What Does the API Development in Blackbaud Grantmaking™ Mean for You?

Have you heard about the new SKY API capabilities in Blackbaud Grantmaking? If you joined us for the May Product Update Briefing then you heard us discuss these tools, and you may even have seen that early endpoints are already available here. What does this API development mean for you? Well, we’re here to help, and we want to hear what you think as well.

For starters, you may be wondering, "What’s an API?" API is an acronym for application programming interface.

What does it actually do?

APIs act as intermediaries between two or more applications, allowing them to communicate with one another. APIs can be used to extract and share data from specified endpoints, which are individual data fields, like Payment Date or Amount. APIs can be used to surface this information from one system in another. For example, if you look at the Blackbaud Marketplace, you’ll find an API tool by Blackbaud partner RedArc that creates a tile in Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge NXT® platform to highlight information from Blackbaud Grantmaking.

You might also be thinking, “Wait, doesn’t Blackbaud Grantmaking already have an API?” You’d be right, it does, and you can find information on those APIs here. However, these are older generation APIs, and the move to SKY APIs will make things easier to use and more robust, especially for connecting Blackbaud systems.

In the near future, the SKY API will include all the same endpoints as the legacy API, and the opportunities will continue to expand over time. This means that you’ll be able to pull and push additional data elements from Blackbaud Grantmaking.

As an important note, if you have a current API integration, the change to the new API doesn’t mean the legacy API integration will break. We’ll support both methods into the foreseeable future.

What does this mean for you? You now have the power to solve some of your integration wants and needs quickly and easily. As we continue to expand the SKY API framework for Blackbaud Grantmaking, you could:

• Integrate with Microsoft Power Platform

• Provide holistic reporting across multiple systems, Blackbaud or otherwise

• View data from your financial system withing Blackbaud Grantmaking and vice versa

• Connect to a shipping system to surface address data for label printing

These are just a few thoughts and ideas we’ve identified directly or heard from customers already. We’d love to hear more from you about what sort of tasks or projects you’d like to accomplish with this powerful tool. Your feedback is incredibly helpful because understanding your needs helps inform what endpoints are added to the new API functionality.

Please respond below and let us know if the above examples would be impactful for you, and more importantly, what other connections would be most helpful to you!