Scaling Impact with a New Kind of Fundraising Agent

Welcoming Blackbaud’s First Agent for Good™  

The first few times I discussed the potential of an AI agent to support fundraising with a nonprofit leader the reaction I got was skepticism. 

“Fundraising is so personal. I don’t see a way for AI to replace that,” they said. 

Fundraising is personal. And that’s exactly why there’s so much potential for AI to power transformative results, while freeing the humans at the center of it all to build authentic relationships. And now, as our first autonomous fundraising agent, the Development Agent, becomes generally available to Raiser’s Edge NXT customers (with availability in other products to follow), fundraising leaders are saying something different:   

• “The Development Agent experience continues to broaden my understanding of how our team operates. It challenges assumptions, motivates us, and inspires curiosity that ripples into other areas opening the door for connection, collaboration and visionary conversations.”  – Cortney Moore, Donor Relations Manager, Fort Collins Habitat for Humanity 

• “We’re using the Development Agent to accelerate donor connections and make those connections more impactful in a shorter period of time. This will help us accelerate fundraising across all giving levels.” – Brian Otis, Vice President for University Advancement, University of New Haven  

At Blackbaud, we don’t focus on solutions or features, we focus on customer outcomes. Just because a tool can do something, if it’s too complicated to use then it may not actually benefit the customer.  

We didn’t want that to happen with Blackbaud AI, because we truly believe that this is a seminal moment for the sector – if we can harness the full potential of AI in service of advancing missions, it could unlock the greatest advancement of purpose-driven missions in human history. Which is why we made our Intelligence for Good® commitment, promising that our AI will always be powerful, convenient, and responsible so that our customers can embrace AI with confidence:  

• Powerful, because it solves real-world customer pain points by leveraging the world’s most robust sector-specific data and domain expertise.  

• Convenient, because it is embedded directly in our products for a seamless user experience. 

• Responsible, because it is built within our Responsible AI framework, which ensures that every solution we deliver is governed by fairness, transparency, human oversight, privacy, and mission alignment. 

Today marks a significant step forward in harnessing the full potential of AI for social impact. The Development Agent – currently available in U.S. Raiser’s Edge NXT® with plans to next expand internationally and to Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM™ – helps development teams safely and responsibly grow revenue without growing headcount.  

The first-ever expert agent to be embedded in a dedicated social impact platform, the Development Agent can securely identify, cultivate and engage donors with individualized, timely, and brand-aligned outreach – all within your existing Blackbaud product. And, best of all, it will do all that on a scale your team could never achieve alone.   

Addressing a Chronic Challenge – and Timely Opportunity – in Fundraising  

There is a meaningful and often underleveraged opportunity among midlevel donors because fundraising teams can face a lack of capacity for one-on-one cultivation for these donors. Yet this is a high-potential group because these individuals are often affluent enough to give more, they just don’t necessarily have the personal affinity with the organization to inspire them to do so.  

The Development Agent changes this, offering the capacity to tap into this massive potential by autonomously stewarding midlevel donors at scale, providing tailored engagement through the right channel at the right time to grow personal connection to the mission. It won’t replace humans or take jobs but rather add capacity to fundraising teams to reach donors they aren’t stewarding today, and continue to provide human oversight throughout the donor journey. 

When you make a new human hire, you spend some time overseeing their work to build trust that they understand the values of your organization and can successfully operate within the environment. An agentic teammate is no different, and it’s exciting to see how quickly the Development Agent has built trust with our customers in the Early Access Program. Now, those customers can prioritize spending their time on the things that are going to really move the needle on mission advancement, and trust that the time-consuming (though still very important) foundational work is being taken care of in the background. 

Blackbaud’s AI Roadmap 

Blackbaud’s Agents for Good are just one element of a broader strategy to transform what is possible for social impact with AI. We plan to expand Agents for Good across core business needs for social impact teams; introduce more ways to expand optionality of access to Blackbaud intelligence; and continue our rapid expansion of Blackbaud AI capabilities integrated within our solutions, including Chat for Blackbaud AI.  

Blackbaud customers have never had so many options to leverage AI-driven technology to support their outcomes, and I am so excited to see them accelerate their world-changing missions in the AI era.