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Blackbaud Releases Virtual Small Group Capability to Serve Churches During COVID-19
New need identified in customer town hall, built and launched in three business days—just in time for Easter
Charleston, S.C. (April 10, 2020) — Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB), the world’s leading cloud software company powering social good, heard customer needs and built and released technology to support virtual small group gatherings for faith communities in a matter of days.
The new capability streamlines the process for a small group leader to engage its members, automatically adding virtual meetings to small group communications and making participation easy. This capability—offered at no additional cost through Blackbaud Church Management™ or its native app, MobileMission™—makes virtual small groups intuitive for both leaders and members quickly adjusting to meeting online. This further extends Blackbaud’s powerful church management capabilities that connect church staff, volunteers and congregations through one comprehensive platform.
“While church communities have been moving away from a single physical location for quite some time, COVID-19 accelerated that trend in an unanticipated way,” said Blackbaud Chief Products Officer Kevin McDearis. “We wanted to address that short-term need as quickly as possible, shifting the focus away from a physical room toward virtual meeting environments. Long term, we want to provide churches with the tools to engage more people and perhaps connect with an audience they never would have reached prior to this sudden digital migration.”
Blackbaud’s virtual small group capability came about after team members convened a town hall for faith customers in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing best practices for virtual gatherings and soliciting feedback on how Blackbaud could best support them during this unprecedented time. Engineers listened in on the call and spent a day the following week building technology to address their concerns. Because of its modern engineering architecture and powerful Blackbaud SKY® platform, the company was able to launch this capability less than three business days later.
Releasing this capability coincides with one of the most significant weeks of the year for churches—Holy Week, culminating with Easter Sunday. “We have churches that have been planning for months for the Easter holiday,” said Blackbaud Faith Solutions Product Manager Courtney Grainger. “Most had less than a month’s notice that they would need to completely revamp the way they engage their communities in this important season, so we wanted to offer a solution to support them now that would also empower them later.”
About Blackbaud
Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB) is the world’s leading cloud software company powering social good. Serving the entire social good community—nonprofits, higher education institutions, K–12 schools, healthcare organizations, faith communities, arts and cultural organizations, foundations, companies and individual change agents—Blackbaud connects and empowers organizations to increase their impact through cloud software, services, expertise and data intelligence. The Blackbaud portfolio is tailored to the unique needs of vertical markets, with solutions for fundraising and CRM, marketing, advocacy, peer-to-peer fundraising, corporate social responsibility, school management, ticketing, grantmaking, financial management, payment processing and analytics. Serving the industry for more than three decades, Blackbaud is headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, and has operations in the United States, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit www.blackbaud.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
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