Blackbaud Inc Q1 FY2025 Earnings Call

Greetings and welcome to Blackbaud's First Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Tom Barth, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you, sir. You may begin.

Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us on Blackbaud's first quarter 2025 earnings call. Joining me on the call today will be Mike Gianoni, Blackbaud's CEO, President and Vice Chairman; Tony Boor, Blackbaud's Executive Vice President and CFO; and Chad Anderson, Blackbaud's Chief Accounting Officer. Mike, Tony and Chad will make prepared comments, and then we will open up the line for your questions. Please note that our comments today contain forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Please refer to our most recent Form 10-K and other SEC filings for more information on those risks. The discussion today will focus on non-GAAP results. Please refer to our press release and the investor materials posted on our website for the full details on our financial performance, including GAAP results, as well as full year guidance. We believe that a combination of both GAAP and non-GAAP measures are more representative of how we internally measure our business. Unless otherwise specified, we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Please note that non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute GAAP measures. And with that, I'll turn the call over to you, Mike.

Thank you, Tom and good morning, everyone. Last quarter, I spent some time discussing the strong financial progress Blackbaud has made over the past 5 years across both our top and bottom lines. We continue to extend our position as the market leader and provide the most comprehensive suite of purpose-built and mission-critical software and services to the social impact sector. Our solutions allow customers to spend more time focusing on what matters to them: their vital social impact work at hospitals, private schools, universities, nonprofits, companies, and through individual acts of generosity. We remain the premier software partner across the social impact space. Our solid first quarter and Rule of 40 attainment give me confidence that Blackbaud is well positioned on our journey to the Rule of 45 by 2030. In the first quarter, Blackbaud generated revenue of $271 million, which is 5.8% organic growth, a non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA margin of 34.3%, non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.96, and a Rule of 40 score of 40.1%. These results are a testament to the resilience of our business in challenging times. The social impact market has been a consistent grower for many decades through recessions, business upturns and downturns, and even through the COVID-19 global pandemic. I know there are concerns about federal grant funding and how it impacts our customers, but much like in COVID, this uncertainty only makes our software more critical to our customers' operations, enabling them to improve fundraising outcomes and to undertake or sharpen their own cost management initiatives. To be clear, our solutions are not in the funds flow from federal agencies but are used for fundraising from individual donors, which is even more critical now. We are proud to play a vital role in supporting our customers' operations as they navigate change. Blackbaud has also undertaken a number of operational initiatives that set us up to perform well even in a challenging market. In 2023, we began transitioning our contractual revenue contracts from primarily one-year to primarily three-year renewal terms. This modernized approach to contract terms provides increased visibility and consistency for nearly two-thirds of our revenue base and provides better predictability for our customers. Over the past several years, we have transitioned the majority of our products and customers to the third-party cloud while shutting down many of our private data centers, with only two of our own data centers remaining. We continue to innovate through the use of AI to not only empower our customers, but also improve our own internal productivity. Lastly, we have rightsized our operations by further rationalizing office leases and renegotiating significant vendor contracts. Despite a strong focus on reducing expenses, we continue to invest aggressively in innovation, in our extensive developer network to help our customers raise more money while enhancing and streamlining their operations. Our innovation and end-to-end workflows continue to be a competitive differentiator and drive sales. We are supporting this innovation through enhancements in sales and marketing programs, and we continue to identify, experiment, and scale a range of successful solutions across marketing, customer success, and engineering to be an active innovator through applied AI. We saw the positive market reaction to our focus here earlier this month at our Corporate Social Impact Summit in Dallas. The summit brought together hundreds of executives from leading companies across the U.S. to share insights and drive meaningful change. Attendees received an exclusive preview of product innovations, including how we are integrating our YourCause portfolio with our payments and fundraising solutions, expanding the use of AI to transform the grant-making process, helping companies unleash generosity globally, and revolutionizing corporate social impact reporting through our partnership with True Impact. YourCause has made significant strides in innovation particularly with our announcement of Expedited Giving. Expedited Giving will transform the way employee donations and eligible match funding are processed, ensuring that nonprofits receive corporate donations directly and faster than ever before, which is especially critical during disaster response efforts. This initiative will soon begin testing with a select group of pilot corporations and nonprofits, expediting employee donation securities that have Blackbaud integrated payments customers. The key value proposition here for customers is to reduce the time lag of an employee donation to a nonprofit to just a day or two. In addition to investing in our innovation, we plan to use our cash flow to repurchase Blackbaud shares. As you recall, in 2024, the company bought back 10% of the common stock outstanding. When you include the net share settlement on employee stock compensation, the figure rises to 11%. In the first quarter of 2025, we repurchased approximately 4%, well within our plans of buying between 3% to 5% of our outstanding shares in 2025. Before I close, I also want to take this opportunity to say a special thank you to Tony Boor. Tony is transitioning his CFO duties to Chad Anderson later today. Tony has been a great CFO, and I'm very grateful to him for his many contributions to Blackbaud's growth and success. Over the last 14 years, Tony has developed an outstanding finance organization, and he's instilled a strong operational and financial discipline across the company. I look forward to continuing to work with Tony in his new role as EVP of Corporate Development and Strategy to help ensure a smooth transition and continue to drive our success and operational excellence. One of his key focus areas will be to help lead our charge to be a Rule of 45 company. I'm delighted about Chad's promotion as CFO. Chad is a highly accomplished global finance executive and 12-year veteran of Blackbaud, with a deep knowledge of our business, our customers, and the industry. Chad has successfully led many key and impactful projects to mature, modernize, and improve the efficiency and accuracy of the company's financial systems, processes, and organizations. Having worked closely with Chad for over a decade, I'm looking forward to benefiting from his experience and knowledge in the role of CFO as we work to deliver profitable growth for our shareholders in 2025 and beyond. There will be a formal press release and 8-K at the end of the day today. Let me conclude with why Blackbaud continues to be a sound investment choice that we believe should create substantial shareholder value, and our performance in Q1 reinforces that belief. Regarding organic revenue, you can expect mid-single-digit plus organic revenue growth driven by visible and full recurring revenue streams targeting both new logos and expansion of our installed base empowered by innovation. You can continue to expect a strong focus on cost and employee productivity to improve EBITDA. Additionally, our strong free cash flow will drive a purposeful capital allocation strategy in 2025 and beyond, with a plan to buy back up to 5% of common stock outstanding in 2025. We look forward to our continued journey in offering our shareholders increasing value in the coming years as we make progress against our Rule of 45 ambition by 2030. With that, let me turn the call over to Tony.

Thanks for the kind words, Mike, and good morning everyone. I believe Blackbaud is positioned for long-term success, delivering consistent growth and industry-leading profitability. I'm very pleased to be turning the reins over to Chad Anderson whom I've worked with for more than 20 years, most recently as my Chief Accounting Officer. I look forward to helping Chad, Mike, and the team in the near term, focused on the corporate development strategy role. I'm confident that this transition will be seamless. With that, let me dive into the details of our Q1 financial results. As Mike outlined, Blackbaud performed well in the first quarter, kicking off a good start to the year. We remain committed to providing investors an attractive financial model balance between growth in revenues, earnings, and cash flows along with a prudent and purposeful capital allocation strategy. Mike walked through the high-level Q1 results which tell a strong story of improving top-line growth and dramatically improved profitability. But to reiterate, Q1 organic revenues were up 5.8% to $271 million. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA of $93 million was up approximately $4 million with a 250 basis point improvement to margin. As you know, we previously only reported stand-alone revenue for EVERFI because it was not a separate reportable segment for us. But we estimate that EVERFI's contribution to our 2024 EBITDA was approximately $10 million to $15 million. The mid-single-digit organic revenue growth and improved EBITDA margin speaks to the power of our 5-point operating plan, which positively impacted earnings per share. Non-GAAP EPS increased to $0.96 compared to $0.93 last year. Adjusted free cash flow was negative $11 million in the quarter. As a reminder, Q1 tends to be our lowest quarter for free cash flow generation. The first quarter of 2025 included the one-time cash release payment associated with the Washington, D.C. office lease that we discussed on last quarter's call. Increased interest expense related to our share repurchase program and fluctuations in the timing of vendor payments also negatively impacted free cash flow in the quarter. However, our expected free cash flow for the year gives us confidence to continue investment in a number of critical areas like product innovation and stock repurchases. In Q1, we bought back approximately 4% of our outstanding shares and continue to demonstrate a strong commitment to our belief in the value of Blackbaud. It was a strong first quarter and start to the year. Before I move on to guidance for the remainder of 2025, there are several housekeeping items I want to highlight that may influence our numbers and help you to set your models for both the year and quarters appropriately. Thinking about revenue seasonality, recall that the fourth quarter is typically our highest revenue quarter, while the first quarter is our lowest due to the timing of charitable giving and events throughout the year. Q1 tends to be our lowest quarter from a profitability standpoint due to timing and expenses related to employee benefits and employee stock or investing. Our annual merit increases for employee compensation go into effect on July 1 every year. So Q3 tends to have higher compensation-related costs compared to Q2. Moving now to guidance for the remainder of 2025. Our guidance for the year remains unchanged and assumes no material changes—good or bad—in the current macroeconomic landscape related to the markets we serve. For the year, we are projecting revenue in the range of $1.115 billion to $1.125 billion, representing organic growth of 4.2% to 5.1% or 4.5% to 5.4% on a constant currency basis. Shifting to profitability, we will continue to focus on margin expansion opportunities while at the same time making investments in the business and areas of innovation, artificial intelligence, product road maps, and cybersecurity. Therefore we anticipate EBITDA margins of approximately 34.9% to 35.9%. This does take into account what I mentioned earlier that EVERFI's contribution to our 2024 EBITDA was approximately $10 million to $15 million. And with the overall revenue and spend configuration I just outlined, we expect 2025 non-GAAP EPS in the range of $4.16 to $4.35 per share or up 2% to 7% year-over-year. The combination of consistent organic revenue growth and improved margin is expected to result in a Rule of 40 at constant currency of 40.4% at the midpoint of guidance for the full year, more than 150 basis point improvement year-over-year. We continue to have a sharp focus on driving adjusted free cash flow and returning capital to our shareholders. For the year, we are guiding to adjusted free cash flow of $185 million to $195 million. This guidance range is inclusive of several one-time investments that will provide long-term benefits to the company and shareholders, including the buyout of the Washington, D.C. office lease, which was a $28 million cash expenditure in Q1 that would have been $42 million if we kept the lease for the full term, and will provide a benefit to adjusted EBITDA moving forward. Additionally, we expect to incur approximately $11 million of incremental interest expense year-over-year, comprised of roughly $30 million in interest for our 2024 and planned 2025 stock repurchases offset by the pay down of debt using discretionary cash. Finally, we expect an approximately $15 million decline year-over-year in other factors, including the timing of certain working capital items and divestiture-related costs. You can find more details on Slide 24 of our Investor Day. Looking to the future, we believe adjusted free cash flow will continue to grow and anticipate, at a minimum, repurchasing shares to offset dilution from share-based compensation. Beyond that, the company has tremendous optionality to dynamically allocate capital to its highest use based on market conditions, including additional stock repurchases, synergistic M&A, or repayment of debt. The performance of our stock, the interest rate environment, and the availability of acquisitions will help inform our capital allocation decisions going forward. We have a lot to be proud of and a lot more to look forward to through 2025 and beyond, with a goal of becoming a Rule of 45 company by 2030. As such, we remain focused on providing enhanced value to our customers and to our shareholders. Before we jump to Q&A, let me introduce Chad, and again, congratulate him on a well-deserved promotion.

Thanks, Tony, and you, Mike, for the kind words. It's been a pleasure working closely with you both over the past decade, and I look forward to following your example of professionalism and business leadership in the years ahead. Operator, let's open up the line for questions.

Thank you. Our first question comes from Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking my question and congrats to Chad. And Tony, it's truly been a pleasure. I hope you won't be a stranger in the new role. Mike, I just wanted to follow up on some of your prepared remarks on the DOGE impact. I very much understand how you can help customers through that and the mission criticality of your software but also curious, have you seen any changes on the gross retention side or the bookings environment in light of this, understanding that a lot of this is outside of your control.

Yes. Brian, good question. First of all, our solutions are not in the fund flow of federal grants. I think that's important. Some of our customers are getting impacted by this. It frankly makes our donation platforms more important. Our platforms are pointed toward individual donors and alumni and things, so we become more important from a revenue source standpoint for customers. We've seen no impact on sales bookings, no impact on building sales pipeline, no impact on existing customers or retention. The biggest test of the health of our end markets was COVID because we had customers that closed their doors, performing art centers and K-12 schools and others. We lost new customers, and we didn't have any go out of business even then. That was the biggest test of the health of the end market. So it might cause some difficulty for some of our larger customers, but we don't see an impact on our business anywhere.

Got it. And Tony, maybe one follow-up for you. Just as we are thinking about the transactional business, how did that perform relative to your expectations in the first quarter? And as we're thinking about that mid-single-digit organic growth outlook, how do we think about the transactional impacting that?

Yes, Brian. The transactions were the biggest driver of overperformance in the quarter. We did well across the board. So as Mike said, retention held up fine, and bookings were actually pretty good for the quarter as well and have been through April. As you know, we had a good Q4. So from a recurring revenue perspective, we're well on track for the year at this point. Transactions, our guide included a little bit of incremental transaction revenue related to L.A. wildfires, but that was in the original guide. As we've stated, when we're providing our longer-term outlook of that mid-single-digit typically is going to relate to the transaction. I think we came in at just about 9% or a little over 9% growth in Q1 transactions, about $2 million in incremental revenue for the quarter, which pushed us up to that kind of 5.8% or 5.9% on constant currency. It’s really hard, as you know, to predict the volatility in some of the transactional revenue. We've not built in those viral giving events this year into the guide. So if we do see more of those like we have with the wildfires, we'd have some incremental upside on the year.

Our next question comes from Rob Oliver with Baird. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thank you, good morning guys. Appreciate it. Tony, I'll echo what Brian said, I wish you the best of luck and it's been a pleasure working with you. My question is for you. Just I guess another way to attack the macro. Clearly, you guys don't have direct exposure to federal. I know you said you haven't seen any change in the behavior of your customers, but it does seem like there is a painful residual effect happening with some of the customers in your market who are exposed to grants or cash flows coming from federal agencies. So in light of that, you guys maintain guidance, obviously, off of a good Q1, driven by transactions. But just wanted to get a sense for you as you thought about the guidance for this year. What sort of macro was contemplated in that guidance? And then secondly, just around the mid-single-digit plus comment, it does seem like a little bit of an uptick from the optionality comment you guys had previously made about the option for upside for mid-single digits. I wanted to understand if I'm reading that right and what that increased confidence might be and what the timeframe is for that.

Hi, Rob, it's Mike. I'll start here and then Tony can kick in. Most of our customers don't get federal grants. Many of our larger nonprofits do, but if you think about the vertical markets we're in K-12, which is a big space for us, performing art centers and other spaces. You have faith-based customers, churches, and synagogues. We have the JustGiving platform in the U.K. You can walk across the company’s vertical markets we serve and the revenue-generating platforms that create revenue for us, and there's very little impact from the end customers that typically receive federal grants. So the noise is a lot in the world, but related to Blackbaud, it is not a big part of the customer funding. We have many customers, including regional food banks, among others. So we are pretty well spread across all the vertical markets that 501(c)3 or educational institutions occupy. It just is not a large impact overall. We haven't seen it, like I said, in bookings, retention, or our sales pipeline for this quarter and the rest of the year. Therefore, we don't expect a big impact on our business. For some of our customers not getting funding, we are working with them to integrate our AI capabilities and predictive analytics that can drive more revenue from individual donors, and it is becoming a more attractive and essential product for them to drive their revenue. When we set the original guidance for the year, we used wording around no material changes in the macro. I think when we said that a couple of months ago, we are sticking with that because we don't really see it. Related to growth, yes. We issued guidance at mid-single digits plus. We just saw some plus in Q1. We're not changing the guidance for the year right now. We're two months away from closing out Q2. We'll have a better view when we report on Q2 in the summertime, but we've had a really great start to the year, and we don't foresee the macro having a negative impact on us. So we're feeling very optimistic going forward for the rest of the year.

Great. Very helpful. Thank you guys.

You’re welcome.

Our next question comes from Parker Lane with Stifel. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, this is Matthew Kikkert on for Parker. Thank you for taking my questions. Congratulations to both Tony and Chad on the long tenure and the promotion. Last quarter, we talked a lot about the net new emphasis for 2025. Just curious about what you saw from that subsegment in Q1 and what the net new pipeline looks like for the rest of the year?

Yes. We talked about a big focus on new logos, and we've made that pivot successfully, and that pivot is behind us. It was just a small part of our bookings, which were conversions from legacy product to cloud product, that's largely behind us now. The focus on new bookings has materialized really quite well. New bookings were up substantially in the first quarter this year. The pipeline looks good. So we're excited about new bookings across the vertical markets that we serve.

Okay. That's great to hear. My second question was on the global market. The JustGiving part of the business is based in the U.K. and you have some exposure to international markets. What are you seeing in international markets versus the opportunity here domestically?

Yes, we are doing quite well in the Asia Pacific area, with good sales bookings and strong customer retention. Across Europe as well, JustGiving is performing well. It has great brand recognition in the U.K. and many other parts of Europe, with major events like the London Marathon utilizing it frequently. It continues to perform well for us. We also see a lot of upside in the future for our YourCause platform for corporations. I mentioned in my prepared remarks that we just had a small customer event in Dallas, where we had over 100 customers from many Fortune 500 companies, and there's great interest in YourCause and employee engagement. YourCause is a leading platform in the world in that space. Thus, we have high hopes around the future for that and continuing to drive that platform as well. New product sales and new logos are going very well.

Our next question comes from Koji Ikeda with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, good morning. Hi, guys. Thanks so much for taking the questions, and I echo the statements on congrats to Chad, and thank you, Tony. It's been a pleasure. Maybe taking a big step back here and asking a big picture question on your end-market. I'm hearing a lot of confidence in the prepared remarks and in the answers to the Q&A about your confidence in the end market demand environment. What is it about your end market that is giving you the confidence in the resiliency for this year?

Yes, sure. The end markets are pretty healthy, like I said already in the call, and the amount of innovation that we've come out with is resonating with customers and new prospects. Back in the fall at our annual conference called BBCon in Seattle, we announced what we call six ways of innovation, and we've been delivering on that. There's a lot of AI capabilities in our products now, with much better integration across the products. Our ability to cross-sell and drive innovation is yielding notably good results in new logos and cross-selling as well. We have a healthy market in all the verticals that we serve, as I mentioned earlier. Our engineering and product teams are doing a great job of driving innovation with some new solutions, improved user interface, user experience, better integration, embedded predictive analytics, and integrated AI that resonate with customers.

Got it. Thank you. Maybe a follow-up here kind of digging in a little bit more specifically on the contract renewals for this year. I know you guys have about 25% of the mix coming up for renewal. How are those conversations going specifically? Is there any sort of seasonality in the contract renewal cycle this year that we should be aware of? Is it more front-end weighted, or is it more back-half weighted this year? Thank you.

Yes, sure. It's going well. Our customer retention remains really high. That hasn't changed even since we started this program. The customer retention numbers are high. Conversations are going well; customers understand this has become a normal course of business now. It's not new anymore because it's been a couple of years. We notify customers five or six months ahead of time, so there's plenty of time for any discussions if needed. Many of our smaller and mid-tier customers are on auto renewals. We've standardized on three-year contracts. Larger customers prefer longer-term, four- to five-year contracts. We're not the only software supplier; our customers buy software from other vendors, including us, at the same time. This is normal for them to see this across multiple vendors, not just Blackbaud. This process is normal and moving well; retentions are still in the 92 to 93 percentile. It is just part of the regular course of business, and customers appreciate our continuous innovation; responding regularly through our webinars and customer updates where thousands participate in discussing roadmaps and innovations.

On the seasonality, that is still going to be higher in Q2. The first part of Q3 is when we have the bigger surge in the renewals; that probably shouldn't change much even with all the new contracting we are going through.

Got it. Thank you so much. One more thing: I think you guys already repurchased 3% of your common stock target mix of the 5% already for 2025. If you guys hit that target early, will there be any thought process of potentially increasing the share buyback program? Thank you.

Thanks for that question. We hit about 4.2% by the end of Q1. We had net share settles for all the normal vesting that we'd usually have in the first quarter, and we bought back $100 million worth of stock. It puts us at about 15% total that we've now purchased back in the last year. We've done a great job from a capital allocation perspective. Debt is up a little bit, as you saw, and interest expense is up a bit. We will, as we do every quarter and year, continue to look at that capital allocation strategy. We'll reevaluate based on market conditions with share price, etc. But we're well on our way towards the 3% to 5% goal for the year.

Thank you so much.

Our next question comes from Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, thanks very much and good morning congrats to Tony and Chad on the new roles. Mike, I was wondering if you could remind us about the thought process on the monetization of some of your AI technologies? How are you thinking about that rolling through contracts with your existing clients or in monetization with some of your net-new clients?

Kirk, thanks for the question. Like I said, we have done a lot of work over the last 18 months with embedded AI and predictive analytics in our solutions, including generative AI, which is available. We are launching a technical preview of Blackbaud Copilot, which is going to come out in some of our products in the next several months. That's going to be a really interesting addition to our solutions. Our customers will be able to interact with our products and their data by asking natural-language questions, which is really impactful because we have all this data in our systems given we've been at this for a long time. That's a differentiated position for us. AI needs a lot of data, and we have that. So the Blackbaud Copilot will be rolling out in the next couple of months, and we are conducting tech reviews. On the further agenda, our Agentic AI solutions will be embedded as well. So far, we have not charged separately for any of these capabilities, as we feel we need to drive lots of innovation, including some of this. Given the three-year contract renewals, we've started with some price increases to ensure our customers are getting a lot of value from us, and they are. Agentic AI is a different story; we are looking at monetization models for Agentic AI in the future. We are observing what other firms are doing and determining what is appropriate. But up until now, all the embedded predictive analytics and AI are included in the contractual pricing.

Okay, that's super helpful. Tony, I know you guys think about the world correctly in constant currency terms, but the dollar has pulled back significantly. If the dollar stays at its current rate, that would likely be a tailwind for you when we look out over the remainder of the year? Any rough thoughts on that?

Yes, Kirk, you are right. The currency has been moving a lot. It's a bit more favorable right now when I look at that forward curve versus when we generated guidance. So there could be a bit of a tailwind for us if that holds.

Okay, thanks very much. I appreciate it, guys.

Thank you, Kirk, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We will be attending a number of investor events in May and June, including several conferences listed on our Events page on our Investor Relations site. We hope to see you then and also to speak with you very soon. Thank you, and have a nice day.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.