Oh $%&@ - RE Data compromised

Because I'm nosy and the question keeps coming up, and because it's a Friday afternoon, I sought out as many threads/discussions about this as possible here on the Blackbaud Community forums and on some of the professional forums I have access to.


I have counted a minimum of 78 organizations which have either come out and said they were affected or suggested as much through the question/reply context. Some replies to the threads were purely informative and did not suggest the org was affected, so I did not count them.


I found people asking about the breach in the following Community forums: Raiser's Edge; Altru; BBNC; Target Analytics; Church Management.


A lot of people I've spoken with are all irritated with how squirrelly Blackbaud is being about the number of affected clients and their unwillingness to provide lists of standard fields for the relevant databases. We understand that Blackbaud doesn't want to fully admit to the scope, because it's not a great story, and they'd rather not say "70% of our hosted clients have had their data stolen" because that will hurt the business. And folks are already shy to sign contracts with BB for various reasons - size (all that Big Gorilla salespitch tone), accessibility of the interfaces, and cost are the big ones I know of. But not being transparent - this reluctance to say anything, and the delay in even informing clients of the breach - is not doing anything to foster trust in BB or future relations with them.


There's a lot that I really like about Blackbaud and Raiser's Edge, and I've been using RE for nearly 10 years - I am excited about the updates to the interface and the potential in NXT. But this whole thing has really shaken my trust.


I'm hopeful that the management of the official response will turn around next week, especially after the BBC article. We're still working with our law team to determine our next steps, but I've already begun receiving email notices from orgs I've donated to who use Blackbaud services.