Big Tech Power, Purpose-Built for Social Impact: How Blackbaud is Leveraging Databricks to Drive Smarter, Faster AI

At Blackbaud, we believe social impact organizations deserve world-class technology, purpose-built to meet their unique needs, not retrofitted from enterprise solutions. Our commitment is to deliver innovation that empowers these organizations to drive meaningful change with confidence and efficiency. 

Through strategic partnerships with leading technology providers like Databricks, our solutions harness the power of data science, artificial intelligence, and analytics. We make these tools accessible, actionable, and ethical, ensuring that the social impact community can unlock insights, deepen engagement, and amplify their mission. 

A Foundation for Smarter Predictions
Blackbaud’s AI solutions are built on the world’s most robust philanthropic dataset. But turning this data into insight requires imaginative technology partners that can handle the volume, velocity and variety of data. Today, Databricks powers the core of our data science engine, supporting the game-changing models trained by our AI and data teams. These models are the intelligence behind products like Prospect Insights, which help fundraisers identify ideal gift ranges, forecast donor engagement, and act with greater confidence. 

The results are staggering: 30 billion predictions each year using Databricks infrastructure. This platform enables our data scientists to build, train, and deploy models faster and more accurately than ever before, making Blackbaud’s predictive capabilities the most extensive in the sector. Blackbaud’s AI models stand apart in scale, accuracy, and purpose, delivering insights that are grounded in the world’s most comprehensive philanthropic data set. 

Real-World Impact: Fort Collins Habitat for Humanity Leverages AI for Fundraising Success
Faced with limited staff and ambitious goals, Fort Collins Habitat for Humanity turned to Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® and Prospect Insights to transform its fundraising strategy. By using AI-powered recommendations, the team identified high-potential donors, streamlined major gift cultivation, and exceeded campaign targets—including securing large gifts with fewer asks and launching a planned giving initiative with confidence. Their success showcases how smart technology can empower small teams to make a big impact. Read more about how Fort Collins Habitat for Humanity transformed its strategy. 

Next-Gen Speed and Flexibility with Feature Serving
We’re actively exploring new ways to harness the power of Databricks to deliver greater value for our customers, including the integration of Databricks Feature Serving, which will enable real-time feature retrieval directly from the platform.   

Traditionally, large-scale data processes have been slow and asynchronous, with updates occurring overnight or in batches. Feature Serving changes that paradigm by allowing our systems, and eventually our AI agents, to access fresh data instantly, eliminating the need to wait for scheduled refreshes. For example, an AI agent seeking updated donor insights could retrieve that information from Databricks instantly.   

This advancement represents a significant leap forward in both performance and user experience. It means Blackbaud customers will benefit from the responsiveness and precision of real-time AI, backed by the security and scalability of Databricks’ managed infrastructure. 

Exploring Data Like Never Before
We’re also exploring Databricks Genie to make it even easier for our customers to interact with complex datasets through natural language. Imagine asking Blackbaud AI, “How many constituents gave $20 in the last month, live in Vermont, and own a dog?” Databricks Genie would be able to comb through all of your organization’s data to answer that very nuanced query.     

By integrating this capability into our Blackbaud AI Chat, we could help customers explore their data more deeply and intuitively than ever before, no SQL queries, no data exports, no complexity. It’s intuitive, enterprise-level power, reimagined for social impact organizations. 

Purpose-Built Innovation, Not Retrofits
Blackbaud’s differentiation lies not only in our technology, but in how we purposefully tailor it to meet the distinct needs of the social impact sector. Rather than repurposing enterprise tools, we embed deep, sector-specific expertise into our solutions, ensuring they address the real-world challenges faced by nonprofits, schools, healthcare institutions, and foundations.  

With Databricks as a foundational part of our ecosystem, Blackbaud delivers enterprise-grade innovation with mission-driven purpose, empowering our customers to spend less time managing data and more time driving meaningful change.