Welcome to the Agents for Good Community!

Amelia Helm · May 4

Welcome to the Agents for Good™ Community 🌱

Fundraising has always been a deeply human endeavor. Relationships, timing, instinct, trust built over years. No technology changes that. What agentic AI and Blackbaud Agents for Good™ can do is expand your fundraising capacity, handle the demands that can be overwhelming, and help your team show up with more of what only humans can bring.

Agentic AI is very much an emerging technology, and how agents work as a part of a fundraising organization is new as well. We have so much to discuss and learn together in this space. This is where we figure it out together.

In this community, you'll find:

Peer learning from organizations navigating agent adoption in real time
Conversations about managing agents, building internal capacity, and bringing human expertise and AI support together well
Product updates, roadmap previews, and direct access to the Agents for Good team
A place to ask questions without pretending you already have the answers

Start here: Introduce yourself below and share just one thing you'd like your team to achieve if you had more fundraising capacity.

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A note of gratitude 💙

A big thank you to the US-based organizations who stepped up first. Our Development Agent Early Adopter Program participants took a chance on something new, gave us honest feedback, and helped shape what this product is today and is expanding into still. Thank you. We hope you'll continue to be loud voices in this community as more organizations join the journey. You'll be receiving a special AI Axolotl badge shortly for your participation too!

Rachel Kave · May 5

Hi all! We are very excited about the Blackbaud AI initiatives and look forward to learning. Right now a hurdle we have is helping our IT team to understand how it works and what it can do. Any insight would be great…we are a healthcare organization so privacy is at the top of their list. The Development Agent could do amazing things for us as we do not currently have a midlevel program but are hiring two staff to take that on!

Amelia Helm · May 7

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/313532#Comment_313532

You are certainly not alone. We have those conversations all the time —- that's where almost everyone is. Organizations are building their policies and requirements as fast as they can, while chasing there the tech is going. We have built into our agentic AI really robust and industry leading data privacy security technology and guardrails. There's more here about the standards we abide by with our Responsible AI approach (and many deeper dives beyond this of course). We'd love to support you in your discussions when it's helpful (and support your future mid-level program staff as well).

Kimberly Pierce · May 16

Hi everyone — excited to join the Blackbaud AI community!

I’m interested in how AI can improve nonprofit operations, fundraising strategy, donor engagement, and internal efficiency while still keeping the human side of mission-driven work front and center.

I’m especially curious about:

Practical AI use cases for nonprofit teams
Automation and workflow optimization
Responsible and ethical AI adoption
AI-assisted communications and donor engagement
Data insights that help organizations make better decisions

Eniko Horvath · May 17

Hi!

I have seen many demonstrations, but we do not have the budget to subscribe. I wish these new functions were universally available at least up to a point until we can truly evaluate them and can gain some data to support possible justification for subscription.

Julie Rempfer · May 18

Hello! Julie Rempfer from Holy Family University here. Nice to meet you all! I am looking forward to following the rollout and success of these Agents for Good. So far, our experience with the AI Chat option hasn't been amazing and we don't currently have the budget to add more to our tech stack. That said, I am very interested in this and would love to be able to do more with less. ;-)

Julie Rempfer · May 18

Rachel Cavalier · May 20

Hi All, I'm interested in knowing what's going on and how my colleagues can use this ethically and responsibly while also producing useful and correct results.!

Allie Bush · May 21

Hi everyone! I'm Allie, and I work in the Higher Ed industry. Excited to join this community and learn more about the ways that other institutions and individuals are leveraging AI in fundraising. This is a topic that interests me both personally and professionally.

Elizabeth Grover · May 21

Happy to be a part of the group. Fundraising has always been about relationships and trust, which is why I’m interested in how AI can expand our capacity to increase revenue without losing the human side of the work. I’m excited about its potential, but also mindful of the environmental impact of large-scale AI and the importance of using it responsibly.

Vincent Catapano · May 22

Happy to join this group and share and learn from everyone. We look forward to seeing how this new wave of expansion into AI can help us be more productive and effficient team members. Thank you all for your sharing and expertise

Jordyn Kieft · May 26

Hi everyone! My name is Jordyn! I am so excited to keep learning more about Agents For Good. If my team had more fundraising capacity, I would love for us to increase donor engagement, particularly with our smaller individual donors that often get overlooked!

Amelia Helm · May 26

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/314166#Comment_314166

Love this! Yes! I talk all the time about how I wish my alma mater used this. I'm not a major donor today but I've given consistently in the past but still just get the same old mailers, the same old mass emails for events that are really generic and giving days that aren't tailored. I wish I'd hear from them about things that specifically pertain to my giving history, area of education etc. via text.

Amelia Helm · May 26

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/313891#Comment_313891

We get it. Unfortunately especially with the text component, reaching out at scale is costly technologically. Especially to do AI responsibly. That said, we have a few customers who have said they've been able to bring on a Development Agent that's managed by an existing mid-level manager with a much expanded portfolio. It's a lot less than even one additional staff member but does up to 10x the engagement.

Hannah McKinney · June 2

Hi, my name is Hannah. Excited to learn/hear more about AI and the ways it can help in our fundraising efforts!

M. Hummel · June 5

Hello my name is Hummel. I work as a Database Manager at One Family Illinois. I am interested in seeing how AI might help us with workflows but nervous about using it to interact with our donors.

Lesley Lewis · June 18

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/314427#Comment_314427

This is me as well. I feel like it is still a bit unsavory to me. I don't want us to be left behind but I don't want it to be something that gives us the excuse to outsource relationship building and personal touchpoints.

Taylor Carpenter · June 22

Hello! I'm an annual giving manager/database person at a small nursing home foundation. Looking forward to learning about AI integration before utilizing it. We're a bit old fashioned and hesitant to jump in, but excited to learn what will make sense to use for our org!

Allison Reville · July 27

Hi, I'm Allison. Just trying to figure out how to learn more myself, what needs to be done with our ITS dept, and how to communicate to my department.

Suzie Capps · August 4

Hi! I'm a database manager and excited about the potential of AI as a database cleaning tool.

Shannon Anderson · August 17

Excited to learn more about how AI can help my team and myself. Have done the first training course and am anxious for the second one to be released.

Welcome to the Agents for Good Community!

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