Yesterday’s widespread system outage highlighted a major opportunity for improvement in Blackbaud’s incident response process.

When RE NXT and related services went down, many of us were left uncertain whether the issue was local, organization-specific, or systemwide. Because the official status page was not updated for approximately 30 minutes, users across the Blackbaud community spent valuable time troubleshooting independently, submitting support cases, and attempting to contact already overwhelmed support channels.

Proposed solution:
Implement a simple outage reporting form or automated incident submission process directly within Blackbaud’s ecosystem. This could allow users experiencing service disruptions to quickly report issues, helping Blackbaud detect patterns faster and escalate widespread outages sooner.

Potential benefits:
Faster identification of large-scale outages
More timely status page updates
Reduced strain on support phone and case systems
Less duplicated troubleshooting effort for customers
Improved customer confidence and communication during incidents

Community discussions often reveal the scope of issues faster than official channels, which suggests there is room for a more proactive and automated response system. As Blackbaud continues expanding and integrating more systems, strengthening outage communication infrastructure feels increasingly important.

There is a real opportunity here to create a more efficient early alert process that benefits both customers and Blackbaud support teams.

We can do this better, and I would welcome being part of that conversation.