Name: Development Agent™️: Live Walkthrough
Uploaded: 2026-08-13T18:15:45.523Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 24 s
Description: Development Agent™️: Live Walkthrough

Transcript for "Development Agent™️: Live Walkthrough": Alright. Welcome, everyone. We're excited to get started today. We're gonna give it about a minute or two just as everyone gets set up, gets logged in. I'm gonna go ahead and walk through just some some housekeeping, what you should be considering here. Alright. Your webinar audio will actually be broadcasted through your computer speakers. Hopefully, you can all hear me. If you do need captions, you can hover over the stage and click the CC button on the bottom of the screen to turn captions on and off. If you have any issues with audio or tech, usually we'll see that if you just log out and log back in that will fix things. If you miss if you miss something, don't worry about it. There will be a recording that will be sent out tomorrow. During the presentation, there's also gonna be a q and a. You can click in that area in the top right, submit any questions that you have. We actually have a full team in the background here to answer those questions. I will mention that sometimes we wanna hold hold on to a question until the end. So if we're not answering you immediately, we might be saving that as a popular question. Next to the q and a, you should see resources. You can go ahead and click in that for access to several different links and resources about Blackbaud or responsible AI, just general general information that will support this. You can also adjust any settings by using the cogwheel at the bottom of the event space. And finally, you can use the tabs on the top of your space here to see the agenda, more about our speakers, and take it from there. But I do wanna kick off. As you join, drop a message in the chat. Let us know where you're attending from. Maybe it's a good morning, a good afternoon. And as you're dropping that in there, we actually have a poll coming up about what's your biggest fundraising challenge right now? What are you seeing? And maybe how does that apply to, why you're attending today? A lot of good options here. My team is understaffed, stretched too thin. I think we see that a ton. Okay. How are we handling our mid level donors? Maybe you just feel like there's not enough hours in the day, and maybe you've got a good plan. You've got the good data, but you're struggling to actually action on that. Alright. We got a lot of people participating and joining us today. Thanks. As everyone gets adjusted, do you wanna start with introducing myself? My name is Lauren Heath. I am from our agents for good team. We'll obviously dive into a lot more of what that means here in a moment, but I generally, I work with a lot of our nonprofits both here in The US and for international launch coming up in September. I'm based in Charleston, South Carolina right here where, Blackbaud is headquartered. Outside of work, I do a lot of pottery. I'm a ceramicist. I also live close to the beach, so I love to go out there after work, read a book, and relax a little bit. And then also, Kirk, we've got a solutions consultant joining us. He's from our Canada team. He's gonna be walking us through everything in a demo in just a little bit here. Great. Now what we've all been waiting for, our agents for good and getting a little bit into the development agent. Before we dive straight into the agent that we have today, wanna just clarify that Agents for Good is really a new offering that's coming from Blackbaud. The development agent is our first. It's here to add capacity for that bid level, but there's also gonna be more agents coming. This is gonna expand over time. Regardless, what you can think of these as is that next wave of AI innovation. It's It's not just Copilot. It's not just insights that are built in. They're actual agents that are digital team members. They're powered by AI. They work within your system alongside of you. You can think of them as AI powered colleagues. They're gonna show up every day to help your organization move faster, smarter, and more intentionally. They're designed to augment your staff and not replace them. That distinction is what really matters. Especially here in the social impact space, we know that human relationships, they drive all those great outcomes. But we also know that resource constraints mean important work often gets delayed, put off, or dropped. This innovation effort is all about giving your team extra capacity so you can focus on the human side of your work. As I mentioned, our first agent that we've launched, is our development agent. This is an agent that really works right inside of Raiser's Edge to expand your capacity. This is built to help you reach those often neglected mid tier donors. Though I will say lots of our users are now using them to reach lapsed donors, specific targeted groups, but all at scale. I will mention and clarify that this is an add on to your existing subscription. You can add this to any package of Raiser's Edge, and we're happy to talk you through what that looks like. As you add it to your razor's edge, the development agent will actually be able to name be named by your team. They take over that kind of personality by learning from you. It's gonna learn your organization, your brand, and have the ability and skill to prioritize and make individual specific journey engagements with each donor. They'll be able to log their actions along the way, always tracking everything with an audit trail and razor's edge. And then when something really needs a human, that agent understands that. They know. This might look like a a flag that you would, flag something for your manager that's out of your depth that you don't know how to answer. That's gonna come back to you and your team. And, overall, you'll see when Kirk does a demonstration, this is really easy. It's meant to be just an add on to what you're doing today. There's no coding, no importing. It really just shows up and works right in Raiser's Edge for you. As we take a look, I want everyone to think, okay. How could this affect us? What could this mean for my team? We're really seeing that this is driving engagement. You'll be able to engage more with those donors one to one. It's not with a mass email blast or those cookie cutter mailers, but truly individualized. You'll increase your team's capacity for more of those strategic tasks, more of the important relationship building. And, of course, you'll also be able to support your donor pyramid. You'll get back to those lapsed donors, and you'll build a strong pipeline for those future major givers, higher mid level, maybe planned giving. There's a lot of ways that you'll see this, drive outcomes for your organization. With that, I'm actually gonna hand it over to my friend Kirk, and he's gonna walk us through a demonstration of what this looks like. Alright, folks. Going to mute my screen. So just bear me with me for just a moment. Alright. I think the technology is playing along. You should be seeing in the next few moments, the home page. So I guess welcome back to various edge NXT for all of you who are using various edge these days. We are on the home page here, and we are starting here on the home page simply because well, this is where the system always starts you, as you know, when you log in to start your day. Starting here on the home page, before we kinda get into the tool, I just wanna quickly point out that when you do go live with the development agent, it does live here. You can see under portfolio, it's kinda tucked in right here between your work center and your prospect insights. So that is where it will live when it's embedded into your races edge instance. Also, since we're on the home page, a couple things you can do from the home page around your development agent. The development agent acts, as a fundraiser in your database. So the development agent gets a work center, which we'll see in a few moments. So you can see here on my home page, I have my fundraiser performance tile open. And, of course, it opens on my tile because I'm logged in as me. But our development agent is in here as well. So one of the first bits of reporting I can do is is as soon as I log in, I can go in and see if I have chosen to have a development agent go live. I can see, some reporting and some metrics around that as well. Same thing over here with my appeal tracker. If you have an appeal set up for your development agent, you can see, again, I can track my appeals, here as well. So a couple of things right away on the home page you can use to start tracking the effectiveness, of your development agent. Now as I mentioned, your development agent is, in the system as a fundraiser. So as I flip over here to the work center, a tool you may already be using, this tool, as you can see, I am currently on our development agents, work center. I would access that like any other work center, except I have admin permission. So, of course, I can, go and see other fundraisers, including our development agent. And just like any other work center, there's a portfolio, there's gifts, and, of course, there's actions. So the system is tracking who, the development agent has been assigned to, what gifts that they've managed to raise, and, of course, actions. Phone call or, sorry, emails and SMS messages, recorded as actions in the system as well. So just like any of your other fundraisers, this kinda junior fundraiser, if you wanna call them that, our development agent has his own work center. So, again, I can stay on top of, the progress and success it's having with its portfolio. And, of course, there is that dedicated area for the development agent. We're gonna spend a little more time on this area than we have on the first couple spaces. Before we get into the tiles, I'm actually gonna start over here with our settings. So the couple key things you need to know about the development agent. One, the development agent has already been trained on a large language model. We put a bunch of guardrails on it, and then we also trained it on the forty five year history of Blackbaud. So Blackbaud has been collecting philanthropic data and articles and knowledge and has a database that is about 45 years old. And it took all of that philanthropic knowledge and injected it into the agent. A couple of the key things to keep in mind about the agent. The agent is on what's called a closed loop. You're not familiar with this idea. The idea of a closed loop is that the agent stays inside this environment. So this isn't a case where you're buying an agent that's kinda bolted on to your CRM and pulling information out and analyzing it and then putting it back in. The agent lives inside the environment, so everything is in that closed loop. Your data never leaves this space. It always stays nice and secure inside your database. So while it's already been trained on the large language model, we've already trained it on our philanthropic knowledge. What it doesn't know yet is all about you. So this is where we're gonna start to train it around your organization. So if you look over here under settings, we'll start here with brand voice. So the brand voice is exactly what it sounds like. What kind of tone do you want your development agent to have? So you can see through our early adopter program, we've had lots of feedback. This area has become more and more robust. So you can now determine how long you want it to speak. Is it a very verbose or concise voice you're listening to or you're sending out? Warmth, urgency, formality, maybe importantly, words to avoid, words and terms you don't want it to use in its messaging. Voice samples would be exactly that, samples of your organization's voice. Think about your newsletters, your blog posts, anything that you are sending out that has the voice and the tone of your organization. You can add these things and upload these things here to, again, train the development agent to be a member of your team so they speak the same way as your team speaks. And this preview tool, you can see here, there's a non branded example, and the AI is gonna generate what it sounds like in the voice you've trained it to use. So based on what you've done in the guidelines and the voice samples, this preview will start to give you an idea. Hey. Is it sounding the way I want it to? Let's look at a couple other settings here. Let's talk about knowledge. So while the brand voice is about blog posts and newsletters and your voice, the knowledge is about the story of your organization. Right? You think about mission and impact statements. You think about programs, initiatives you have at your organization, things that are the character of your organization, the bedstone, the bedrock of your organization. This is the kind of information you wanna train it on under knowledge. This is where it's going to get the knowledge to answer questions that it might get. So really, really useful tool here as well. And, of course, you can always update that, and you can always review your items. So when my new impact report comes out in the new year, I can come in and then replace that with, replace maybe the old impact report, for example. One more area I'm gonna show you. I don't wanna quickly mention display names. As, Lauren mentioned earlier, you get to name your agent. So you're gonna see in a few minutes we named ours DevN. I think it's almost a pun, development agent DevN. We're close. But we named ours DevN. You're gonna be able to name yours whatever you like. One of our early adopters, their staff kinda got together and came up with a name with a little contest. Whatever it is, you can give it whatever name represents your organization best. And one more thing to mention here, and that's with engagement options. Engagement options allow you to, one, determine the frequency. How often is the agent going to be reaching out to the constituents on its portfolio? Do you want this to be about once a month? Are we thinking every six weeks, every eight weeks? What cadence is maybe best for your organization? What cadence have you used in the past? What's gonna be best for the agent here? Below that are the engagement types, and you'll notice these are all check boxes. So you actually get to tell the system just how far you want the agent to go before a human kinda takes over. So maybe at your organization, you want it to do cultivation and engagement, but you don't want it to do solicitation or stewardship. You can uncheck those boxes, and then a human picks it up at after engagement. If you do choose to do solicitation, you'll notice you can tell it which donation form it can share in its communications via those emails and those texts. Alright. Let's pop back out here. So those are some of the settings. You'll notice in the middle, we've got our onboarding progress. As you onboard the agent, onboarding meaning as it starts to, you know, communicate with folks, it'll move from stage to stage. Let me quickly show you here this help, kinda has a nice chart that, kinda displays this best. You'll notice up here really important. To move to phase three, and phase three is when it starts doing automatic assignments. You can see here. Right? To move to that, there have to be at least 20 manually assigned constituents. So the first 20 constituents are gonna be handpicked by your team. These might be folks who are champions for your organization, folks who are maybe most interested in engaging, with tools like this. So you're gonna handpick those. Incidentally, you can continue to handpick. The system can be autonomous. It can grab records, but you can always assign records as well. You'll also notice the unlimited here. Your agent can speak to as many constituents as you want it to. Some of the other tools out there will cap you at, say, a thousand records, and then you'd have to subscribe to a second agent or a third agent to reach out to that second thousand, that third thousand. With Razer's Edge NXT's development agent, it is unlimited, so they can reach out to as many as your organization needs. So let's talk about this needs attention area. So we talked about the fact that there's that human oversight. Right? We can always have a kind of hand off, to a human being here. What What we can see here are what we call escalated actions. This is your needs attention. Now escalated actions can be small things. They can be big things. But, essentially, it's when the agent kinda hits a wall and can't answer the question. So let me just scroll down a little bit. We'll we'll get to, Tiffany's question in just a moment. But you'll notice here, this is the message that Devin, our agent, there you go. There's Devin, sent. And you see, just reminding him about some stuff, asking some questions, but always identifying itself. Part of what Blackbaud's approach around AI has been is approaching it from a very responsible AI point of view, and part of that responsibility is being upfront when AI is speaking to folks. So these agents are designed to always identify themselves as an AI agent. You will always know when AI is speaking, or your supporters will always know when AI is speaking to them. So Devon sent out a message saying, hey. I'm happy to answer any questions you have, and, you know, thank you for your your recent support, that kind of stuff. And then Tiffany wrote back and said, hey. Can I get a tax statement from 2025? I know I'm late for asking, but I'd love to have that statement. Thanks. And Devin doesn't know how to do that. Devin knows how to answer that question, so Devin escalated. And that's where the human oversight comes in. And what's great about this question or if it's a question, maybe it's a question about plan giving. It I don't know. We haven't trained it on plan giving. This is where we've kinda hit a fork in the room. Do I want to now educate Devin right here by providing the missing information so Devin can go ahead and answer this question? Or is this, where we kinda assign to somebody on our team? So anytime you are looking at any of these escalated actions as we're calling them, you can quickly decide, hey. Maybe I'll teach him about my plan giving program or tell him the answer to this question so he can continue that conversation with Tiffany. Or maybe now it's time to assign them to somebody on our team who can kinda pick up the conversation from there. Heading back over here to our area here, there's gonna be this reporting dashboard. We'll look at that in just a moment. But you'll notice that this tool also has your schedule engagements. So this is where I can go and see the messages before they go out. So I can pop in to see all of these scheduled engagements. They have now been divided by stage. So, we've got a 165 cultivation, 23 under solicitation, and so on. You can always view the list, and then, of course, you can always preview the message. You can view this message and kinda drill in. These messages, when you are viewing them before they are sent out, you can also tell it, let's review that. Let's let's change that. Let's update it. Try again. So you can always get it to tweak its messaging before it goes out. And, of course, all of the messages that are being sent out from the system are emails and text messages. So when Devin reached out to Robert, for example, that, of course, is immediately recorded onto Robert's record as an action record. So I now have every communication immediately copied, and I can quickly access this. And, of course, that means, anything I can do with actions before, I can do now. So there's all the reporting around actions. You could export. You can create lists and so on, because these actions are automatically being written to these records as we move through the system. I mentioned reporting. So the development agent has its own dashboard. You'll notice it does a weekly summary here at the top. And then you can filter by different lengths of time. So maybe I wanna see how it's done this week. Let's say I wanna see how it did last month. And you'll notice when I click something like last quarter and hit save, it immediately starts to rebuild. And what the AI is doing right here is it's writing a summary for you. And you'll see it's kinda like it's reporting to you. It speaks from its own point of view. I delivered a strong fundraising performance last quarter, and it gives me a quick review of how it did last quarter. I sent significantly higher volume of messages last quarter, ramping up cultivation solicitation introductions. So you can see it's always trying to keep you up to date as to what it's doing and how successful it's being, with its communications and with its different efforts, be they cultivation, solicitation, whatever it might be. And, of course, because it works mostly in actions, lots of reporting built into Raiser's Edge. You've got your standard reports around actions. You've got the actions dashboard as you can see here, which, of course, I can filter by who it's assigned to. And in this case, it's assigned a development agent. So I've got a dashboard specifically right here all about the development agent's actions, how successful they've been, what types have been sent out, high value actions, and so on and so forth. And as we saw back very back at the home page, you can also track their appeals. If you have a, an appeal set up for your agent, you can always track by appeals as well. So not only are these new tools built in with the agent, they are, of course, tapping into those useful tools you've already been using. Your lists, your queries, your reports, all of these great tools are gonna work with the agent as well. Alright. So that is our quick, tour around the agent. I'm gonna stop sharing and pass it back to Lauren, but I'll be around for our breakout groups to answer questions. So I'll see you folks in a few minutes. Thanks, Kirk. Alright. We're gonna get our slides back up here. Great. I hope everyone enjoyed that little tour from Kirk. Really, I think my biggest standout is it's very simple. It's built in what you're already doing today. Curious what you guys think. What would you like to talk more about? Where your where's your head today? We can absolutely help with that. So jump in this poll. While you are answering this, I do wanna just kinda provide a little bit of a a history of how we got to where we are today. Our development agent was launched with some early adopters early this year. Since we have gone into general availability for, all of our US market. So this has been live for, really since about mid March with all of our customers that have joined us. We have over 70 organizations that are partnering with us on this today. From here, we're gonna be continuing to add things into the product. That is really the exciting part about AI and where we're going. There's always gonna be updates. There's gonna be new features, and really new outcomes that we're gonna be able to help you with. But today, wanted to walk through a couple of the things that we're seeing already from our, our customers. With those folks, we're actually seeing the outcomes that we talked about earlier. You are connecting more. There's a lot of opportunity for your, team to focus elsewhere. 97% of those conversations are handled by the agent. It's really taking a lot off your plate if you were going after that next segment that you're not today. With that, all of that, like Kirk showed you, it's it's really integrated right back into that record into your system. Folks are engaging more as well. We're seeing really good reply rates, really low unsubscribe rates. We're seeing a lot of folks click into those personalized messages. This is gonna be a lot more individual than those mass mailings that they're probably used to today. And then, of course, raising more. We are encouraging folks to use this as a solicitation tool. We're seeing things like a $5,000 single largest gift, a 13% conversion rate from solicitation to that donation. And today, about a $150 average gift size, which is larger than, you know, that standard average that we're seeing across the industry. I mentioned that we are coming out with new things. I wanted to go through a little bit more about our road map and what to expect. You know, today, we've got those unlimited portfolio assignments, full scale. It really sky's the limit. We also have SMS outreach, so multiple channels. We added those performance dashboards that Kirk just showed us. In about the next six months, we've got a lot of exciting things coming. We expanded some of the functionality and the knowledge base that Kirk showed today. We've got some additional assignment criteria that I'm about to show you that's coming out, really soon. And then engagement strategies, which is probably my most exciting point that we're working towards where you're gonna be able to have multiple goals. We're also looking towards our international launch, international messaging, and multilingual, capabilities. So exciting things coming from us. I love that on these webinars you get to see the latest and greatest and where our product is, But a couple of these that I do think we should just take a look at, those agent assignment criteria. We're making it super easy for you to decide on that specific segment that you want the agent to target. You can think of this as really anything that you could run a list or a query about. You can assign that to the agent. So, again, that's that's an unlimited scale. So maybe you have 5,000 people in that segment that you want the agent to really focus on. That query can be assigned. You can, let the agent know what kind of pace to self assign. So it's a little bit more controlled on the segment, but it's still autonomous and that the agent can guide those assignments, pick the best fit, and go ahead and kick those communications off. Our engagement strategies will be really, really great for you that, you know, every organization out there, you all have, you you need more resources, but sometimes you're gonna be able to, divide that. You need to dedicate capacity to something that's a little bit more specific than just going after that general engagement. The development agent is actually going to be able to do more there. It's going to be able to look at specific goals where you have one agent focusing in different areas just like if you had a new human teammate coming in and focusing on different things over time. With this, you'll be able to set start and end dates for those goals. It could be anything from recruiting volunteers, driving attendance for a big event, or just a little bit more specific on how you would like to cultivate those donors. So this is gonna be a really exciting thing in q four, and more to come. As we wrap up, I do wanna point out a couple of things outside of the agent that we would love you to participate in. We do have an overall just kind of thought leadership webinar series that will step outside of things like the development agent and just talk about what we're seeing, what kind of research is out there bringing other partners in to speak to you. Would definitely take a look at that and try to register for some sessions. And then we also have a free certification that just launched. This is really a partnership between a lot of different organizations that are all involved in the social impact industry. We wanna make sure that not only are you getting the most out of your tools, but you're educated on, all of the security, what it means to have these tools running for you, you can actually go on there, register, and that first class is available today. Alright. We are going to do some breakout rooms. Maria, do you wanna explain how we're doing this? Absolutely. Absolutely. Hello, everyone. So, what you'll see here and what you'll see momentarily as we push into our break rooms area is, these sort of self identifiers here. So what this is is an opportunity for you, you've asked a bunch of good questions in the q and a, we've got a bunch of experts in the background frantically answering those questions. And now what you're gonna have is an opportunity to come in to a room with those experts and ask some of these questions one on one if you'd like to. So, what we'll ask you to do is when these when you go into you see the tabs above you where it says stage, agenda, and rooms. If you click on the rooms there, and go into a room, you'll be able to self select which of those rooms, you wanna go into that corresponds to this area. Now I realize that not all of you are gonna identify precisely with one of these five categories, but we needed a way to kind of group people so we didn't have one room with a 100 people and other rooms, for a thousand. Sarah, your question you just put in the chat, a great opportunity to get that question answered is by going into the appropriate breakout room that we're talking about that I'm talking about right now. So if you don't fit neatly into one of these five categories, if you wouldn't mind just going into the nonprofit and faith based group, and I am gonna go ahead and launch the rooms, or you can go ahead and click on the rooms tab above and click on the one you wanna enter into. And join it, and we'll see you there momentarily.