Blackbaud, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLKB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Parker Lane: Understood. Appreciate it guys. Thanks.

Michael Gianoni: You are welcome.

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

Kirk Materne: Thanks and congrats on the nice quarter. Mike, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about sort of your thought process on sort of organic innovation versus acquisition at this point in time. We’re at sort of a different period in terms of where interest rates are. And I was just kind of curious, when you think out three to five years, do you feel good about the ability to perhaps be a little bit more focused on organic, I know you have it, it’s not like you weren’t, but less dependent on M&A as you go forward, I realize that’s always a balance, but just kind of curious how you’re thinking about it given where rates are? And I just have a quick follow-up for Tony.

Michael Gianoni: Yes, sure. So we’ve been fairly inquisitive as a company. We made a small acquisition last year, which is a technology expansion that’s worked out very, very well. We made a small equity interest in one of our startup partner businesses recently. And those are technology investments to add to our innovation pipeline. Our focus this year has been doing some things that we’ve already talked about and announced, frankly, related to capital such as closing out the litigation with the Attorney Generals and paying that, which we have, paying down debt, as Tony mentioned. We’re still expecting to be around two — levered at two by the end of the year, close to there now. We mentioned in our prepared remarks that we’re going to be back in the market in our buyback program.

We’ve got $250 million authorized by the Board that we haven’t really executed on because we were focused on paying down debt and closing this out with the Attorney General. So that’s sort of some insight into capital thinking, if you will. And Tony also mentioned that when we announced the Q4 and the year, and the guidance for next year, we’ll also talk about long-term capital allocation strategy as well. Related to M&A, we’re still active in the market. We’ve got a really good go-forward view on really strong organic growth as well. But there are still really good acquisition opportunities out there for us to expand TAM and expand a number of products per customer as well. Like Impact Edge of new organic build that will do that, more products per customer, but there’s still opportunities in M&A for the same.

Kirk Materne: That’s helpful. And then Tony, just a quick one for you. You mentioned sort of some of the — it seemed like a little bit onetime benefits in transactional this quarter around the Hawaii wild fire relief and the BBMS rate change. Were those meaningful, it seemed like the performance was largely driven just by better activity levels, but I was just kind of curious how we should think about that on sort of a seasonal basis, I guess?

Anthony Boor: Yes, Kirk, I don’t think that the viral stuff was that significant in the quarter, obviously contributes. We end up, as you are aware, you’ve been following us a long time, we have a lot of different drivers on the transaction side of the business that at times will cause a little bit of volatility but not meaningful material to the overall revenue numbers. We had continued to see good traction in BBMS and good growth on that front. Overall, Tuition Management also has done well. The number of families at the private schools that we support is up year-on-year. We have had some price increases on both BBMS and BBTM. And then the YourCause business has some transaction components that’s done well. And then JustGiving has also done well in the UK.