Blackbaud: the system of record, and the night it was never built for

Blackbaud is the incumbent, and incumbents are usually there for good reasons. So this is not a demolition job. It is what a sales deck will never hand you: what the company tells its shareholders about how it makes money, set beside what a charity needs from a Saturday in November.

Everything below comes from Blackbaud’s own pages and its filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, opened in October 2026.

What is Blackbaud, and what does it sell?

Blackbaud sells the database your charity runs on all year, not the software that runs one evening. Its UK site calls it the “leading software for non-profit organisations, education institutions and social impact teams”, and claims £75B+ raised, granted or invested annually across its customers.

The product list is broad: Raiser’s Edge NXT, an Enterprise Fundraising CRM for the largest institutions, JustGiving, Grantmaking, Integrated Payments, Award Management and YourCause for corporate giving.

Raiser’s Edge NXT is the one you will meet. The UK page describes donor management with gift processing, major gift tracking, recurring giving, email, dashboards and event management “complete with registration, payments”. The US page adds prospect insights, a JustGiving integration and APIs, and lists no auction, bidding or paddle-raise capability at all.

That is a category, not a failing. Nobody buys a CRM to call bids.

What does Blackbaud cost in October 2026?

Nobody outside Blackbaud knows, because no figure is published. The pricing page says pricing is “customized based” on your organisation’s size, goals and the solutions you need, typically including implementation, training and support, and asks for a quote request.

The shape of the deal is public, though, because shareholders are entitled to know it. Blackbaud’s 2025 annual report, filed in February 2026, says subscription arrangements run on three-year terms at contract inception, with three-year renewals after that. Most customers sit on standard three-year terms with “mid-to-high single-digit price increases at renewal and embedded annual price increases”. More than 20% have signed for four years or longer.

Read that twice before you sign a three-year term. The price goes up inside the term, not only at the end of it, and the increase is contractual rather than negotiable. Around 40% of Blackbaud’s existing customer contracts fall due for renewal in 2026.

None of this is improper. It is how enterprise software has been sold for thirty years, and the predictability is what keeps a supplier four decades old still standing. It is just a very long commitment to make on behalf of an events team that may have a different plan by spring.

Does Blackbaud take a percentage of what you raise?

Part of its income does move with the money, yes. The 2025 annual report splits revenue into contractual recurring, around 64% of the total, and transactional recurring, around 34%. Inside that transactional third, donation processing is about 55%, JustGiving is about 20%, tuition management about 20%, and “event-based usage” about 5%.

For the quarter ended 30 June 2026 that transactional line came to $98.9 million of $290.6 million total revenue, with the UK contributing $37.0 million against $33.7 million a year earlier. The British business is growing.

You can see the same model at the retail end. JustGiving’s charity pricing page shows a free Start plan with 0% platform fees, a Grow plan at £15 a month plus VAT up to £15,000 raised a year and £39 above it, processing at 1.9% plus 30p, and a 5% administration fee on Gift Aid claimed unless you opt out. For context, Stripe’s published UK rate on standard UK cards is 1.5% plus 20p. The JustGiving fees page has the full workings.

Since 1 November 2025 the Code of Fundraising Practice has required any platform charging a fee to show donors, before payment details are taken, how the fee is calculated and how much the charity receives.

How often does the word auction appear in Blackbaud’s accounts?

Not once, in either filing I read. Search the 2025 annual report for “auction” and you get nothing. Search the half-year filing to 30 June 2026 and you get nothing there either. “Gala” is absent from both.

The closest the accounts come is that event-based usage slice: about 5% of a revenue line that is itself about a third of the business, “derived from usage-based transactions across certain registration, ticketing and event-related workflows”. Do the multiplication and events are under 2% of the company.

So the evening your fundraising year leans on is, to your supplier, a rounding error.

That is not cynicism. It is arithmetic, and it tells you how much product attention the night is going to get.

What Blackbaud does well

Plenty, and it would be dishonest not to say so.

It holds history. Blackbaud says Raiser’s Edge NXT tracks “more than $1 trillion” in giving history, and in September 2026 it announced Platform for Good, pulling its data, AI and workflow layers together underneath the products customers already run. For a charity with two decades of supporter records and a legacy programme running underneath them, that depth is real, and a spreadsheet is not a substitute for it.

It also does the unglamorous things properly: reconciliation with finance, consent preferences, major gift pipelines, Microsoft and Google integrations. Those are the jobs of the other 361 days.

Where does the Generosity Works platform fit?

In the four hours the CRM was never designed for, and alongside it rather than instead of it.

A room does not behave like a database. Lots open and close on a schedule somebody has to hold. Cards need taking at registration and charging when the hammer falls. And the pledge, the part that most often out-raises the bidding, needs tiers on a screen and a declaration captured in the moment it is given.

That last point is where the money sits. HMRC will not let you claim Gift Aid on a payment for goods or services, and the split treatment on a winning bid applies only where the item is commercially available and the bidder knew its separate price when they made the bid. A gift carries 25% that a lot does not. The Gift Aid rules explain the benefit limits, and Gift Aid capture on the pledge is why the platform I built does it on the night rather than on a clipboard afterwards.

The rest follows from the same idea. Live auction and silent bidding, ticketing, the gala screen, an offline event server for when the hotel basement lets you down, and payments through the charity’s own Stripe account so nothing is added to Stripe’s standard rate and no percentage is taken.

It is free when a charity books me as auctioneer and host, and my fee is the only money Generosity Works takes. The platform is not sold on its own; our pricing page explains why. One fee agreed up front, whatever the room gives. The hire itself lives on my charity auctioneer site.

Keep the Blackbaud contract. Export the night into it on Monday morning. The two were never competing for the same job.

If you have a number to hit this year, book a discovery call. Let’s talk about your number.