For years, Blackbaud has been signaling that Raiser’s Edge NXT would eventually move to one unified experience. For years, users have heard that Database View would go away at some point. Now, “eventually” has a date: September 15, 2027.
If you’re a CEO, executive director, chief advancement officer, or development leader, you may be wondering why this matters. After all, you probably aren’t entering gifts, importing records, or running data updates yourself.
The answer is simple: the people who keep your fundraising operation running are!
Week after week, someone on your team downloads files from giving platforms, imports gifts, updates constituent records, merges duplicate accounts, prepares lists for appeals, processes event registrations, and makes sure donor acknowledgments reach the right mailbox. Much of that work has historically happened in Database View.
Most leaders never see it.
They see campaign reports, donor portfolios, pipeline dashboards, and board materials. They log into NXT on the web, pull up a donor record, glance at fundraising progress, and move on with their day.
Behind those dashboards sits a different set of users. Advancement services professionals, database administrators, gift processors, and operations staff often spend hours working in Database View because that’s where many of the tools they rely on have lived. Global changes. Imports. Single-line data exports. Tested-and-true batch processing.
Blackbaud is moving those functions into Web View and accelerating development to meet the September 2027 deadline. New capabilities are arriving over the next year, and organizations have a limited window to test them before Database View disappears.
First things first, your data is not moving anywhere. *Sigh of relief.*
Donor records, gift history, constituent information, and fundraising data will stay inside Raiser’s Edge NXT. The change is in how your team interacts with that information and how connected tools support those workflows.
For some staff members, that will feel exciting. For others, it may feel like having the furniture rearranged in a room they’ve worked in for fifteen years.
Leaders should expect an adjustment period and, importantly, make room for it. Some system administration features aren’t expected to be released until sometime in 2027, which could give teams a limited window to test new workflows and make adjustments before Database View goes away. That work will take time on top of everything your operations team is already doing.
Start Planning Before the Deadline Gets Close
To navigate this transition successfully, start planning long before September 2027 arrives. Sit down with your database, advancement services, and operations teams and ask questions like:
Then give your team the space to do the work. Test workflows. Validate integrations. Learn new processes. Identify bottlenecks. Make adjustments while there is still time to do so.
Most importantly, build time into your 2027 plans now.
Over the coming months, Campbell & Company will host a series of 30-minute webinars to help nonprofit organizations prepare for the transition. The series will be led by consultant Steph Venskoske, who is currently helping organizations navigate their own shift from Database View to Web View.
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