Powering an Ecosystem of Good
As featured in the 2019 Blackbaud Social Responsibility Report:
Blackbaud began nearly four decades ago with a simple idea: Organizations and people striving to make a tangible impact in their communities deserve the right tools to help them work faster, more efficiently, and at greater scale.
Because that’s how good takes over.
We started with a single customer, the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City, which has provided kindergarten through high school education to girls and young women for nearly 100 years—and which, we’re proud to say, remains a Blackbaud customer today. The school needed a computerized billing system—a transformational innovation in 1981. From that single customer and its success, Blackbaud began.
Today, we serve the entire social good community, which includes:
- Nonprofits
- Higher education institutions
- K–12 schools
- Healthcare organizations
- Faith communities
- Arts and cultural organizations
- Foundations
- Companies
- Individual change agents
Millions of users in over 100 countries raise, grant, and invest more than $100 billion each year. But despite Blackbaud’s growth and evolution, we remain singularly focused on our mission: to help good take over.
We do that by providing cloud software, services, data intelligence, and expertise that connect and empower people to drive impact for social good. We pride ourselves on our unique role in powering an Ecosystem of Good®—helping people and organizations who are working to build a better world thrive by connecting them with one another. But we don’t just power this Ecosystem with our software; we also enthusiastically participate in it.
As a giveback to the community we serve, the Blackbaud Institute brings together the best minds in philanthropy to deliver leading-edge research that accelerates the impact of social good. We uncover insight from the most comprehensive data set in the social good community and publish findings and best practices to empower readers to drive greater impact in their work.
We encourage employee choice in the way we give, and we donate 3% of our pretax profit to support causes that reflect our team’s passions. In alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals, nearly half of our charitable donations represent our commitment to education, peace and justice, and ending poverty. Those three focus areas also reflect our deep commitment to serving underrepresented minorities.
- Education: In Canada, we awarded a Blackbaud Community Matters grant to MusiCounts, which strives to provide access to music education for all Canadian children.
- Justice and Inclusive Institutions: At our 2018 user conference in London, we made a donation to the Sophie Hayes Foundation, which helps human trafficking survivors achieve independence through employment.
- Poverty Reduction: For the past 25 years, we have volunteered with and contributed to One80 Place in Charleston, a nonprofit organization that works to end homelessness and hunger one person at a time.
