Blackbaud buys fundraising platform for $43M

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Daniel Island-based Blackbaud has acquired Reeher, a data analytics and fundraising platform, for $43 million, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows.

Reeher is a St. Paul, Minn.-based software firm that makes products for higher education. Its predictive data tools are used by fundraisers to assess their performance comparatively with their own organization and other groups. It also analyzes the giving behaviors and characteristics of donors to increase giving.

Blackbaud said it expects those tools will be useful to its customers, including in sectors other than higher education.

Blackbaud executives said they will use Reeher’s platform to expand Blackbaud’s own predictive capabilities by providing a better understanding of how fundraising campaigns compare with one another.

During an earnings call Monday, Blackbaud CEO Mike Gianoni said the acquisition does not change Blackbaud’s engineering strategy, “but for us and for our customers, it advances capabilities pretty significantly for major gift officers in larger institutions.”

Gianoni said the tech firm was attracted to Reeher’s focus on analytics, performance and data. He said the platform will help institutions ensure individual fundraisers are campaigning effectively, which improves fundraising outcomes.

“It’s a really cool platform that really uses analytics to drive performance,” Gianoni said. “So, you could think of the platform as a team-based platform for a major gift officer team to drive that team’s performance. And it also pulls data from multiple customers, so that team can compare their performance to industry performance. And that’s really the basis of what this is about.”