On Giving Tuesday, the annual event devoted to philanthropy, Blackbaud processed nearly $63 million in gifts, a significant chunk of the roughly $380 million charities raised that day.
But Blackbaud’s total probably could have been higher. On Giving Tuesday, some nonprofits that relied on the company’s Online Express product to help them solicit and process gifts said they faced service outages. The result was frustrated donors and fundraisers, and the possible loss of dollars that charities would otherwise have received.
For some charities, it was the second year in a row they experienced glitches using the Blackbaud product on Giving Tuesday.
In a statement released Tuesday evening, a week after the event, the company said it had reached out to its customers and acknowledged that “a small subset of customers using Blackbaud Online Express for #GivingTuesday campaigns experienced intermittent issues.”
The statement further described the problem with the cloud-based platform as being “caused by a defect in a key third-party framework which supports our application.” The company would not name the third party or say how many clients were affected.
Blackbaud said its systems for Online Express have been restored and that it has been working with the other company to make sure problems did not reoccur.
The company pledged to continue being transparent with its customers about the problems and solutions. It also said that Blackbaud understands that Giving Tuesday is “a mission-critical day” for its customers.
“Although donation volumes processed via Online Express achieved an all-time high this year, we deeply regret that some customers did not have an experience that lives up to their — and our — high standards,” the statement read. Blackbaud added: “In addition to reconciling this situation in partnership with any affected customers, we will invest all we are learning from this to be better.”
Frustrated Fundraisers
A spokeswoman for Giving Tuesday’s organizers at the 92nd Street Y, in New York, said they were not aware of specific charities that were affected by tech glitches.
But some individual fundraisers took to social media to complain while the problems were happening; the Chronicle counted about a dozen on Twitter. When the Blackbaud Corporate Solutions Twitter feed asked followers if they saw the company’s representative ring the Nasdaq closing bell on Giving Tuesday, Lydia McNeil, communications manager at Walden Family Services, tweeted back from her personal account, “We missed it because we were on the phone with donors who weren’t able to give because of #onlineexpress. But hey, sounds like fun.”
For roughly three hours on Giving Tuesday, fundraisers at Walden Family Services, a social-service charity in San Diego, couldn’t process online donations. It learned of the glitches an hour after sending out a Giving Tuesday appeal to its donors, according to McNeil.
Visitors to the charity’s donation page saw only a donor-advised-fund donation widget and instructions to give by check, but the rest of the page was blank. The charity received numerous calls, texts, and emails from donors who couldn’t complete their donations.
The problems were resolved after Walden’s director of development, Kathryn Stephens, alerted Blackbaud’s customer-service representatives by phone and email on Giving Tuesday.
“They did apologize to us for any inconvenience via Twitter, but that’s not the same as acknowledging their failure to provide the service for which they’re paid,” McNeil wrote in an email to the Chronicle.
Ultimately, she reports, the charity’s officials think the group lost more than $5,000 in gifts that day; it raised $1,795 on a $10,000 goal. Next year, McNeil wrote, the organization is likely to use Facebook’s giving tools for Giving Tuesday instead.
“Lost donations ultimately affect the people who count on the many services nonprofits provide — it’s a heartbreaking turn of events,” she wrote.
Archbishop Spalding High School, a private institution in Severn, Md., had a better Giving Tuesday, raising more than $25,000 on a goal of $18,000.
Still, the total might have been higher if not for the problems donors faced with Blackbaud’s system, writes Carol Gordon, associate director of alumni giving and alumni relations, in an email to the Chronicle. “Unfortunately, we may never know how many donations were lost,” she writes.
Beginning around 11 a.m. on Giving Tuesday, Gordon writes, donors had trouble viewing the donation page and typing in their information, and some were charged more than once. The school’s staff fielded complaints from about 40 supporters.
The school experienced similar problems with Blackbaud last year, Gordon writes. She is not mollified by the statement Blackbaud sent to its clients on Tuesday.
“We aren’t hopeful that Blackbaud will offer a proper resolution to this issue as their recent customer email did not include more than a written apology and the excuse that the errors were due to a third-party framework that we use. We have tried to be supportive of Blackbaud, but it is difficult when they are not supportive of their clients.”
At Antioch College, fundraisers fielded complaints from donors on Giving Tuesday beginning around noon. Donation pages through the Online Express system were not loading, links in emails were not working, and Antioch’s fundraisers couldn’t create or send emails.
It’s hard to estimate how many donations were lost as a result, said James Lippincott, the college’s director of alumni and external relations. Most frustrating for him, he said, is the damage Blackbaud’s problems may do to Antioch’s reputation with its supporters. The college, which closed due to financial issues in 2008 and restarted at the dawn of this decade, has worked hard to establish trust with its supporters.
“It could be interpreted that our systems are not functioning properly or that we are not responsive,” he said. “It reflects on us.”
A Surge of Donor Interest
To be sure, outages happen on busy days. J. Crew, for example suffered a major outage on Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving. But the problems at Blackbaud, which echo an outage on Kimbia during a May 2016 nationwide giving day, do raise questions about whether nonprofits and their providers are up to a big rise in traffic.
Amy Sample Ward, CEO of NTEN, an organization of nonprofit technology professionals, echoes that sentiment in an email to the Chronicle.
“Ultimately, I don’t think this is about Blackbaud or Kimbia or any single provider,” Ward writes. “I think it is the reality of putting so much emphasis on a single day. Any day of the year there are things that may happen outside our control.”
She doesn’t want to discourage charities from participating in Giving Tuesday or other giving days. However, she adds, participating in those events “should be part of a larger and more holistic fundraising strategy and campaign. This is how organizations can better manage issues that arise in real time.”
Finding Solutions
Lori Finch, now a marketing consultant in Washington, worked as Kimbia’s vice president for community giving during the Give Local America outage in 2016. (The company is now owned by GiveGab.) She said the Blackbaud case demonstrates that it’s smart to gather more information about giving-software options. But, she cautions, don’t make a hasty decision: Changing providers can be costly and disruptive.
“Take deep breaths,” Finch advises. “The benefit of working in the nonprofit sector is that people are giving to you because they want to give to you. And hopefully those donors are sticking with you.”
Julian Wyllie contributed to this article.
Correction: A previous version of this article referred to Lori Finch as Lori French.
