.

Prospect Insights embeds predictive analytics and wealth-screening data directly into Raiser’s Edge NXT, so researchers and gift officers no longer need to export constituent data to a third-party platform to identify their most promising prospects.

The tool analyzes giving history to the organization, donations to comparable organizations, and wealth indicators to generate a prioritized, in-app view of the prospects most likely to make a significant gift. The Blackbaud data platform underneath Prospect Insights generates 30 billion predictions annually to generate these insights.

Prospect Insights also includes predictive modeling for planned-gift likelihood and deeper wealth and asset detail. Because the modeling runs natively on the customer’s own data—with no separate database subscription or manual import/export step—new constituents receive dynamic scores automatically, and recommendations continue to improve as more outcomes feed back into the model.

Once a promising prospect has been identified, the Cultivation Assistant helps fundraisers put that intelligence into action by guiding opportunity creation and next-best-action scheduling.

That intelligence also carries into the fundraiser’s everyday workflow. Blackbaud surfaces the same prioritization as Intelligent Tags, which can be used as list criteria or ready-made segmentation, letting a fundraiser build an outreach list without writing a query.

Development Agent: An Agentic Teammate For Mid-Tier Donors

Where Prospect Insights helps fundraisers decide where to focus, the Development Agent helps them act at scale.

The Development Agent works within Raiser’s Edge NXT and Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM™ to identify prospects, deliver individualized outreach at scale, and document those interactions in the system of record.

The agent is purpose-built for the donor segment organizations most often neglect—mid-tier and lapsed donors who are affluent enough to give more but not yet cultivated closely enough to warrant a major-gift officer’s limited time.

The Development Agent finds and activates these overlooked and unassigned donors—including lapsed supporters and alumni—with ongoing, personalized email and SMS outreach, and uses AI-powered analytics to time and size the ask. Every message and reply is captured in the Donor Management platform, and human staff retain built-in oversight of the agent’s activity.

Early results demonstrate the agent’s potential. Development Agent outreach achieves a reply rate roughly 76 times the industry average with a ten-point higher open rate, and gifts attributable to the agent run 39% larger on average than the industry benchmark.

Organizations compare the agent to adding the capacity of a detail-oriented junior fundraiser to their team without adding headcount, freeing existing staff to spend more time on the high-value, human-to-human conversations only they can have.

Between cultivating a donor and receiving a gift sits the work of reaching and engaging supporters at scale. AI can help digital teams bring more intelligence and personalization to that work, informed by the same connected fundraising data that supports the rest of the donor journey.

Agent-Assisted Digital Marketing

The sector doesn’t need more marketing software. It needs AI that understands giving behavior rather than buying behavior, works from the organization’s own data rather than rented audiences, and optimizes for what funds missions—completed gifts, retention, and lifetime value.

That is the purpose of Agent-Assisted Digital Marketing, a sector-specific agentic implementation that plans campaigns end to end—selecting audiences, creating on-brand content, and optimizing in real time across channels—while putting humans in control of campaign sends.

With Blackbaud Marketing, organizations can send personalized, multi-channel digital campaigns (e.g. Email, SMS, Social, Digital Ads) with analytics that predict returns per audience and message. All touchpoints with recipients are measured through an end-to-end digital engagement funnel and captured as additional data points that feed into the first party data of the core CRM.

What sets this approach to marketing apart is the fundraising context behind it.
Audience decisions draw on first-party giving history and engagement, resolved to clean identities by Persistent Key and kept current by the Data Health Agent—not decaying cookies or consumer proxies.

And because marketing shares a platform with Online Giving (including donation, event, membership and constituent sign-up forms) and the gift record, the attribution loop finally closes and campaigns optimize toward completed gifts and returning donors, not clicks.

Even a well-cultivated and engaged prospect can still be lost at the moment of giving. AI can help reduce friction at this critical point in the journey, creating more relevant giving experiences that help turn donor intent into completed gifts.

Optimized And AI-Assisted Donation Forms

Blackbaud’s Optimized Donation Forms are mobile-first and embed payment directly into the page rather than routing donors to a separate site, which matters given that a majority of donors across every generation now give online, with younger donors giving online at even higher rates.

AI plays a role in the experience beyond the form itself. Blackbaud has built AI-aided acknowledgment into the giving flow, so a donor’s thank-you response can be more tailored with less manual drafting by staff.

And automated pledge installment payments and social sharing, alongside a modernized checkout, maximize payment acceptance rates and feed the same downstream data model that Development and Disbursement rely on.

Intelligent Forms: AI-Driven Ask Amounts

The clearest example of AI acting directly on a donor in the moment of giving is the Intelligent Ask feature built into Blackbaud’s Standard Donation Forms across Raiser’s Edge NXT, Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM, and Blackbaud Altru®. Rather than presenting every donor with the same generic ask ladder, Intelligent Ask uses AI to present a personalized one-time gift amount for each online donor, automatically adjusting toward higher-than-average gift amounts based on analysis of that donor’s own data.

The goal is narrow and measurable: put the right ask amount in front of the right donor, so organizations lift their average gift size without a fundraiser manually segmenting a single campaign into dozens of ask tiers.

The results are substantial. Seed Savers Exchange saw a 10% increase in conversion rate and a 61% jump in average donation amount after adopting Optimized Donation Forms.

AI-Powered Engagement, Ask Ladders And Form Creation

Beyond the ask itself, Blackbaud is extending generative and predictive AI further into the giving experience.

Fundraisers can ask Blackbaud AI directly to create donation forms, tailor a form to a specific campaign, or generate a Raiser’s Edge NXT list of likely sustainer candidates for targeted outreach—transforming a multi-step build-and-export process into a conversational request.

Looking ahead, Online Giving will extend AI’s role further, into engagement recommendations, personalized ask ladders (suggesting the next gift amount based on a donor’s own giving pattern rather than a generic tier), and intelligent assistants surfaced to donors through a redesigned portal.

For nonprofits registered with the Blackbaud Verified Network (BVN),eligible corporate and employee donations can be received up to 90% faster than the industry’s typical 30-to-90-plus-day disbursement cycle, with some gifts settling in near real time—so a faster ask is followed by a faster deposit, not a slower one.

A completed gift is not the end of the journey. It still needs to be accurately recorded, reconciled, and put to work, creating another opportunity for AI and automation to reduce manual effort and help organizations move from gift to impact more efficiently.

Automated Gift Posting

Blackbaud’s connected payments architecture is designed to remove the manual work that once separated a fundraising database from the accounting system behind it.

Gifts, fees, and deposits captured through Blackbaud Integrated Payments™ and Raiser’s Edge NXT can be reconciled automatically inside Financial Edge NXT®, helping information move from fundraising to finance without the same manual re-entry.

That connection also helps preserve important gift information as it moves from the development record to the ledger, particularly for restricted funds where accurate designation matters. By reducing manual reconciliation and flagging potential mismatches for review, automation can help finance teams work more efficiently and with greater confidence.

Financial Edge NXT: AI-Powered Reconciliation And Anomaly Detection

On the finance side, AI in Financial Edge NXT can help reduce the manual work involved in routine financial processes and the monthly close.

AI Document Intelligence extracts key details from invoices and receipts and generates draft records automatically, removing hours of manual data entry while keeping every record subject to human review and approval.

An Import Mapping Assistant automatically matches incoming fields—from budgets, payables, or other imported data—to the correct Financial Edge NXT fields, reducing the friction and error rate of routine data imports.

AI can also help shift reconciliation from a point-in-time exercise toward more continuous oversight. Anomaly Detection and Reconciliation Assistants provide continuous oversight of transactions rather than a single check at period’s end. They review activity as it happens, flagging unusual patterns, potential errors, duplicate payments, and misclassifications so finance teams can catch issues in real time instead of after the books are closed.

Taken together, gift posting and Financial Edge NXT reconciliation close the loop for a donor and their transaction: a gift identified through Prospect Insights or cultivated by the Development Agent, completed through an AI-optimized Online Giving form, now lands in the general ledger with its fund coding validated, its anomalies flagged, and its reconciliation substantially automated—all inside the same connected platform.

Blackbaud’s Platform for Good is the connected operating system for fundraising, bringing data, intelligence, and action together across the fundraising lifecycle, so that each stage can build on what came before.

A prospect score is more useful when it’s built on trusted constituent data. Outreach becomes more relevant when it’s informed by a donor’s giving history and engagement. And a completed gift creates greater continuity when it can move from fundraising into financial stewardship with less manual intervention. Together, those connections create a more intelligent path from identifying an opportunity to putting a donor’s gift to work.

Platform for Good provides the foundation for this connected, intelligent approach to fundraising. But the value of that intelligence also depends on how easily fundraisers can access and act on it. That’s where Chat for Blackbaud AI comes in.

Embedded directly in fundraising solutions like Raiser’s Edge NXT, it allows fundraisers to interact with donor data using natural language, helping them surface constituent and gift information, identify prospects, understand giving patterns, and support outreach and cultivation without relying on traditional queries and reports.

And Chat is evolving beyond answering questions to more proactively supporting fundraising decisions, helping teams understand trends, identify next steps, and prepare for donor engagement. As Chat expands into experiences such as Online Giving, that same conversational approach can extend across more of the fundraising lifecycle.

Connected intelligence becomes even more valuable when organizations have flexibility in how and where they access it. Platform for Good is designed to extend Blackbaud’s fundraising intelligence beyond its own experiences through secure connections with other AI tools.

A Microsoft 365 Copilot-enabled agent for Raiser’s Edge NXT, for example, allows fundraisers to securely access real-time insights grounded in their Raiser’s Edge NXT data from Microsoft 365 applications including Copilot Chat, Outlook, Teams, Word, and Excel. This gives organizations another way to bring fundraising intelligence into the tools where work is already happening.

Blackbaud’s integration with Anthropic’s Claude extends that same principle of choice, allowing Raiser’s Edge NXT customers to securely access donor records, events, and gifts through Claude. Together, these integrations point toward a more open approach in which organizations can access Blackbaud’s fundraising intelligence through the experiences that best fit how they work.

Every AI capability described in this paper is built on Blackbaud’s commitment to Responsible AI, grounded in a people-first philosophy and supported by ongoing governance and oversight.

Blackbaud’s approach emphasizes mission-first innovation, transparency and explainability, fairness and accessibility, safety and privacy, human accountability, and responsible stewardship. Human judgment remains essential, with people able to guide, review, and override AI-supported decisions when appropriate.

Together, these principles provide a foundation for developing and deploying AI in ways that are useful, trustworthy, and responsibly governed, helping organizations adopt new capabilities with confidence.

The potential of AI in fundraising isn’t defined by any single capability. It comes from connecting trusted data, intelligence, and action across the fundraising lifecycle, so organizations can identify opportunities sooner, engage supporters more effectively, reduce friction in giving, and carry that connection through to financial stewardship.

But ultimately, the value of that connected intelligence is the capacity it creates. When AI can help with the work of finding opportunities, understanding supporters, personalizing engagement, and reducing manual effort, fundraisers can spend more time on the work that technology can’t replace—building the human relationships that inspire generosity and sustain an organization’s mission.

Fundraising has always been a relationship business. AI doesn’t change that. Applied responsibly and connected to the systems, data, and workflows fundraisers already rely on, it can help organizations deepen those relationships and expand what their teams are able to accomplish.

Note:
Blackbaud product capabilities, platform-scale figures, and performance results reflect available Blackbaud product information, platform telemetry, and customer-reported outcomes as of August 2026. Specific third-party comparisons and customer results are cited individually.