Blackbaud Development Agent
Fundraising Just Got More Personal—At Scale
Increase your fundraising team’s capacity by up to 10x* and engage more donors at scale with personalized, brand-aligned outreach. That’s the power of responsible agentic AI.
Engage more donors
Engage donors you don’t have the time or resources to steward today with personalized, ongoing email and SMS outreach.
Grow fundraising revenue
Identify and cultivate mid-tier donors at scale and grow average annual gift size with AI-powered analytics to ask for the right amounts at the right times.
Increase team capacity
Free up your fundraising team to focus on high-value, human-to-human work while your agent handles consistent outreach and follow-ups.
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
Onboard your agent like a new teammate.
Set up your agent inside your CRM, where it works directly with your constituent data and learns your brand and fundraising goals.
Choose a personality and name, so outreach feels natural and donor‑appropriate.
Define how your agent will engage donors.
Select the types of engagement, like emails or texts, your agent will use. Set the right tone for their outreach based on your brand and audience.
Decide if your agent will identify the best mid-tier donors from your unassigned database or focus on a group you assign.
Activate your agent and make adjustments.
Launch your agent, starting outreach slowly while you fine‑tune tone, message length, and brand alignment.
Review and adjust. Then ramp up personalized engagement for assigned donors based on their complete relationship history.
Cultivate and track rich donor relationships.
Build consistent, personalized relationships at scale while every interaction is logged in real time.
Your donors stay engaged and your CRM data stays up to date.
Onboard your agent like a new teammate.
Set up your agent inside your CRM, where it works directly with your constituent data and learns your brand and fundraising goals.
Choose a personality and name, so outreach feels natural and donor‑appropriate.
Define how your agent will engage donors.
Select the types of engagement, like emails or texts, your agent will use. Set the right tone for their outreach based on your brand and audience.
Decide if your agent will identify the best mid-tier donors from your unassigned database or focus on a group you assign.
Activate your agent and make adjustments.
Launch your agent, starting outreach slowly while you fine‑tune tone, message length, and brand alignment.
Review and adjust. Then ramp up personalized engagement for assigned donors based on their complete relationship history.
Cultivate and track rich donor relationships.
Build consistent, personalized relationships at scale while every interaction is logged in real time.
Your donors stay engaged and your CRM data stays up to date.
Context-Aware Intelligence
Applies real‑time understanding of your goals, brand voice, and donor context, while documenting interactions automatically.
Built-In Human Oversight
Ensures human oversight through visibility and escalation, while autonomously managing day‑to‑day outreach.
Individualized Outreach at Scale
Generates personalized email and SMS conversations, adding context and making asks at the right moment.
Take the next step toward expanding your fundraising team capacity with agentic AI.
The Development Agent is available to Raiser’s Edge NXT customers in the U.S., with a broader release internationally and Blackbaud CRM customers anticipated later in 2026.
Yes, there will be! The Development Agent is the first of Blackbaud’s Agents for Good™. We are actively working toward additional agents to add capacity to functions across fundraising, financial management and education solutions.
Ultimately, no. The Development Agent will be available in whatever platform you use. At this time, only Raiser’s Edge NXT customers in the United States have access, but we are expanding availability to other geographies and products later this year.
An agent is an AI-powered technology that operates like an extension of your staff, following the same processes a coworker would use to accomplish a specific set of outcomes. Within prescribed guardrails and under human supervision, agents run tasks, use data to optimize those tasks, log the actions they take, and report on the success of their actions.
Learn more: What Is Agentic AI and Why It Matters for Social Impact
No, Agents for Good are specifically designed to expand capacity and fill in gaps where you don’t already have staff. Agents free up your staff so they can focus on the work only humans can do. Our customers have compared the Agent experience to having a detail-oriented junior fundraiser join their team to serve their mid-level giving segments.
Their virtual agent can scale the work of their most critical and expert staff members, filling in gaps that weren’t possible to fill before, or taking on repetitive or tedious work so that human staff members can plan ahead, or focus on the most artful and important parts of their jobs.
While Blackbaud’s Development Agent and Givzey’s Version2.ai are both described as agentic AI solutions for fundraising, they differ in three key aspects:
- Seamlessness: Blackbaud’s Development Agent is embedded in your Blackbaud system of record, delivering a seamless, real‑time experience with no data refreshes. It works where your fundraisers already work today. In contrast, Givzey’s Version2.ai operates as a third‑party add‑on without integration, requiring periodic data refreshes which can create delays and data security risks.
- Autonomy and Human Collaboration: Blackbaud’s Development Agent combines autonomous fundraising with built‑in human oversight, enabling teams to guide assignments and review communications. This supports trusted human‑AI collaboration. Givzey’s Version2.ai does not allow the ability to fine tune every aspect of the agent’s activity.
- Value: Blackbaud’s Development Agent supports true scale with no limits to the number of prospects your agent can engage, whereas Version2.ai from Givzey caps your prospect count at 1,000. This undermines the scalable nature of agentic AI and can drive up your costs significantly.
* Footnote: A Major Gift Officer typically manages ~75–150 prospects at a time. By comparison, the average organization using Raiser’s Edge NXT averages approximately 1,200 high‑potential mid‑level donors. The Development Agent can engage a group of this size concurrently, representing roughly a 10x increase in the number of prospects that can be actively engaged versus a traditionally managed portfolio.