Blackbaud Expands AI Fundraising Tools and Sets Lantern Model for 2027

Blackbaud announced new AI-powered fundraising and marketing products at bbcon Sydney, including the Data Health Agent and Blackbaud Marketing, and set Lantern, a fundraising-specific language model built with Databricks, to begin powering select experiences within Platform for Good in 2027. The company said the products are aimed at social impact organisations across Australia and New Zealand. The details were reported by TradingView.

Blackbaud's New Agents and Marketing Platform

Blackbaud said the Data Health Agent is a continuous data steward that detects and addresses data issues through review-and-approve workflows, identifying common data issues and recommending corrections. The agent is launching in an early access programme in the US now, with international expansion planned after early learnings are implemented. The Early Access Programme for the Development Agent is underway for Raiser's Edge NXT customers in Australia and New Zealand, as well as the UK and Canada, and the agent is designed to expand fundraising capacity through personalised, brand-aligned agentic outreach, with interactions captured in Raiser's Edge NXT.

Blackbaud Marketing is a new AI-assisted multichannel digital marketing platform built within Raiser's Edge NXT to connect fundraising and marketing teams, with AI assisting throughout the marketing workflow with planning, content creation and optimisation. Blackbaud anticipates releasing Blackbaud Marketing by the second quarter of 2027. Blackbaud also introduced Platform for Good, a unified operating system that connects data, workflows, AI and a broader ecosystem of solutions and partners.

"Across Asia Pacific, organisations are continually looking for new ways to deepen engagement, improve efficiency and expand their impact while staying true to the people and communities they serve," said Kevin Sher, president and general manager of Blackbaud's operations in Asia Pacific. "With these innovations, we're focused on helping customers put trusted data and AI to work in practical ways, giving their teams more capacity and more connected ways to build the relationships that advance their missions."

Blackbaud's Recent Product and Partnership Record

According to akta.pro company records, Blackbaud launched the Development Agent into general availability on March 17, 2026, priced at $25,000 to $30,000 annually as a new standalone Agents for Good category. The same records show a strategic investment and integration agreement with Student First in May 2026, embedding an AI-enabled higher-ed student information system inside the Connected Campus experience, and a December 2025 partnership with Anthropic to deliver the Claude for Nonprofits connector, making more than 40 years of nonprofit data accessible within Claude AI for Raiser's Edge NXT Teams and Enterprise customers.

Earlier Blackbaud Announcements This Year

Blackbaud unveiled Platform for Good and Lantern, a fundraising-specific language model, at its bbcon 2026 conference on October 5, 2026, according to Stock Titan. Third News reported on September 29, 2026, that Blackbaud launched Platform for Good at its bbcon conference, unifying social impact workflows with a data core, intelligence layer and action layer, and that Lantern, developed with Databricks, will integrate into Raiser's Edge NXT and Agents for Good starting in 2027.

Blackbaud's Next Scheduled Update

Blackbaud will report its third quarter 2026 financial results on October 28, 2026, at 8:00 a.m. ET, followed by a conference call, according to PR Newswire.