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Can Blackbaud's AI Innovation Drive Growth Amid Rising Competition?
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Key Takeaways
Blackbaud is embedding AI into fundraising, financial management and CSR platforms.
BLKB raised 2025 revenue outlook to $1.120-$1.130B, with organic growth near 5%.
Margin expansion and innovation remain key focuses as competition pressures pricing.
Blackbaud, Inc. (BLKB - Free Report) is leaning heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) and innovation to fuel its next phase of growth. The company has been steadily expanding its product portfolio, rolling out frequent updates and AI-driven capabilities to empower nonprofits, educational institutions and corporate social responsibility (CSR) professionals. From AI-enabled fundraising tools to predictive analytics and cognitive technology, Blackbaud is embedding advanced intelligence across its solutions to help clients optimize donor stewardship, corporate impact and fundraising outcomes. It unveiled advancements in AI-driven fundraising and financial management for social impact organizations, at bbcon 2024. The company launched six innovation-focused initiatives to foster stronger links between solutions and teams and provide contextual intelligence.
In second-quarter 2025, the company empowered developers with advanced AI skills. It unveiled its vision for Agentic AI, aimed at helping customers drive greater efficiency and build stronger connections in areas like donor cultivation, stewardship and sustainer management at its annual developer conference. In its May Product Update Briefings, Blackbaud highlighted its Intelligence for Good strategy, demonstrating how responsible, high-impact AI is being seamlessly embedded into its products.
In a strategic move, Blackbaud partnered with Constant Contact to launch a new integration that allows social impact organizations to engage supporters more effectively across email, SMS, social media and other digital channels, all directly within Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT. Also, Blackbaud is developing a comprehensive Agentic offering, set to launch at its bbcon conference in October. That said, the company remains focused on identifying and pursuing margin expansion opportunities, while simultaneously investing in critical areas of the business such as innovation, AI and cybersecurity.
Recently, BLKB introduced major enhancements to Impact Edge, its AI-powered CSR reporting and storytelling platform. The updates bring advanced AI capabilities, deeper analytics and a centralized dashboard to help organizations measure and showcase the impact of employee giving, volunteering and grantmaking.
Earlier this year, the company announced an integration with True Impact to incorporate predictive, outcome-based data, which is now live. As part of this, Impact Edge now includes a Charity Discovery Tool powered in part by Candid, providing CSR professionals with streamlined access to detailed nonprofit profiles, program data and impact metrics, all in a single interactive dashboard designed to simplify research and support more informed decision-making.
The company’s financial outlook for 2025 reflects the positive momentum. Blackbaud raised its revenue guidance to a range of $1.120–$1.130 billion, representing approximately 5% organic growth at the midpoint. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA margin is now projected between 35.4% and 36.2%, higher than earlier expectations, while non-GAAP EPS is forecasted to be between $4.30 and $4.50.
However, Blackbaud faces stiff competition from companies that provide software and related services in the nonprofit sector. In the general business, the company faces competition from Salesforce, Inc. (CRM - Free Report) , Oracle (ORCL - Free Report) and Pegasystems Inc. (PEGA - Free Report) . Intensifying competition negatively impacts pricing power, which keeps margins under pressure. To remain competitive, the company must increase spending on research & development, which may further negatively impact operating margin.
Taking a Look at AI Initiatives of Competitors
Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM company in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enterprise application market. Salesforce is continuously expanding its generative AI offerings. The company forayed into the generative AI space with the launch of Einstein GPT in March 2023. In June 2023, it further elevated the set of its generative AI tools with the launch of the AI Cloud service. With this, the company claims to offer one-stop AI-powered solutions for enterprises looking to enhance productivity. It also raised its venture capital fund for generative AI to $500 million from $250 million announced in March 2023.
Oracle's database business experienced remarkable growth in fiscal 2025, with cloud database services generating $2.6 billion in annualized revenue and consumption growing significantly. The company's Oracle 23 AI database represents a transformative AI data platform, uniquely positioned to make enterprise data immediately available to popular large language models while maintaining complete data privacy. This AI-centric approach addresses the critical enterprise need to leverage AI with proprietary data.
Pegasystems is an enterprise software provider that helps global organizations transform their businesses through AI-powered decision-making and a workflow automation platform. PEGA is benefiting from strong revenues driven by robust demand for its AI-powered and cloud-based solutions. In July 2025, Pegasystems announced a five-year collaboration with AWS to integrate generative AI services, including Amazon Bedrock and AWS Transform, with Pega Blueprint to accelerate legacy modernization and enterprise workflow automation.
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Can Blackbaud's AI Innovation Drive Growth Amid Rising Competition?
Key Takeaways
Blackbaud, Inc. (BLKB - Free Report) is leaning heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) and innovation to fuel its next phase of growth. The company has been steadily expanding its product portfolio, rolling out frequent updates and AI-driven capabilities to empower nonprofits, educational institutions and corporate social responsibility (CSR) professionals. From AI-enabled fundraising tools to predictive analytics and cognitive technology, Blackbaud is embedding advanced intelligence across its solutions to help clients optimize donor stewardship, corporate impact and fundraising outcomes. It unveiled advancements in AI-driven fundraising and financial management for social impact organizations, at bbcon 2024. The company launched six innovation-focused initiatives to foster stronger links between solutions and teams and provide contextual intelligence.
In second-quarter 2025, the company empowered developers with advanced AI skills. It unveiled its vision for Agentic AI, aimed at helping customers drive greater efficiency and build stronger connections in areas like donor cultivation, stewardship and sustainer management at its annual developer conference. In its May Product Update Briefings, Blackbaud highlighted its Intelligence for Good strategy, demonstrating how responsible, high-impact AI is being seamlessly embedded into its products.
In a strategic move, Blackbaud partnered with Constant Contact to launch a new integration that allows social impact organizations to engage supporters more effectively across email, SMS, social media and other digital channels, all directly within Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT. Also, Blackbaud is developing a comprehensive Agentic offering, set to launch at its bbcon conference in October. That said, the company remains focused on identifying and pursuing margin expansion opportunities, while simultaneously investing in critical areas of the business such as innovation, AI and cybersecurity.
Recently, BLKB introduced major enhancements to Impact Edge, its AI-powered CSR reporting and storytelling platform. The updates bring advanced AI capabilities, deeper analytics and a centralized dashboard to help organizations measure and showcase the impact of employee giving, volunteering and grantmaking.
Earlier this year, the company announced an integration with True Impact to incorporate predictive, outcome-based data, which is now live. As part of this, Impact Edge now includes a Charity Discovery Tool powered in part by Candid, providing CSR professionals with streamlined access to detailed nonprofit profiles, program data and impact metrics, all in a single interactive dashboard designed to simplify research and support more informed decision-making.
The company’s financial outlook for 2025 reflects the positive momentum. Blackbaud raised its revenue guidance to a range of $1.120–$1.130 billion, representing approximately 5% organic growth at the midpoint. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA margin is now projected between 35.4% and 36.2%, higher than earlier expectations, while non-GAAP EPS is forecasted to be between $4.30 and $4.50.
However, Blackbaud faces stiff competition from companies that provide software and related services in the nonprofit sector. In the general business, the company faces competition from Salesforce, Inc. (CRM - Free Report) , Oracle (ORCL - Free Report) and Pegasystems Inc. (PEGA - Free Report) . Intensifying competition negatively impacts pricing power, which keeps margins under pressure. To remain competitive, the company must increase spending on research & development, which may further negatively impact operating margin.
Taking a Look at AI Initiatives of Competitors
Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM company in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enterprise application market. Salesforce is continuously expanding its generative AI offerings. The company forayed into the generative AI space with the launch of Einstein GPT in March 2023. In June 2023, it further elevated the set of its generative AI tools with the launch of the AI Cloud service. With this, the company claims to offer one-stop AI-powered solutions for enterprises looking to enhance productivity. It also raised its venture capital fund for generative AI to $500 million from $250 million announced in March 2023.
Oracle's database business experienced remarkable growth in fiscal 2025, with cloud database services generating $2.6 billion in annualized revenue and consumption growing significantly. The company's Oracle 23 AI database represents a transformative AI data platform, uniquely positioned to make enterprise data immediately available to popular large language models while maintaining complete data privacy. This AI-centric approach addresses the critical enterprise need to leverage AI with proprietary data.
Pegasystems is an enterprise software provider that helps global organizations transform their businesses through AI-powered decision-making and a workflow automation platform. PEGA is benefiting from strong revenues driven by robust demand for its AI-powered and cloud-based solutions. In July 2025, Pegasystems announced a five-year collaboration with AWS to integrate generative AI services, including Amazon Bedrock and AWS Transform, with Pega Blueprint to accelerate legacy modernization and enterprise workflow automation.