Join the bbdevdays team for a fun, fast-paced guide to getting the most out of your time at bbdevdays. Learn how the conference organized, how to plan your day, and where to find the sessions that will help you most. Get the inside scoop on all the event experiences. From sessions, to Braindates, to Innovation Inspirations, this session will help you build your network and make the most of your bbdevdays experience.

Get your bbdevdays groove going & dance like your webcam isn't on! Join us for a DJ set sure to get your energy flowing before our first keynote session.

Kick off bbdevdays with Blackbaud's solution updates, platform vision, and innovation announcements designed for the developer community.

Hear how we’re investing in extensibility, automation, and AI across the Blackbaud ecosystem—and what it means for builders, integrators, and technical leaders. We’ll share where we’re headed, what’s launching, and how developers can shape what comes next.

This session offers a practical orientation to the Microsoft Power Platform—Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI—through the lens of real‑world use with Blackbaud solutions. You’ll see concrete examples of how teams are using the Power Platform to automate repetitive tasks, build lightweight apps, and create dashboards that turn data into insight. After establishing what the Power Platform is (and when to use each tool), we’ll walk through the resources available to help you get started and keep learning. You’ll also hear firsthand from Marilyn Garvey of the Diocese of Knoxville, who will share how she navigated her own journey into the Power Platform—from early experiments to becoming a confident practitioner—and what she wishes she’d known along the way. This session is ideal for anyone curious about where to start, what’s possible, and how peers in the Blackbaud community are putting these tools to work today.

Hosted by Keegan Wade

I thought it might be interesting to share one or two neat listbuilder customizations, and am curious if others have their own tips to share

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Many organizations rely heavily on attributes (custom fields) in Raiser’s Edge NXT®, particularly within constituent and gift records. Over time, the number of attributes can grow quickly, making it difficult to extract only the fields that matter most for reporting.

While the SKY API provides access to attribute data, its structure—and how tools like the Power BI connector consume it—can make it inefficient to retrieve specific attributes without pulling in a large amount of unnecessary data.

In this session, you’ll learn a practical approach for isolating and retrieving only the attributes you care about, reducing complexity and improving performance when reporting in Power BI. We’ll focus on techniques that help minimize data overhead, keep reports clean and focused, and ensure refreshes remain fast and reliable as your attribute use continues to scale.

Hosted by Amanda Brown

The need to better manage our data to ensure accuracy, timely and useful donor information.

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Hosted by Lauren Henderson

Advocacy and community building for those working in K-12 schools

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Hosted by James Parsons

Some data in NXT can't be pulled through a query into Power BI (e.g. Time in Status), but we found a way to do it through Power Automate

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You don’t have to be a developer to create a donation form that donors enjoy using. In this collaborative, conversation‑driven session, non‑technical fundraisers will explore small but powerful changes that make Blackbaud Online Giving forms clearer, cleaner, and more donor‑friendly—without adding extra complexity. We’ll share practical tweaks that make a big difference across different audiences, campaigns, and use cases, focusing on how to work smarter, not harder. If building donation forms is part of your role—and you want to make them better for your donors, even if you’re not the “tech person”—this discussion is designed for you.

New to Blackbaud SKY UX or Angular? No problem. This workshop walks you through building your first SKY UX project from the ground up—with AI coding agents as your co-pilot.

You'll learn core SKY UX concepts, get comfortable with Angular fundamentals, and discover how to use AI tools to accelerate your workflow, write better code, and get unstuck faster. Leave with a working project and a repeatable development approach you can take back to your team.

Hosted by Jordan Yarr

people often talk about why they cannot let go of the old power automate designer. I took the plunge and feel like I can't go back. I'd like to talk pros and cons

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Hosted by Liz Dixon-Eversole

While overhauling gift officer portfolios, I discovered the connector could surface live capacity ratings and philanthropic signals on demand — and wanted to compare notes.

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Hosted by Sean Donnelly

Nonprofits have so many manual data challenges. It's the most widely cited pain point when you speak to development professionals. Yet there's so much overlap and therefore shared wisdom. Let's share!

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Most fundraising organizations manage funds across two systems that don't talk to each other—financial data lives in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®, donor data lives in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®, and compliance happens in spreadsheets.

This session demos a live API integration architecture connecting both Blackbaud systems through FundMiner, giving finance and fundraising teams a unified view of every fund: balances, restrictions, utilization status, and compliance flags—updated in real time, not nightly. We'll cover the integration pattern, the SKY API endpoints involved, and the compliance workflow it unlocks. Attendees leave with a replicable model for bridging the financial/fundraising data gap.

Are your Power Automate flows getting bogged down by nested loops just to total gift amounts or perform basic calculations? Have you found yourself exporting data to Excel just to do the math?

In this session, we’ll explore how using XML functions inside Power Automate can dramatically simplify flow design and significantly improve performance. You’ll learn how to replace complex looping logic with more efficient patterns that speed up processing for gift totals and similar scenarios—without sending data outside your flow.

Take a short break from code and step into Congo Falls, home to the San Antonio Zoo’s western lowland gorillas. In this 15 minute innovation inspiration session, the Zoo team will share a brief look at their mission and conservation work, followed by a virtual visit to the gorilla exhibit. It’s a chance to explore how habitat design, animal care, and conservation storytelling come together—all from your seat.

“Agents” are often described as autonomous digital coworkers that think, plan, and act on their own. But in practice, most agents are something far more nuanced—and far more intentional.

This session demystifies what agents actually are and how Blackbaud thinks about agentic systems from a technical and product perspective. We’ll explore how agent-like experiences can be powered by deterministic workflows, LLM-driven reasoning, or hybrids of the two—and why that distinction matters for trust, safety, and outcomes.

This session is designed for developers, architects, and technically curious practitioners who want a clearer mental model for agents—one grounded in real systems, not hype.

Learn how to embed AI directly into Blackbaud CRM™ using native tools and lightweight web technologies.

This session walks through an implementation that allows users to summarize individual interactions, generate aggregate interaction insights with sentiment analysis, and create AI-driven constituent profile summaries—all within Blackbaud CRM™ data forms and UI models. Powered by Azure API Foundry and implemented with HTML and JavaScript, this approach avoids external apps while delivering modern AI functionality directly to end users.

Reusables are one of the simplest ways to work smarter in Blackbaud Luminate Online®—especially when deadlines are tight. This beginner-friendly session introduces the core concepts behind reusables, demonstrates real-world examples for building emails and donation forms, and shares practical tips for staying organized and versioning.

We’ll spend a few minutes talking theory before going over use cases for email and donation forms, and wrap up with some best practices on version control and organization. You’ll leave with simple best practices for organizing and versioning reusables so they stay helpful—not stressful.

Getting started with Power BI can feel overwhelming—especially when you’re working with Blackbaud data and aren’t sure what “connecting” even means. This session is designed for beginners who want a clear, simple starting point and a better understanding of what options are available.

We’ll break down the different ways people commonly get Blackbaud data into Power BI, using straightforward examples and plain language. You’ll learn why some tools and connectors exist, what problems they’re meant to solve, and how viewing data for reporting is different from working with data inside everyday Blackbaud workflows.

Along the way, we’ll share a few easy “first dashboard” ideas based on real fundraising and finance questions, so you can imagine what’s possible without needing to be a data expert. You’ll also leave knowing where to find helpful documentation, examples, and learning resources so you can confidently take your next step with Power BI.

In this session, you’ll see how a constituent insights report can be generated automatically by combining Microsoft Power Automate, SKY Add-ins, and Copilot features. Together, these tools create a seamless, end-to-end experience that pulls constituent data from Raiser's Edge NXT® and supplements it with relevant external news—without manual research or context switching.

With a single click from a constituent record, an automated flow:

• Gathers key constituent details from Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® • Identifies the top seven recent news articles associated with the constituent
• Compiles everything into a polished Word document
• Sends an email with the completed insights report attached

We will walk through how the solution works and explore the architecture behind it.

SKY Add‑ins provide a powerful—but often underused—way to extend the Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® user experience with custom, embedded content. In this demo‑driven session, you’ll see how Raiser's Edge NXT® can be enhanced by displaying full‑screen, contextual information directly within the application using standard SKY Add‑in techniques.

We’ll walk through a real‑world example of embedding an Event Calendar Power BI report inside the Raiser's Edge NXT® workspace, then explore how the same patterns can be applied to surface Adaptive Cards, custom HTML, and other external content.

The focus is on practical implementation—what’s possible, how it works, and repeatable approaches you can use to deliver richer, more interactive experiences for Raiser's Edge NXT® users.

You don't need to know a single line of code to be a Blackbaud Luminate Online® development expert anymore. With the introduction of endless AI tools that are very low cost and easy to use, you can now maximize the power of the Luminate Online® and TeamRaiser platforms without the limitations on development knowledge, time, and budget to build the campaigns, events, email sequences, and workflows you need to be as successful as possible.

Power Automate can be a powerful companion to Blackbaud CRM™—but knowing where it fits makes all the difference. In this session, we’ll explore practical ways Power Automate can be used to extend and automate common Blackbaud CRM™ scenarios. We’ll walk through how to work with current SKY API endpoints, including pulling query results into Power Automate, and discuss how SOAP endpoints can also be leveraged when needed. The focus will be on patterns, possibilities, and decision‑making—helping you understand when Power Automate is a good fit and how to use it effectively alongside Blackbaud CRM™.

This 101-level session introduces the GrantsConnect SKY API with a focus on clarity, concrete examples, and practical understanding. While general SKY API content exists, this session is tailored specifically to GrantsConnect, using product-relevant scenarios to make the capabilities easier to understand.

The session will cover:

• A high-level overview of the GrantsConnect SKY API and where it fits within the GrantsConnect ecosystem.
• Common use cases, such as integrating GrantsConnect data with internal systems, supporting reporting needs, or enabling downstream workflows.
• How teams typically decide whether to use configuration, reporting tools, or the SKY API for a given problem.
• What “getting started” realistically looks like, including expectations, prerequisites, and learning paths.

Key takeaways for attendees:

• A clear mental model of what the GrantsConnect SKY API can and cannot do today.
• Practical examples that help teams recognize when the API is the right tool.
• Confidence to engage in follow-up conversations with Blackbaud, partners, or internal teams about next steps.

Not all the endpoints in SKY API are in the connectors in Microsoft Power Automate. Austen and Stacy share some of our favorite available endpoints and how to use them in your automations.

The Arthritis Society of Canada is adopting a Databricks‑first architecture to modernize and unify its data ecosystem. This session walks through how we’re adopting the Microsoft Common Data Model in the Silver layer to improve interoperability across the organization, while migrating from Hive Metastore to Unity Catalog for stronger governance and taxonomy standardization.

We’ll show practical examples of how Databricks notebooks integrate data from multiple sources—including how data flows out of and back into Raiser’s Edge NXT®—and share lessons learned from designing a scalable, interoperable data foundation.

Innovation doesn’t always start at a desk. In this 15‑minute inspiration session, you’ll be introduced to hula: an expressive art form where movement tells stories, carries cultural knowledge, and inspires connection. We’ll explore how the principles behind hula, intentionality, rhythm, and meaningful storytelling, parallel the way developers design, build, and innovate. This session offers a moment to pause, reset, and reconnect with creativity through movement and shared experience.

A database assessment is only as valuable as what happens next. In this session, we'll use real client examples to show how thorough RE NXT reviews translate into prioritized, actionable roadmaps covering data integrity, classification cleanup, prospect management, and reporting strategy.

But we'll go a step further than the findings. We'll walk through the lightweight tools and techniques consultants and power users actually use to surface problems and validate data — including built-in RENXT functionality you may not be fully leveraging, and accessible tools like Power BI and Power Automate that don't require a developer background to use effectively.

You don't need to write code to think like a developer when it comes to reviewing your database. You'll walk away with a practical framework for turning findings into recommendations your team can actually execute, plus a handful of techniques you can apply to your own system right away.

Monthly giving programs don’t fail because of bad messaging. They fail because of weak infrastructure. In this session, you’ll learn how to build a modern monthly giving program in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® that is strategically designed, technically structured, and fully measurable. We’ll walk through a real-world implementation that covers: * Launching (or formalizing) a monthly giving program * Designing a clean data structure that supports automation * Building status logic for donor journey implementation * Automating donor journeys using Power Automate * Capturing and structuring recurring gift data for reporting in Power BI *Creating dashboards that surface risk, retention, and upgrade opportunity You’ll leave with practical frameworks—not theory—including naming conventions, custom field schemas, automation triggers, and reporting models you can replicate in your own environment.

Explore how to embed an AI-powered conversational interface directly inside Blackbaud CRM™ pages. We’ll walk through a real-world implementation of a ChatGPT-style experience built with React and the Blackbaud UI Model, where users can ask natural-language questions against CRM report data. Using Azure AI Foundry as the intelligence layer, the solution enables secure, contextual, and highly relevant AI responses driven by existing reports. Ideal for developers interested in extending CRM with practical, production-ready AI.

In this three-part workshop, you will discover how to use Power Automate to extend Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® by building a data integration and automation that "lives inside" your Blackbaud product for a seamless user experience.

By the end of the three classes, you'll have built an app that helps automate fundraiser requests for receiving credit on a gift. This includes handling approval steps and how to circumvent potential technical roadblocks that may arise when automating data health tasks. For this course, we will use a Raiser's Edge NXT developer environment, which will be provided to you.

We design the course so that power users of other Blackbaud systems—Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®, Blackbaud's education management products, Blackbaud Altru®, or Blackbaud CRM™—will learn transferrable skills.

Learn how we developed a Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® event registration integration using SKY API. Discover the best practices we employed along with some workarounds by diving deep into the Events API, Constituent API, Payments API, and Gift API.

We used these APIs to process payments as well as develop a matching interface that allows event registrars to match each attendee coming to an event with their constituent or non-constituent record in Raiser's Edge NXT®.

Automation is transforming nonprofit operations, reducing manual work, and boosting efficiency—but where do you start? In this session, we'll introduce automation concepts tailored to nonprofit professionals, helping you identify opportunities to optimize workflows.

We'll answer:

• What makes a good candidate for automation? Learn how to evaluate tasks, avoid common pitfalls, and choose the right tools.
• How to use automation tools? Dive into real-world use cases of Queue, Omatic Cloud, Excel Macros, and Power Automate.

This interactive session will provide practical insights, examples, and time for Q&A to help you integrate automation into your work with confidence. Join us to discover how automation can save time, reduce errors, and empower your organization to focus on what matters most—its mission.

SKY UX has been working to transform the design system to enable user modes like dark mode. As we continue to partner internally with Blackbaud product teams, external developers can also prepare for the eventual enabling of this feature.

At last year’s bbdevdays we shared a turning point for Red Arc. We had started building AI agents inside our own company to see if they could take on real operational work. They could. Very quickly those agents were handling entire pieces of workflow across our support desk and internal operations, reducing busywork and freeing our team to focus on higher-value work.

Last year we realised agents could change everything internally. This year we’re giving nonprofits the tools to do the same. In this session we’ll introduce Workflow Agents. AI-powered helpers that monitor activity, trigger actions, and complete repetitive work across fundraising operations.

We’ll walk through practical examples such as processing declined gifts, managing major gift follow-ups, and automating everyday supporter engagement tasks. Along the way we’ll show how agents combine automation, integrations, and AI to help teams spend less time on manual tasks and more time supporting their mission.

Getting Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® data into Power BI often feels harder than it should—requiring complex workarounds, third‑party connectors, or gateway configurations.

In this session, you’ll learn a simpler, more practical approach for bringing Raiser's Edge NXT® data into Power BI with fewer steps and no unofficial tools. Whether you’re new to Power BI or already building reports, this method helps reduce complexity and makes scheduled refreshes easier to manage. You’ll also see how using Query in Web View can unlock data that has traditionally been difficult—or even impossible—to access through standard reporting methods.

The focus is on clear, real‑world guidance you can apply immediately, helping you build more reliable, automated dashboards using the data you already have in Raiser’s Edge NXT®.

One of the most common challenges facing Blackbaud Luminate Online® users (especially those new to the platform) is knowing how to communicate with multiple donor segments without multiplying their workload. This hands-on session tackles that problem head on, using conditional logic and S-tags to build smarter, more dynamic email communications.

Attendees will leave with a working conditional email template and access to a purpose-built AI tool trained on Luminate Online® documentation - designed to help you keep building long after the session ends.

WHO THIS IS FOR
Luminate Online® users who are newer to the platform or who have been tossed into an admin role and are still finding their footing. No deep technical background required—just a willingness to roll up your sleeves.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• How S tags work and why they're the foundation of dynamic content in Luminate Online®
• How to write conditional logic that speaks to multiple donor groups in a single email
• How to use an AI assistant trained on Luminate documentation to build and troubleshoot conditionals faster
• How to structure reusable templates you can adapt across campaigns

AI-powered insights in Power BI are only as good as the data behind them. In this session, we’ll walk through how to prepare your data for AI—starting with the fundamentals and moving all the way to advanced, agent-driven experiences.

We’ll begin by covering the essential building blocks for AI-ready data, including best practices for data modeling, structuring, cleaning, and validation to ensure accuracy, trust, and reliability. You’ll learn practical guidelines that help set a strong foundation for using Copilot and AI capabilities effectively in Power BI. From there, we’ll explore how users can interact with their data using the immersive, full-screen Copilot experience in Power BI—making insights easier to discover, understand, and act on through natural language.

Finally, we’ll go beyond Copilot in Power BI to show how Fabric Data Agents and Copilot Studio can unlock more advanced scenarios. You’ll see how to extend AI-driven insights across datasets, automate analysis, and build custom conversational experiences tailored to your organization’s needs. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how to prepare their data for AI today—and how to evolve toward more powerful, agent-based analytics tomorrow.

You’ve built the flows, launched the forms, and are navigating the shift from Database View to Web View—all while your team and responsibilities continue to grow. But as operations scale, so does complexity: tracking cross‑department initiatives, maintaining visibility into automations and reporting, and ensuring everyone understands what’s running, why it exists, and who owns it. In this interactive panel, three experienced operations leaders share how they use project management systems to bring structure, visibility, and accountability to advancement operations. You’ll see real‑world approaches leveraging a range of solutions from Microsoft to Monday.com to keep stakeholders informed. Designed for advancement operations professionals, this session focuses on moving from reactive task management to intentional operational infrastructure—so your systems, not just your people, are built to scale.

Hosted by Dominique Pearyer

Currently use sky api but find that it is missing some endpoints that could be useful that is available in SOAP API. I am curious how other developers think about this..

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Hosted by Tina Wikner

Curious to learn/share useful tools.

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Hosted by John Sturmer

Use of AI has become cross functional. Business/Tech and Consulting need to be working more closely and understanding one anothers usage of the technology

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Hosted by Joe Killian

Altru

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Hosted by Marleen Lucas

Challenges to regularly attend trainings, finding difficulty in making time during full work days to be inspired to use technology and AI to do new things. Numerous options, that change frequently.

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This session dives into the best practices, tips, and habits that will elevate your Power BI reporting when working with Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® data. Whether you are new to Power BI or already building reports, this session will help you work smarter. Covering everything from how to structure and model your Raiser's Edge NXT® data effectively, to designing clean and intuitive dashboards that your team will actually use.

We will explore practical habits like establishing consistent naming conventions, building reusable templates, optimizing data models for performance, and using DAX measures strategically to unlock deeper insights from your fundraising data. We will also discuss common mistakes to avoid, common troubleshooting issues, data relationships, and building dashboards that others can quickly understand/continue the work on.

The goal is to help you build a sustainable, scalable approach to Raiser's Edge NXT® reporting in Power BI that saves time and builds trust in your data across your organization.

Feeling pain from your TeamRaiser Autorepsonders and Milestone messages that cannot be updated for a Participant once they have registered using the standard setup? Learn how to use Reusables to easily make updates to your messages.

Nonprofit due diligence is one of the most time-consuming workflows in grantmaking. Compliance teams manually check IRS databases, run OFAC sanctions screenings, analyze Form 990 financials, review board composition, and assess mission alignment, often spending minutes/hours/days (depending on the size of grant and grantmaking organization) per grantee before a single grant can be approved and disbursed.

In this session, we'll demo Givalgo's API platform that automates this entire workflow and show how it integrates with Blackbaud Grantmaking through SKY API. Our platform combines the most recent IRS data, multiple sanctions databases, and AI-powered analysis of nonprofit programs, financials, and mission alignment. All accessible through simple REST API calls.

Month‑end gift reporting shouldn’t depend on who has the most Excel experience (or who has the most patience). In this session, you’ll see how we use Raiser’s Edge NXT Query, Power Automate, Excel scripts, and Microsoft Teams notifications to generate a clean, formatted, and sorted month‑end gift list for finance and development stakeholders—automatically and consistently.

What used to take 20–30 minutes for an experienced team member (and an hour or more for newer staff) now runs in about five minutes, end‑to‑end. The goal is simple: reduce manual steps, speed up close, and deliver a report your team can trust.

Merchandise is more than swag—it’s one of the strongest signals of who your most devoted and engaged supporters really are. In this session, we’ll explore how merchandise engagement can reveal high‑value constituents and why this signal is especially powerful for nonprofits and schools.

Drawing on lessons from large‑scale merchandise programs and real‑world nonprofit use cases, we’ll show how integrating merchandise data with Raiser's Edge NXT® unlocks deeper insight into supporter behavior. You’ll see how our partnership with Blackbaud and a SKY API–powered integration can automatically surface highly engaged constituents—helping organizations better understand, recognize, and activate their most loyal supporters.

In this session, we’ll walk through a fully automated integration between Give Campus and Blackbaud CRM™, designed to minimize manual data entry, accelerate gift processing and documentation, and reduce data quality issues during high volume campaigns. This solution uses the low code tools of SKY API and Power Automate to automatically ingest, clean, and stage giving data, and create batches in Blackbaud CRM™.

Attendees will learn how to create a Power Automate flow to create a full integration lifecycle. From setting up the API and SKY API calls, generating PDF reports that can then be attached to revenue in Blackbaud CRM™ and using a velocity process solution to create batches through the SKYAPI calls to business processes. We’ll take a look at how to accommodate delayed deposit timelines from PayPal, Venmo, and similar processors, often 3-5 days after the gift occurs, and how a small additional Microsoft Fabric component ensures these transactions are still captured in your daily workflows.

Ready to spend less time copy-pasting data and more time doing the work that actually matters? This panel dives into how everyday Raiser’s Edge NXT® users are using Microsoft Power Automate to cut down on manual work, reduce errors, and reclaim their time—no developer skills required. Panelists will share why they jumped into automation, how they got started (hint: it was easier than expected), and the small “aha” moments that led to big efficiency wins. You’ll hear honest stories about what worked, what didn’t, and what they wish they’d known sooner.

The session will also demystify the Power Platform: why Power Automate is approachable for non-technical users, how guided templates and ready-to-use connectors make building flows less intimidating, and how many Blackbaud connectors are already included with existing subscriptions. This isn’t about building perfect systems—it’s about making meaningful improvements with the tools you already have. Whether you’re automation-curious or ready to level up beyond your first flow, you’ll walk away with practical ideas, realistic starting points, and the confidence to start experimenting.

Target Audience:

• You are deeply, personally tired of copying and pasting the same data into multiple systems.
• You’ve been told “we should automate that” but no one ever explains how.
• You assume automation requires a developer, a consultant, or a minor miracle (spoiler: it doesn’t).
• You use Raiser’s Edge NXT® and have a nagging feeling you’re not getting your money’s worth yet.
• You enjoy deleting unnecessary manual processes almost as much as you enjoy not recreating spreadsheets.

Social donation matching lets any individual, donor, or organization fund a match, directly and in real time, inside a nonprofit’s existing fundraising workflow. Unlike employer-based matching programs, it does not rely on donor employment, HR systems, or corporate benefit eligibility.

This interactive focus group will start with a 10-minute live demo showing how MatchNice integrates with Raiser’s Edge NXT® and Blackbaud Merchant Services to automate real-time social donation matching, without manual tracking or one-off campaign work.

The remainder of the session is an open, practitioner-led discussion where Blackbaud users will help shape:

• What’s working (and breaking) in real matching workflows today
• Where matching creates friction for fundraising teams
• Where matching could add the most value across the Blackbaud ecosystem (e.g., peer-to-peer, events, CSR)

This is not a sales session. It’s a working conversation for nonprofit leaders and admins who want to influence how donation matching evolves within Blackbaud's ecosystem.

Curious how generative AI tools like Claude can work with your Blackbaud data—securely and responsibly? This session offers a practical introduction to the Blackbaud for Claude connector, what it does today, and how to get it up and running. We’ll walk through what the connector enables (and what it doesn’t), the steps to install and authorize it in your environment, and how the connector respects existing permissions and security models.

This is a great session for admins, technical staff, and curious practitioners who want to understand the connector before experimenting on their own. You'll leave with:

• A clear understanding of what the Blackbaud for Claude connector does
• An overview of the installation and authorization flow • Guidance on common setup considerations and gotchas
• Ideas for safe, practical ways to start experimenting with Claude + Blackbaud data

As AI becomes embedded in nonprofit and social sector workflows, the question is no longer whether to adopt it, but how to do so responsibly.

In this session, Rhea Saxena, Technical & Product Lead at the Responsible AI Institute, will share a practical framework for organizations to assess, classify, and govern AI systems with confidence.

Drawing on real-world enterprise deployments and emerging agentic AI standards, attendees will leave with actionable tools to build trust, manage risk, and ensure their AI investments align with their mission and values.

Hosted by Bob Rickards

Interested in how to intergrate AI with Power Automate to deliver information that is impactful and useful.

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This technical session will explore the upcoming Import capabilities for Raiser’s Edge NXT®. Learn how these new features support importing constituent, contact information, and gift batch records using both CSV and JSON formats.

We’ll delve into duplicate detection, record updates, exception workflow, and demonstrate imports from SKY API for seamless integration with other systems.

Postman, Bruno, and company are excellent, but they aren't tailored to Blackbaud's SKY API. This session explores a free tool that is. See how you can quickly and easily find and select the APIs and endpoints you're looking for. Plus, you'll gain an understanding of SKY API response types, like advanced lists and responses with count and value properties. We'll explore how to handle pagination and special next_link scenarios as well.

This is your opportunity to engage with our Blackbaud CRM™ developers and gain insights into "how things work". Blackbaud CRM™ developers get your questions ready for our expert panel!

You don't need a senior developer on staff to unlock the full potential of your Blackbaud data! In his session, Matt will explore how curious nonprofit professionals can use a tool like Claude Code, Anthropic's AI-powered coding agent, to safely connect to the Blackbaud SKY API, extract meaningful data, and build polished output that helps board members and donors.

Matt will step through a complete real-world example from start to finish: defining the idea (answering board directed questions), writing a spec, implementing working code, and deploying it to a secure, live hosted environment.

We'll build it with conversational AI rather than traditional coding expertise. Beyond the build, we'll cover the critical guardrails that make this approach safe for production use: API key management, data access scoping, output validation, and establishing a repeatable Standard Operating Procedure your team can follow.

You'll leave this session with a clear, documented playbook for turning your Blackbaud data into actionable outputs. The era of agentic development is putting more tools into the hands of nonprofit leaders willing to explore their data. Matt will show you how to do it safely.

Copilot in Power BI has fundamentally changed how reports are created, explored, and explained—but the quality of the outcome depends heavily on the quality of the prompt. In this session, we’ll go beyond “ask a question and see what happens” and focus on how to intentionally prompt Copilot in Power BI to generate meaningful visuals, accurate summaries, and trustworthy insights.

Using the newest Copilot features for report creation, report page summaries, and natural‑language Q&A, we’ll show how prompting becomes a core skill for modern BI developers and analysts.

This session covers the key concepts of using Microsoft Power Automate.

• Learn how to set up and integrate the platform with Raiser’s Edge NXT® and other software.
• Discover the Blackbaud Marketplace and the other applications available to extend the functionality and capabilities of numerous software.
• Get familiar with using templates and how to import and create a flow.
• Explore the template showcase to see other user-created templates available for your own automated flows.

Learning Objectives: Navigate the Marketplace, Build a new Power Automate flow, Identify help resources

Advanced Preparation: Students wishing to build a flow during class must have the necessary Power Automate license.
Use this link for more information on license options: https://docs.blackbaud.com/microsoft-connectors-docs/microsoft-power-platform/getting-started

Fuel your brain's creativity as you learn about Morgan's Wonderland, the world's first theme park designed for individuals with special needs and built for everyone's enjoyment. In this 15‑minute innovation inspiration session, the team will share the park’s mission and the thinking behind designing experiences that are welcoming to guests of all abilities. You’ll get a visual walkthrough of the park and a look at how inclusive design can create meaningful impact for an entire community.

This session starts with the Raiser’s Edge Queue module as the foundation for a reliable, automated reporting pipeline. You’ll get a hands‑on walkthrough of building a daily data flow that begins with configuring and scheduling a Queue export, delivering files to Blackbaud’s SFTP, pulling that data on a recurring schedule, and powering dashboards that refresh automatically and surface insights directly through Microsoft Teams.

The focus is on creating a “set it and forget it” pipeline that organizations can depend on day after day.

Do you know how many flows are running in your environment right now? Which ones are turned off? Suspended? Power Automate doesn’t make it easy to organize or filter your full list of flows—but there’s a better way.

In this session, I'll show you a simple flow that uses the Power Automate Management connector to pull details about your flow collection—including status, trigger type, and descriptions—into SharePoint. The result is a centralized, customizable inventory that gives clearer visibility into your automation environment.

Stewardship is at the heart of nonprofit work, but manual processes can quickly become time‑consuming and hard to scale. In this case study, we walk through how a client transformed a stewardship workflow that once took over eight hours each month into an automated process that now runs weekly using the Power Platform.

This session breaks down the full workflow, the mix of tools required to make automation successful, and the challenges encountered along the way—along with the opportunities they unlocked. Attendees will see real examples of how related workflows like daily gift logs and email processes to support a more sustainable, repeatable approach to stewardship.

APIs. Extensibility. Integrations. These terms come up a lot—but what do they actually mean, and why do they matter now more than ever with the rise of AI? This 101‑level session breaks down the core concepts behind APIs and extensibility in plain language, then explores how those foundations enable modern AI‑powered experiences.

We’ll focus on the why and how behind extensible platforms—without diving into vendor‑ or product‑specific implementations. The session will be highly interactive, with Q&A centered on understanding these concepts at a conceptual level and how they fit into today’s evolving technology landscape.

No prior API experience required, and discussion will intentionally stay general rather than SKY API‑specific.

Most charity teams are stuck in the same painful data process loop: export CSVs, clean them, map fields, de-duplicate, then import into the CRM. It’s slow, error-prone and it undermines reporting and supporter journeys.

In this Skills Lab you’ll build (or learn to build) a working integration “bridge” into Raiser’s Edge NXT® using Bridgit’s plain-English approach to mapping, rules and transformations. No coding required: if you can explain your rules, you can build the bridge. Many source platforms are covered including JustGiving, Raisely, Funraisin, Fundraise Up, DotDigital, Stripe and more.

You’ll work through real scenarios, test with sample data and learn patterns you can reuse across your stack.

What you’ll leave with: Either a functioning bridge set up in Bridgit (lab attendees get 1 bridge for free) Or a clear, repeatable method to build your own bridge, with your mapping, rules and test cases documented so you can implement on your own.

The Luminate Gift Service Center is one of the most underused and underestimated features in the platform. Out of the box, it's limiting. But with PageBuilder and a solid understanding of S-tags, it becomes a powerful, fully customizable donor experience - one that can meaningfully improve retention and monthly giving programs.

In this advanced session, Yeeboo Digital walks through a real client build: a fully custom Service Center that replaces the default interface with a branded, donor-friendly experience driven entirely by S-tags and custom PageBuilder logic. Attendees will see the full architecture, understand the key decisions made along the way, and walk away with a working framework they can adapt for their own organization.

WHO THIS IS FOR
Experienced Luminate administrators and developers who are comfortable with S-tags and PageBuilder and want to push the platform further. This session assumes working knowledge of the platform.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why the out-of-the-box Service Center falls short for sophisticated donor programs - and what to do about it
• How to architect a fully custom Service Center experience using Page Builder and S tags
• Key conditional logic patterns for handling monthly donor management, payment updates, and personalized messaging
• How to use the legacy Chrome plugin (rebuilt and updated) for faster backend access during development

Building a production-ready SKY API integration used to take months. Our team at DonorAtlas did it in two weeks, and we'll show you exactly how. In this session, we'll teach you how to use AI agents to develop SKY API add-ins and other Blackbaud solutions at a pace that would have been unthinkable a year ago.

We'll dig into how we closed the agent loop with browser-use automation and Blackbaud-specific skills, enabling AI agents to not just write code but actually test and iterate against live Blackbaud environments end-to-end. You'll see the real architecture: how we structured prompts and tooling so an AI agent could navigate SKY API docs, generate integration code, validate it in a browser, and fix its own mistakes, all with minimal human intervention.

We'll cap it off with a live look at the complete DonorAtlas Raiser's Edge NXT® integration that was built this way and share practical takeaways so you can apply these same techniques to your own Blackbaud development projects.

Many institutions rely on Blackbaud Award Management™ and Raiser’s Edge NXT® as core platforms for scholarship and advancement management, but enabling fully digital, constituent‑driven workflows often requires extending these systems beyond their out‑of‑the‑box capabilities.

In this session, we’ll share how Tennessee State University used the Blackbaud SKY API and enterprise integration patterns to modernize scholarship creation, donor engagement, and advancement automation across systems. You’ll see a real‑world implementation that enables donors, scholarship sponsors, and partners to securely create and manage scholarships through a constituent‑facing digital workflow—authoring agreements, defining eligibility, linking funds and donor records, and submitting documentation without manual administrative intervention.

We’ll also cover how API‑driven integrations synchronized data between Ellucian Banner and Raiser’s Edge NXT® to improve segmentation, reporting, and fundraising workflows, and how migrating to Blackbaud’s native online giving and donor portal replaced manual batch processes with automated, near real‑time workflows.

Attendees will leave with practical insight into extending Blackbaud Award Management™ and Raiser’s Edge NXT® using the SKY API, integrating enterprise SIS data, and modernizing advancement operations through secure, scalable automation.

What if the moment a donor read their personalized impact report was also the moment they could give again—without leaving the page?

This session demos a technical integration connecting FundMiner's stewardship reporting engine to Blackbaud Integrated Payments via SKY API, enabling a "Give Now" donation experience embedded directly inside a personalized, fund-specific impact report. No redirect. No separate campaign page. The donor reads about the scholarship their gift funded, sees the student story, and clicks to renew—all within the same experience.

We'll walk through the full integration architecture: how FundMiner pulls live fund and gift data from Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® and Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® via SKY API, generates a personalized report, and surfaces a Blackbaud Integrated Payments-powered donation widget scoped to the donor's specific fund. We'll cover authentication flow, the SKY API endpoints involved, how gift records are written back to Raiser's Edge NXT® on completion, and the UX decisions that make this feel native rather than bolted on.

Attendees will leave with a replicable integration pattern for embedding Blackbaud Payments into any constituent-facing experience — not just impact reports.

In this session, we’ll show you how to design an identity-first integration that prevents duplicates before they ever reach your CRM.

We'll show you how to: Use Blackbaud’s Identity Thread API as the foundation, stage and resolve constituent identity with BrightVine Data Link before data hits your system, handle matched, unmatched, and ambiguous identity scenarios without breaking your integration and accelerate development using Claude Code (Anthropic’s AI coding tool) in real time.

We’ll walk through a real integration from start to finish, showing how these components work together to create a more accurate, scalable, and resilient data pipeline. If you care about data integrity (and want to stop cleaning up duplicates after the fact), this session will change how you approach integrations.

This session explores how to extend Blackbaud Online Giving donation forms beyond a single use case, enabling flexible, campaign‑ready experiences without duplicating forms. You’ll see how URL passthrough and website components can work together to adapt donation forms for different audiences, entry points, and fundraising moments—while keeping your configuration simple and maintainable.

Using real‑world examples like giving days and targeted campaigns, we’ll walk through practical patterns for designing scalable, on‑brand donation experiences. The session also covers where these techniques reach their limits and when SKY Add‑ins become the right solution for more advanced customization.

You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of how to choose the right approach for each campaign and how to build donation experiences that are both flexible and future‑ready.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to transform an idea into a fully-realized software solution? In this session, Ken Swift and Chris Nance founders of Net Outlook and creator of SwiftGrants, will share their firsthand experience of bringing a new product to life in the nonprofit technology space.

Take a moment to pause, reset, and realign through a guided breathwork session designed to support your nervous system and well-being. This experience will introduce a simple technique called box breathing to help regulate energy, reduce mental fatigue, and improve clarity. By creating space to slow down, you’ll be better positioned to approach your day with a grounded mindset and renewed creativity.

In this three-part workshop, you will discover how to use Power Automate to extend Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® by building a data integration and automation that "lives inside" your Blackbaud product for a seamless user experience.

By the end of the three classes, you'll have built an app that helps automate fundraiser requests for receiving credit on a gift. This includes handling approval steps and how to circumvent potential technical roadblocks that may arise when automating data health tasks.

For this course, we will use a Raiser's Edge NXT® developer environment, which will be provided to you. We design the course so that power users of other Blackbaud systems—Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®, Blackbaud's education management products, Blackbaud Altru®, or Blackbaud CRM™—will learn transferrable skills.

With the introduction of new Donor Fee Cover options in Blackbaud Luminate Online®, organizations now have more flexibility—and more decisions—when it comes to recovering processing fees while maintaining a strong donor experience.

In this session, we’ll walk through Donor Cover, Complete Cover, and Custom Cover, highlighting how each option works and what it means for your donation forms, donor perception, and overall revenue strategy. You’ll explore real‑world use cases, configuration considerations, and common questions teams face when choosing a fee cover model.

By the end of this session, you’ll have a clearer framework for selecting the right approach for your organization and confidently communicating fee recovery in a way that supports both transparency and donor trust.

Microsoft Power Platform makes it easy to start building integrations with Raiser’s Edge NXT®—but getting them to work reliably in the real world is what this session will cover.

We’ll walk through what it actually takes to design, build, and run a production-ready Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® integration using Power Apps, Power Automate, and the Blackbaud SKY API.

In this session, you’ll learn: how to build and secure a custom SKY API connector using Blackbaud ID (OAuth2), how to design Power Automate flows that handle pagination, throttling, and failures and how we reliably stage and move data using BrightVine Data Link for Raiser's Edge NXT®. More importantly, we’ll share what didn’t work—common assumptions, early design mistakes, and how we adapted when real data (and real constraints) got in the way.

In this session, you’ll learn how to extract Admission Pipeline data from Blackbaud Education Management and build a Power BI report that enables accurate year-to-date comparisons across admission cycles. We’ll walk through how to structure your data model and create dynamic to-date comparisons that support real-time enrollment decision-making.

You'll see how this same approach can be used to compare other metrics to date, including tuition, financial aid, and enrollment outcomes.

We’ll share a high‑level technical walkthrough of how Blackbaud AI Chat is implemented in Raiser’s Edge NXT®. You’ll see how user questions are interpreted and how AI patterns like system prompts and tool‑based workflows are used to produce accurate, product‑relevant answers.

We’ll review the security and privacy built into AI Chat, including what data is (and isn’t) used during a chat interaction, how information is handled when generating responses, and the guardrails that help reduce risk.

You'll walk away with the understanding of how your data is protected and what controls are in place to support responsible use.

Are you ready to take your Power Automate knowledge to the next level? Come learn how to make your automations powerful with valuable tools that will allow you to further customize flows that connect with Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®, Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®, and other Blackbaud SKY API enabled solutions.

In this session, you will:

• Build a basic flow from blank, based on the Raiser's Edge NXT® Power Automate connector.
• Learn how to apply Number and Date Formatting to improve the appearance of your output.
• Use hyperlinks in your output to directly access Constituent and Gift records.
• Learn how arrays (variables) can be used to retrieve multiple values such as a list of Split Gifts.

Advanced Preparation: Complete the BBU course: Power Automate: Overview and Templates.

Students wishing to build a flow during class must have the necessary Power Automate license. Use this link for more information on license options: https://docs.blackbaud.com/microsoft-connectors-docs/microsoft-power-platform/getting-started

Tired of needing to “Save As…” a flow just to make a safe edit? Finding yourself rebuilding the same lookup logic across multiple flows? Or worried a critical automation will break while you’re out of office? This session is for the moment when Microsoft Power Automate stops feeling like quick wins and starts feeling like production software that needs structure, reuse, and a backup plan.

We’ll explore how building in Power Platform Solutions can help you level up: packaging work with solutions, reducing duplication with child flows, and improving portability with connection references, environments, and deployment pipelines. You’ll also get an honest look at the tradeoffs—dependency headaches, connection reference quirks, and the real-world complexity that comes with “doing it right.”

Presented by a database admin turned citizen developer who’s been testing these techniques in the wild, this session will help you decide if unlocking more features of the Power Platform is right for you!

Stop relying on manual CSV exports. In this technical Skills Lab, we move beyond the "why" and dive straight into the "how" of building a live data connection between Blackbaud and Google Workspace. This session is designed for school technologists who want to turn static Advanced Lists into programmatic, accessible data.

Using a provided Google Apps Script starter template, we will work through a sample implementation of the SKY API. We will begin by configuring a new application in the Blackbaud Developer Portal and navigating the OAuth2 "Authentication Dance" to connect with the Script. Once connected, we will walk through the logic to programmatically fetch an existing Advanced List from your environment and populate it into a Google Sheet.

You will learn the mechanics of API scopes, redirect URIs, and the UrlFetchApp service. By the end of this session, you will have a working script that bridges the gap between Blackbaud’s data and Google’s flexibility, providing a foundational engine for your school’s custom reporting and integrations.

Prerequisites for Participation: A Blackbaud SKY Developer account. Marketplace or Org Admin credentials for their environment. One "Advanced List" already created in Blackbaud (under 1,000 rows) to use as a data source. A Google account with access to Google Apps Script.

Learn to code around the BBAppFx Web Service Platform using C#, or VB.NET. In this session I will show the basics of leveraging the Blackbaud CRM™ backend to deliver custom solutions from with and outside of Blackbaud CRM™.

We will cover how South Dakota State University Alumni & Foundation implemented Microsoft Fabric to handle data warehousing for Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®. We will outline the selection process, the hurdles encountered along the way, and the benefits achieved so far. We will also discuss the skills the SDSU Alumni & Foundation's team needed to learn to support the implementation, including working in SQL and Python. This session is intended for anyone interested in using Fabric or other data warehousing technology to manage and analyze data.

TeamRaiser is the proven P2P fundraising platform — and now there's even more you can do with it. In this session, DNL OmniMedia demos an enhanced search experience built for the AI age that extends TeamRaiser's capabilities with fuzzy and phonetic matching, so supporters can find participants and teams even with partial or approximate names.

Results are enriched with photos, fundraising progress bars, team captain details, and span across all event types — Run/Walks, Major Events, and DIY campaigns like birthday fundraisers — in a single unified search.

We'll also debut a new AI-powered conversational mode where supporters can discover participants through natural language instead of traditional filters.

Want toknow instantly whenever a constituent is deleted, or an address is updated, or a gift is added? It's possible with webhooks! In this session we'll demonstrate how to subscribe a webhook to a Microsoft Power Automate flow using -- you guessed it --another Power Automate flow!

Hosted by Kelly Garwood

Fear of burnout.

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Hosted by Austen Brown

Data hygiene flows are my favorite to build. Join a lively discussion on data clean-up flows, ideas, Power Automate questions, and more. .

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Hosted by Erik Leaver

The 2026 bbdevdays Hackathon

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Hosted by Debbi Converse

I work in public media and my colleagues across the country have filled gaps in RENXT with the most creative development applications. Let's discuss what's working or what you need!

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Hosted by Sean Donnelly

We're expecting lots of questions from the session. This is your opportunity to meet the Bridgit team and get answers.

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Your fundraisers shouldn't have to leave Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® to get deep prospect research. In this session, we'll show you how DonorAtlas brings AI-powered donor intelligence (rich biographical profiles, wealth indicators with transparent sourcing, giving history, and other information pulled in real-time by our agents) directly into your Raiser's Edge NXT® workflow through a native SKY Add-in integration.

We'll walk through a live demo of researching a prospect without ever leaving the constituent record, show how natural language search lets you find donors the way you'd actually describe them ("alumni in Boston who care about climate and have given six figures"), and cover how DonorAtlas enriches your existing data with cited, verifiable insights so your frontline fundraisers go into every meeting prepared.

You'll leave with a clear picture of how to plug AI-powered prospect research into the tool your team already lives in.

Kick off the bbdevdays hackathon—an extended, virtual build experience that opens during bbdevdays and runs through September, with awardees recognized at bbcon. This hackathon invites you to explore what’s possible with Blackbaud’s APIs, developer tools, and integrations over a longer runway, giving you time to iterate, test ideas, and try your hand at building something meaningful.

New to hackathons? A hackathon is a time‑boxed innovation challenge where developers, designers, and problem-solvers turn ideas into working prototypes or proof‑of‑concepts.

Whether you’re automating a workflow, building an integration, or experimenting with a new app idea, this session will walk through how the bbdevdays hackathon works, how to get involved, and how to set yourself up for success.

Event follow-up shouldn’t depend on stacks of paper, delayed data entry, or guesswork about who should reach out next.

In this bbdevdays session, we’ll walk through the design and build of a “Connect With Us” Power Automate flow created to replace physical contact cards handed out at events. The solution captures supporter interest in real time, routes it to the right team, and enables fast, targeted follow-up while the conversation is still fresh.

We’ll cover the full technical build—from form intake and constituent matching to automation logic and notifications—and share how this flow is evolving with customized business cards and tracking. Attendees will leave with a practical pattern they can adapt for events, site visits, and field fundraising.

Rolling out AI tools is the easy part. Sustaining adoption, measuring impact, and managing the organizational change that follows is where most programs stall. This session covers the operational backbone of enterprise AI: building user support models that scale, instrumenting usage data to separate signal from noise, and leading teams through workflow change without losing momentum.

Attendees will leave with practical frameworks for support tiers, usage metrics that matter, and change management tactics grounded in real rollouts.

As AI agents evolve from simple chatbots to functional tools, the need for a standardized communication layer is critical. This session led by three students from the University of Manitoba provides a comprehensive look at the Model Context Protocol (MCP). We will define what an MCP server is, why it is essential for modern industrial integrations, and how we utilized it to connect LLMs with the Blackbaud SKY API and data inside Raiser’s Edge NXT. We’ll also share a candid look at the challenges of implementing this protocol and explore the practical ways developers can use MCP to build smarter, context-aware automations.

Getting started with Power BI can feel overwhelming—many different views, unfamiliar terminology, and lots of places to click. This session breaks it all down. You’ll learn how the Data, Model, and Report views fit together and how each one plays a role in turning raw data into meaningful insights.

We’ll walk through a simple, end‑to‑end example: using Power Query to shape data, creating a basic data model with relationships, and then building a straightforward report.

Along the way, you’ll see how data flows through Power BI and how small decisions in the data and model layers directly affect what you can do in your reports. This session is ideal for anyone new to Power BI.

Are you still wondering what Power Automate is actually useful for? You’re not alone! In this session, we’ll cut through the noise and focus on simple, practical flows using Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT that solve everyday problems and deliver quick wins for your organization. Through live demos and real examples, you’ll see how Power Automate can handle common questions and routine checks automatically—saving time and reducing manual effort.

We’ll walk through flows such as checking whether a custom field already exists before populating it, sending a daily gift summary each morning, validating required fund attributes and notifying your team when something is missing, generating basic audit reports, and triggering actions automatically based on your data.

By the end, you’ll have concrete ideas you can put to work right away and a clearer sense of where Power Automate fits into your daily operations.

Adaptive Cards offer a flexible way to build rich, interactive add‑ins that extend Blackbaud solutions—and this session shows you how to get started and go further.

We’ll begin with the fundamentals of creating an Adaptive Card, leveraging existing Power Automate templates to quickly stand up impactful Add‑ins. From there, we’ll explore more advanced features and design patterns that enhance the overall Adaptive Card experience—helping you create add‑ins that are more dynamic, intuitive, and impactful.

Whether you’re just getting started or looking to refine existing implementations, you’ll leave with practical ideas you can apply right away.

Hosted by Nathan Goodroe

Pydantic AI has opened up my use of local llm by giving it the power of tools to make tiny scripts to experiment with the SKY API to talk to our data in a novel way.

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This is your opportunity to engage with peers and Blackbaud developers who are actively building and experimenting with AI inside their organizations. Come with your questions, learn from shared experiences, and join the discussion as we collectively explore what’s possible—and what’s next—with AI.

Grant teams often manage prospects, awards, and reporting in systems that don’t talk to the organization's primary database leading to duplicate data entry, inconsistent records, and hours of lost time each week. Yet many organizations hesitate to integrate due to perceived risk, lack of IT support, or uncertainty about change management for legacy databases. In this practical, discussion‑driven session, the Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) Foundation team shares how they implemented a low‑risk, phased integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT® that now saves more than 7 hours each week and eliminates redundant workflows. Rather than focusing on technology, this session highlights the communication, cross‑department alignment, and guardrails needed to make integration successful in a complex healthcare environment.

What if building software felt less like writing code—and more like describing the outcome you want? Welcome to vibe coding: using generative AI to create apps, automations, and workflows by focusing on intent instead of code.

You bring the idea and the problem to solve; AI helps handle the technical heavy lifting. No traditional developer background required.

In this keynote, Richie Cotton, Senior Data Evangelist at DataCamp, explores how non-technical professionals are using AI-powered tools to automate admin work, streamline operations, and support outreach and program delivery—without adding headcount or stretching budgets.

You’ll explore real use cases in the non-profit space, learn which skills matter most, and understand how generative AI is reshaping roles and teamwork. Whether you’re AI-curious, workflow-obsessed, or just tired of manual busywork, this session will leave you inspired to experiment—and confident that you can start building.

Most fundraising analytics aren't actually analytics—they're glorified reports with a fancier label. If you've ever built a typical "Top Donors" list or a "Gifts by Month" chart or a SYBUNT report and called it done, this session is for you. The dirty secret is that the most valuable data in fundraising doesn't live in your database—it has to be calculated. And the developers building these tools often don't know what fundraisers actually need, while the fundraisers can't articulate what they're missing. The result? Dashboards full of noise, and development teams flying blind.

In this session, we'll cut through that gap. You'll walk away understanding the difference between a report and a true analytic, why raw data fields are often the least interesting thing you can surface, and which data science concepts—borrowed from decades of direct marketing research will immediately level up the tools you build.

We'll introduce three frameworks every nonprofit developer should know: RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value), donor segmentation, and a predictive model called Buy Till You Die analysis that can tell you which donors are quietly lapsing before anyone notices. We'll contrast real-world examples of traditional reports against analytics that actually change fundraiser behavior.

Whether you're building on a full-stack custom platform or wiring together low-code tools, you'll leave with a concrete path to creating analytics that don't just measure fundraising—they improve it.

Blackbaud Internet Solutions (BBIS) has long been the default platform for nonprofit web presence, but its aging architecture limits flexibility, performance, and developer experience.

In this session, we'll explore a practical, production-ready approach to replacing BBIS with a modern stack: a .NET 10 ASP.NET Minimal API backend paired with your SPA framework of choice (React, Blazor, Vue), secured with Blackbaud ID OAuth2/OIDC authentication using the Backend for Frontend (BFF) pattern.

This session explores the shift happening in how software gets built today with real world examples from Blackbaud’s Social Good Startup programs. You’ll learn how startups are using AI assisted development to move from idea to deployment in days and weeks – not months and years.

The real story isn't AI hype. It's what happens when deep domain expertise, direct customer access, and AI-assisted development collapse the distance between problem and solution.

Brent Chudoba (former CRO SurveyMonkey, COO Calendly) will discuss how he built and iterates Grasshopper Signup, a production SaaS serving thousands of schools and nonprofits, with a team of one.

Justin Steele, CEO of Kindora, an AI-powered funder intelligence platform, will share how his team used Claude Code - Anthropic's AI coding agent - to write an entire integration to Raiser’s Edge NXT which included 25 features across secure authentication, constituent matching, gift history import, two-way data sync, relationship mapping, and a tile embedded directly inside the RENXT. The full integration was built across two evening sessions.

Prospect Information Manager Copilot is a generative AI–enabled approach to improving how advancement organizations review, enrich, and act on contact reports at scale.

Developed in close partnership with Prospect Information Managers, the solution integrates with Blackbaud CRM™ to assist PIMs by automatically summarizing contact reports, identifying key themes and follow up actions, and providing feedback to improve report quality—while maintaining a human in the loop review and approval process. The result is faster processing, more consistent and actionable data, and clearer feedback loops between PIMs and frontline fundraisers.

This session will share practical lessons learned from designing and piloting the solution, along with governance considerations and guidance for organizations exploring responsible AI adoption in advancement operations.

Your resident Power Automate and Power BI experts are here to answer your questions! They'll bring their best tips and tricks to share with you, too!

Join us for a guided virtual tour of the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, a place central to the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States. In recognition of PRIDE month and season, this experience offers space to reflect on the history, impact, and ongoing work of social justice—connecting the legacy of Stonewall to the values of inclusion, dignity, and community we continue to build today.

The Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center is owned and operated by Pride Live™, a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to accelerating awareness and support for the LGBTQ+ community via social advocacy and community engagement to advance the fight for full equality.

Managing Blackbaud's OAuth refresh tokens in headless or server-side environments can be tricky. This session demos an open-source refresh token manager that extends Blackbaud's authorization code flow to simplify persistent, automated access. We'll walk through how the server handles OAuth on your behalf, manages multi-environment connections, and exposes a simple API so your flows can always get a usable access token from a single request.

The solution shared can be self-hosted or available in a free hosted edition from Userbus.

Pledge payments don’t always apply themselves—especially when soft credits, online gifts, and mixed giving scenarios are involved.

In this session, you’ll see how Microsoft Power Automate can be used to proactively identify gifts that may represent pledge payments and surface those opportunities to your team before they’re missed.

We’ll walk through two complementary daily automations. The first reviews gifts entered the prior day, checks for soft creditors, and evaluates related giving history to identify open pledges tied to the same campaign or fund. The second scans open pledges and reviews recent giving activity to catch payments—such as online donations—that don’t automatically apply to pledges.

Both flows deliver Microsoft Teams notifications when a potential match is found, helping advancement teams take timely action, improve pledge reconciliation, and reduce manual review.

This session walks through a real‑world blueprint for building an agentic analytics system that runs entirely on your local machine, designed to analyze Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® data with a strong focus on data governance, speed, privacy, and cost control.

You’ll see an end‑to‑end architecture that incrementally syncs Raiser's Edge NXT® data via the SKY API into a locally encrypted SQL store, creating a secure and high‑performance foundation for downstream analysis. From there, the session demonstrates how to integrate local large language models (LLMs) into an agentic workflow to automate analysis, surface insights, and support decision‑making—without sending data to the cloud. Rather than focusing on theory, this is a practical, hands‑on look at guardrails, architecture patterns, and proven techniques for safely operationalizing local AI against sensitive fundraising data.

By the end of the session, you’ll understand how to build a secure local data cache using SKY API best practices, design a production‑ready agentic architecture with open‑source LLMs, and unlock advanced analytics and automation—without compromising governance or trust in your data.

Keeping constituent data aligned across systems is hard—especially when your school’s fundraising data lives in Raiser’s Edge NXT® and your student information lives in Education Management. In this session, you’ll learn how to use Power BI, Blackbaud SKY API, Power Automate, SharePoint, and Google Apps Script to continuously compare key records across both databases and surface mismatches before they become bigger problems.

We’ll walk through a real implementation that powers three dashboards—Current Parents, Current Students, and Faculty/Staff—built specifically to validate that the “same person” is represented consistently across systems.

You’ll leave with a repeatable approach for pulling data, automating refreshes, and creating a reliable reconciliation view that helps your team trust what they see (and act on it) across platforms.

In this session, attendees will learn how to use Power Automate to build a single, streamlined registration experience that supports multiple events without duplicating forms. We’ll walk through how to simplify the registration process for constituents while maintaining clean, accurate data behind the scenes.

Participants will explore practical techniques for matching registrants to existing records in Raiser’s Edge NXT® (when applicable), handling duplicate registrations, and automatically adding participants to the correct event records. The session also covers generating custom email receipts to ensure registrants receive timely, accurate confirmations.

By the end, attendees will have a clear understanding of how to design an efficient, scalable multi‑event registration solution that reduces manual work and improves the overall registration experience.

Blackbaud is now in the early adopter phase of migrating database view Export features to Web View. Rather than creating a separate module, we're integrating Export's output capabilities directly into Web View Query. This integration streamlines your workflows by ensuring the same tool solves all your Query and Export needs. Discover how these enhancements can provide greater flexibility and build on existing knowledge in both the UI and API.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation faced a familiar challenge: collecting new constituent and event participant information from forms, events, and external sources, then getting that data into Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® accurately and on time. In this session, you’ll see how a simple Google Sheet was transformed into a no‑code, data‑staging solution using the SKY API, allowing multiple teams to enter new constituent details in a familiar tool and have records automatically created or updated in Raiser's Edge NXT®with built‑in data quality safeguards. The session also explores how the same approach was applied to Raiser's Edge NXT® event participant data, automatically syncing complex application forms into Google Sheets for real‑time access by staff and volunteers—eliminating the need to build workarounds outside the system. You’ll learn how this automated workflow saves time, reduces duplicate records, improves collaboration across teams, and ensures data is available quickly to support timely donor cultivation and stewardship.

Modern supporters expect fast, flexible checkouts in your custom fundraising or payment-enabled apps. In this session, learn how the SKY Payments API powers Blackbaud’s newest checkout experience, now generally available. We’ll share what’s new for builders: a mobile‑first flow that optimizes payments with flexible presentation options (inline or modal) and features like new digital wallets and donor cover. Hear directly from a customer about their integration journey and join the live Q&A with the product team on how to get started (or migrate) quickly and confidently.

Building with the Power Platform doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. This session shares practical tips and best practices that help early‑to‑intermediate users work more effectively in Power BI and Power Automate by avoiding common pitfalls and following patterns used by experienced builders. You’ll learn how to model data correctly, improve report performance, choose the right connections, design reports with a clear purpose, add safeguards to automations, and use AI tools thoughtfully. The focus is on real‑world examples and reusable techniques you can apply right away, along with downloadable resources to support your projects after the session.

Velocity can be a powerful tool for validating that your integrations and processes work as expected—but only if you’re testing them in a consistent, repeatable way. In this session, you’ll learn how to use Velocity to design tests that validate functionality, compare implementation approaches, and measure performance across real‑world scenarios. We’ll walk through how to define an expected system state, execute operations using different techniques (such as batch processing, forms, or bulk SQL), and capture results at each stage to validate outcomes. You’ll see how to evaluate performance characteristics and trade‑offs between approaches, and how to safely tear down test data to return your application to a known, clean state. This session is ideal for developers and admins who want more confidence in their testing strategy—and clearer insight into how different approaches behave at scale.

Schools using Blackbaud are sitting on rich, real-time data—grades, schedules, attendance, assignments, activities—but most of it only reaches parents through portals they rarely check and emails they skim. This session looks at the problem practically: what data matters most to parents, why current delivery methods fall short, and what it actually takes to close that gap—whether you're building custom integrations, websites, applications, or leveraging third-party tools. We'll walk through specific SKY API data points, the limitations you'll hit when trying to surface them effectively, and the patterns we developed to solve those problems while building a production platform on top of the API. You'll see real examples of how raw Blackbaud data becomes timely, contextual information that parents actually engage with. Key takeaways: - Which SKY API data points drive the highest parent engagement—and which ones are noise - The real limitations of the API when it comes to delivering data in real time, and practical workarounds - How to think about notification and communication strategy: urgency, context, and personalization using data you already have - A live look at how raw SKY API data transforms into parent-facing experiences

Frustrated with the lack of push noticiations from the Blackbaud Status Page? See how Power Automate can help! In this hands on session, you'll build a simple flow that watches the status feed and sends an email or Microsoft Teams notification whenever there’s an incident, update, or resolution for the products you care about. We’ll walk step‑by‑step through the essentials—choosing the trigger, adding a filter to focus on the right products or update types, and sending a clean, readable alert. Once the basics are working, we’ll show an easy upgrade: add conditional logic so “new,” “updated,” and “completed” messages stand out with simple color‑coding—helping your team quickly understand what changed without digging through a status page.

(Headphones are highly encouraged for the most immersive experience.)
Step away from the screen and into a guided 15-minute sound experience designed to help you pause, reset, and recharge during the conference day.
Using breathwork, crystal singing bowls, gong resonance, and immersive sound textures, this session offers participants a space to reduce mental fatigue, regulate stress, and reconnect with focus and creativity.
Think of it as a guided “power nap” for the nervous system — no sleeping required.

Through code samples, demos, and real-world scenarios, attendees will learn how Net Outlook's developers have leveraged Blackbaud's SKY UX to craft purpose-built solutions that accelerate nonprofits' missions. Whether you're new to SKY UX or an experienced Blackbaud developer, this session will provide valuable insights into maximizing the potential of this powerful framework.

Establishing a Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) is a strategic way to drive adoption while keeping the platform scalable and secure—through governance, best practices, and support. In this session, we’ll connect that CoE foundation to the emerging operational reality of Agent 365—where agents and low-code solutions must coexist with clear ownership, policy, and visibility We’ll start with what a CoE really is (and isn’t), and how to use the Power Platform CoE Starter Kit as a reference implementation for governance, monitoring, and adoption—while recognizing that successful CoEs also require people, communications, and defined processes. Then we’ll translate those same CoE practices into an Agent 365 operating model, including the practical admin steps and guardrails that determine whether agents are usable, visible, and compliant inside the organization. Finally, we’ll demystify what it takes for agents to safely connect to enterprise systems—such as integrating an agent with Dynamics 365 and enabling the Dataverse Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, with a focus on permissions and governance considerations that IT admins and decision makers care about.

In this three-part workshop, you will discover how to use Power Automate to extend Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® by building a data integration and automation that "lives inside" your Blackbaud product for a seamless user experience. By the end of the three classes, you'll have built an app that helps automate fundraiser requests for receiving credit on a gift. This includes handling approval steps and how to circumvent potential technical roadblocks that may arise when automating data health tasks. For this course, we will use a Raiser's Edge NXT developer environment, which will be provided to you. We design the course so that power users of other Blackbaud systems—Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®, Blackbaud's education management products, Blackbaud Altru®, or Blackbaud CRM™—will learn transferrable skills.

Advancement and finance teams often rely on manual processes to track incoming gifts, notify staff of significant donations, and respond to report requests. This session demonstrates how these workflows can be streamlined using low-code automation tools already available in the Microsoft ecosystem. Attendees will see how a SharePoint-hosted Excel log can track gifts before database entry and trigger tiered staff notifications based on gift amount using Microsoft Power Automate. The session will also showcase a secure, self-service process where users request quarterly investment statements through Microsoft Forms. A Power Automate workflow retrieves the appropriate report and sends a password-protected file directly to the requester. By connecting Microsoft Excel, Microsoft SharePoint, Forms, and Power Automate, organizations can reduce manual work, improve response times, and provide staff with efficient self-service tools.

In the last couple of years, “AI” went from a curiosity to something that shows up in every toolchain—and it’s getting harder to tell what’s genuinely useful versus what’s just a new label. In this session, Thomas Betts will recap the practical foundations of AI beyond the buzzwords, then fast-forward to the state of AI in 2026—with an emphasis on what matters to developers building solutions on (and around) Blackbaud products. We’ll break down what’s changed in the past year: AI agents that can act (not just chat), the rise (and risks) of vibe coding, and why spec-driven development is becoming the antidote to “prompt roulette” for anything you intend to maintain. You’ll learn where these approaches shine (rapid prototypes, internal tools, workflow automation) and where they can hurt you (security, correctness, maintainability, and hidden costs). We’ll also cover the essential do’s and don’ts: treating generative models as prediction engines, not sources of truth, designing for human oversight, and setting lightweight guardrails that help citizen developers ship safely and confidently. You’ll leave with a practical mental model, a vocabulary you can trust, and a clear checklist for evaluating “AI-powered” features—so you can cut through the marketing and use modern AI tools to save time without breaking things.

Create smarter processes with intuitive, customizable flows. In this advanced course, learn how to build effective automated cloud flows using Microsoft Power Automate. Explore how triggers work to launch processes and how connectors and connections enable communication with other applications. Create automated flows from scratch and apply conditional True/False logic that guides actions down separate paths. Test flows both manually and automatically to ensure they run as intended. Learning Objectives: Explain how to use triggers to automate cloud flows, Describe how Power Automate uses connectors and connections to talk to other programs, Build automated cloud flows from blank, Add conditional True/False statements to flows and add actions to both paths Include dynamic content in flows, Test automated flows both manually and automatically Advanced Preparation: This course has suggested prerequisites. Prerequisites include: BBU Power Automate: Overview and Templates course. Students wishing to build a flow after class must have the necessary Power Automate license. Use this link for more information on license options: https://docs.blackbaud.com/microsoft-connectors-docs/microsoft-power-platform/getting-started

Blackbaud Altru® holds the data your teams need—but getting that information in front of the right people at the right time can be a challenge. In this session, you’ll learn how to combine Altru® Query with Microsoft Power Automate to automatically sync program events and group sales reservations into Microsoft Outlook, creating shared visibility across your organization.

We’ll walk through a real world flow that uses query results to create, update, or remove Outlook calendar items or tasks as data changes in Altru®. The session focuses on practical patterns you can reuse to keep calendars accurate, reduce manual coordination, and ensure staff always have an up to date view of what’s happening—without relying on spreadsheets or manual follow ups.

Understanding error messages and figuring out the source of issues as you build in Microsoft Power Automate is a constant battle. And what happens if a flow starts failing at its job but you don’t notice until it’s too late? Austen and Stacy give you time-tested tricks for fixing, monitoring, and fixing again until you can be confident your automation is doing what you want it to.

Mission creep is the gradual departure of a nonprofit from its mission and priorities. The organization takes on new initiatives outside its scope, often to court donors, visibility, or new audiences. In technology, “technical debt” describes the long-term cost incurred when short-term system decisions are made for speed or convenience rather than architectural coherence. Both can occur within nonprofits in both parallel and intersecting ways. Creep often shows up in data systems as proliferating custom reports, increasingly complex CRM structures, unclear KPIs, and an expanding number of campaigns and dashboards—all evolving without consistent alignment to strategic goals and intentional data architecture. This session examines how leaders can prevent mission creep and Frankenstein data systems by aligning strategic planning discipline with platform use. Sophia will address how creep develops at the board and executive level—through weak strategic and enterprise risk management planning, initiative expansion, unclear ownership, and inconsistent review cadence. Adam will address the technical layer: how dashboards, KPI configuration, data capture standards, campaign design, and reporting frameworks can reinforce strategic priorities and strengthen the effective use of software platforms. We will focus on three practical areas: defining initiative ownership and time boundaries; aligning KPIs directly with board-approved goals; and establishing review cadences that connect strategic planning and data input to disciplined decision-making. Participants will leave with a practical framework for identifying early signs of drift, aligning CRM structure with strategic priorities, and strengthening discipline in the data used for fundraising and financial oversight.

Join a senior architect for a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® AI Chat feature. This session will cover the story of the feature development from early concept to the current version available in the product, along with a glimpse of things the team is exploring for making the chat extensible via SKY Developer MCP and SKY Add-Ins.

Most fundraising teams using Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® have the donor relationship data—but no easy way to connect it to fund financials, automate compliance monitoring, or produce personalized impact reports at scale. The result: stewardship that lags behind gift activity, manual reporting cycles that consume weeks of staff time, and donors who never hear what happened to their gift.

This session shows how The University of Texas at Tyler solved that problem by extending Raiser's Edge NXT® with an integration to FundMiner, extending their existing Blackbaud environment. James Hines, Director of Development and Endowment Compliance at UT Tyler, will walk through the before and after: what fund compliance and donor reporting looked like when it lived in spreadsheets, what changed when Raiser's Edge NXT® data began flowing live into a centralized fund management platform, and what the team can now do that simply wasn't possible before.

The demo will show the live integration in action — fund data pulling from Raiser's Edge NXT® in real time, compliance status surfaced automatically, and personalized impact reports generated and delivered without manual assembly.

Most SKY API tutorials get you to "hello world"—this session picks up where the documentation ends. We'll walk through the hard lessons learned building a production multi-tenant application on top of the SKY API, including authentication patterns that don't break at 3am, handling rate limits gracefully, webhook reliability, and architecting for multiple schools without multiplying your infrastructure costs. Key takeaways: - Token refresh strategies for long-lived multi-tenant integrations - Patterns for handling SKY API rate limits and failures without data loss - How to structure your integration so adding a new school is a configuration change, not a code change - Monitoring and alerting patterns so you know when your integration breaks before your schools do

Don't miss the closing celebration! We'll recap the best of bbdevdays and announce the top rated sessions based on your feedback -- those speakers win Golden tickets to present at bbcon in Columbus!