UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

Form 10-K

Commission File Number: 000-50600

Blackbaud, Inc.

(Exact name of Registrant as specified in its charter)

2000 Daniel Island Drive

Charleston, South Carolina 29492

(Address of principal executive offices, including zip code)

(843) 216-6200

(Registrant’s telephone number, including area code)

Securities Registered Pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

None

Securities Registered Pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act:

Common Stock, $0.001 Par Value

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days.     YES þ          NO o

Indicate by check mark if disclosure of delinquent filers pursuant to Item 405 of Regulation S-K is not contained herein, and will not be contained, to the best of registrant’s knowledge, in definitive proxy or information statements incorporated by reference in Part III of this Form 10-K or any amendment to this Form 10-K.     o

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is an accelerated filer (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Act).     YES o          NO þ

The aggregate market value of the Registrant’s common stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant on July 26, 2004, which was the first trading day for the registrant’s common stock on the Nasdaq National Market (based on the closing sale price of $8.75 on that date), was approximately U.S. $86,033,124. Common stock held by each officer and director and by each person known to the registrant who owned 5% or more of the outstanding common stock have been excluded in that such persons may be deemed to be affiliates. This determination of affiliate status is not necessarily a conclusive determination for other purposes.

The number of shares of the registrant’s common stock outstanding at March 9, 2005 was 42,978,275.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

Portions of the Registrant’s definitive Proxy Statement to be filed for its 2005 Annual Meeting of Stockholders currently scheduled to be held June 21, 2005 are incorporated by reference into Part III of this report.

BLACKBAUD, INC.

ANNUAL REPORT ON FORM 10-K

Table of Contents

This report contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from historical results or those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of certain factors, including those set forth under “Cautionary Statement” under “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and elsewhere in this report and in our other SEC filings.

PART I

Overview

We are the leading global provider of software and related services designed specifically for nonprofit organizations. Our products and services enable nonprofit organizations to increase donations, reduce fundraising costs, improve communications with constituents, manage their finances and optimize internal operations. We have focused solely on the nonprofit market since our incorporation in 1982, and have developed our suite of products and services based upon our extensive knowledge of the operating challenges facing nonprofit organizations. In 2004, we had over 12,700 customers, over 12,300 of which pay us annual maintenance and support fees. Our customers operate in multiple verticals within the nonprofit market including religion, education, foundations, health and human services, arts and cultural, public and societal benefits, environment and animal welfare, and international and foreign affairs.

Industry background

The nonprofit industry is large and growing

Nonprofit organizations are a large part of the U.S. economy, employing one out of every ten Americans. There were greater than 1.5 million registered U.S. nonprofit organizations in 2003, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service. In addition, there are greater than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations outside the United States. Donations to nonprofit organizations in the United States were $241 billion in 2003, having increased almost every year since 1962, with a compound annual growth rate over that period of 7.8%, according to Giving USA. In addition, these organizations received fees of approximately $600 billion in the twelve months prior to December 2003 for services they provided. Worldwide, nonprofit organizations employ more than 19 million people and account for $1.1 trillion in total annual expenditures, according to the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project.

Traditional methods of fundraising are costly and inefficient

Many nonprofit organizations manage fundraising programs using manual methods or stand-alone software applications not specifically designed to meet the needs of nonprofit organizations. These fundraising methods are often costly and inefficient, largely because of the difficulties in effectively collecting, sharing and using information to maximize donations and minimize related costs. Some nonprofit organizations have developed proprietary software, but doing so can be expensive, requiring these organizations to hire technical personnel for development, implementation and maintenance functions. General purpose software and Internet applications typically offer stand-alone solutions with limited functionality that might not efficiently integrate multiple databases.

Fundraising and related administrative costs are significant. Based on our market research, an average $0.24 of each dollar donated is used by nonprofit organizations for their direct fundraising expenses alone. These expenses do not include additional administrative expenses associated with fundraising. Moreover, according to a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled, “The Nonprofit Sector’s $100 Billion Opportunity,” McKinsey & Company estimates that improvements in the efficiency of delivery of their services could result in savings to the nonprofit sector in excess of $55 billion annually.

The nonprofit industry faces particular operational challenges

Nonprofit organizations face distinct operational challenges. For example, nonprofit organizations generally must efficiently:

Because of these challenges, we believe nonprofit organizations can benefit from software applications specifically designed to serve their particular needs.

The Blackbaud solution

Our suite of products and services addresses the fundraising costs and operational challenges facing nonprofit organizations by providing them with software tools and services that help them increase donations, reduce the overall cost of managing their business and the fundraising process and improve communications with their constituents. We provide an operational platform through our three core software applications: The Raiser’s Edge, The Financial Edge and The Education Edge. In addition, we offer 36 extended applications providing distinct, add-on functionality tailored to meet the specific needs of our diverse customer base. To complement our operational platform, we offer a suite of analytical tools and related services that enable nonprofit organizations to extract, aggregate and analyze vast quantities of data to help them make better-informed operational decisions. We also help our customers increase the return on their technology investment by providing a broad array of complementary professional services, including implementation, business process improvement, education services, as well as maintenance and technical support.

Our solution is illustrated as follows:

Nonprofit organizations use our products and services to increase donations

Approximately 10,750 of our active customers currently subscribe to our annual maintenance and support for The Raiser’s Edge. In 2003, these customers raised an aggregate of more than $26 billion in contributions. These customers use The Raiser’s Edge to help them with their fundraising and donor management efforts. The complexity of managing constituent relationships and nonprofits’ reliance on charitable contributions make managing the fundraising process the critical business function for nonprofits. The Raiser’s Edge allows nonprofit organizations to establish, maintain and develop their relationships with current and prospective donors. Our fundraising products and services enable nonprofit organizations to use a centralized database, as well as the Internet and an array of analytical tools to facilitate and expand their fundraising efforts. We believe our products and services help nonprofit organizations increase donations by enabling them to:

In addition, our array of predictive donor modeling and wealth identification products and services, including ProspectPoint and WealthPoint, integrate important third-party data, including financial, geographic and demographic information, together with sophisticated analytical techniques to assist nonprofits in their efforts to more effectively identify and target willing and able donors. The result is that organizations are able to lower fundraising costs while at the same time increase donations.

We help nonprofit organizations operate more effectively and efficiently

Our products and services combine a comprehensive suite of software and analytical tools with a centralized database to help employees more effectively and efficiently manage the key aspects of their nonprofit organization’s operations. Our products automate nonprofit business processes to create efficiencies for our customers, which helps to reduce the overall costs of operating their organizations. For example, The Raiser’s Edge and our other core products automate data collection processes, which eliminates cumbersome and inaccurate manual processes. In addition, nonprofits use The Financial Edge, which integrates with The Raiser’s Edge, to eliminate duplicate entry of gift data and streamline processes for posting the results of fundraising activities to the organization’s general ledger. Nonprofit constituents can use The Financial Edge to view information in a single, integrated dashboard view that illustrates key performance metrics and detailed information on specific campaigns, funds and programs. These efficient communications are often critical to a nonprofit’s ability to effectively strengthen relationships with important supporters, while making effective use of valuable internal resources.

We provide solutions that address many of the technological and business process needs of our customers, including:

Our strategy

Our objective is to maintain and leverage our position as a leading provider of software and related services designed specifically for nonprofit organizations. Key elements of our strategy to achieve this objective are to:

Grow our customer base

We intend to expand our industry-leading customer base and enhance our market position. While we have established a strong presence in the nonprofit industry, we believe that the fragmented nature of the industry presents an opportunity for us to continue to increase our market penetration. We plan to achieve this objective by leveraging our experience in the nonprofit sector, our existing customer base and our strong brand recognition. We also intend to expand our overall sales efforts, especially national accounts, enterprise-focused sales teams and third-party sales channels.

Maintain and expand existing customer relationships

We have historically had success selling maintenance renewal and additional products and services to existing customers. In each of the past three years, an average of over 94% of our customers have renewed their maintenance and support plans for our products. We plan to continue to capitalize on our existing customer base by increasing both the number of our products and services they use and the frequency with which they use them. As part of this strategy, we have established a dedicated sales team to focus exclusively on selling products and services to our existing customers.

Introduce additional products and services

We intend to leverage our expertise and experience in developing leading products for the nonprofit industry to introduce additional products and related services, to continue to build stronger relationships with existing customers and to attract new customer relationships. We believe that our existing proprietary software and services can form the foundation for an even wider range of products and services for nonprofit organizations. Our current product offerings share approximately one-third of our proprietary code, and we anticipate that future product offerings will also share this backbone. We believe that this shared code allows us to more cost efficiently expedite the development and rollout of new products.

Leverage the Internet as a means of additional growth

We intend to continue to enhance our existing products and develop new products and services to allow our customers to more fully utilize the Internet to effectively achieve their missions. Although online fundraising composed less than 1% of all charitable contributions in 2003, we believe online donations will continue to grow as a percentage of total contributions and that nonprofits will continue to benefit from the trend of increased online donations. As such, we have web-enabled our core applications and currently offer a variety of Internet applications and consulting services that allow nonprofit organizations to utilize our fundraising, accounting and administration products to leverage the Internet for online fundraising, e-marketing, alumni and membership directories, newsletters, event management and volunteer coordination. For example, through December 31, 2004, we had sold our NetSolutions product, which is our online fundraising application, to over 1,000 customers.

Expand international presence

We believe that the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia as well as other international markets represent growing market opportunities. We currently have international offices in Glasgow, Scotland, Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia. We believe the overall market of international nonprofit organizations is changing as donations to nonprofit organizations are increasing in response to reductions in governmental funding of certain activities and expansion of U.S.-based nonprofit organizations into international locations. We believe these markets are currently underserved, and we intend to increase our presence in international markets by expanding our sales and marketing efforts, leveraging our installed base of customers to sell complementary products and services and continuing to offer and develop new products tailored to these international markets.

Pursue strategic acquisitions and alliances

We intend to continue to selectively pursue acquisitions and alliances in the future with companies that provide us with complementary technology, customers, personnel with significant relevant experience, increased access to additional geographic and specific vertical markets. We have completed three acquisitions in the past four years and are currently involved in a number of strategic relationships. We believe that our size and our history of leadership in the nonprofit sector make us an attractive acquiror or partner for others in the industry.

Products and services

We license software and provide various services to our customers. We generate revenue in six reportable segments, as described in more detail in note 14 of the Notes to our consolidated financial statements. These revenue segments are license fees and maintenance and subscription fees for our software products, consulting services, education services, analytic services, and other. In 2004, 2003 and 2002, revenue from the sale of The Raiser’s Edge and related services represented approximately 70%, 72% and 70%, respectively, of our total revenue.

Software products

The Raiser’s Edge

The Raiser’s Edge is the leading software application specifically designed to manage a nonprofit organization’s fundraising activity. The Raiser’s Edge enables nonprofit organizations to communicate with their constituents, manage fundraising activities, expand their development efforts and make better-informed decisions through its powerful segmentation, analysis, and reporting capabilities. We released version 7.7 of The Raiser’s Edge in October 2004. The functionality included in our current version of The Raiser’s Edge is the result of over 20 years of improvement incorporating the suggestions of our customers and innovations in technology. The Raiser’s Edge provides a comprehensive dashboard view that shows users important performance indicators for campaigns, appeals, funds, events, proposals, and membership drives. The Raiser’s Edge is highly customizable allowing a nonprofit organization to create numerous custom views of constituent records and automate a variety of business processes. The Raiser’s Edge contains a robust data management and storage system to help fundraisers use their data more effectively. Among other things, The Raiser’s Edge allows an organization to access extensive biographical and demographic information about donors and prospects, process gifts, monitor solicitation activity, analyze data and publish reports. The Raiser’s Edge improves the efficiency and effectiveness of a nonprofit organization by reducing overall mailing costs, offering faster data entry and gift processing, supporting major donor cultivation, using the Internet to send email appeals and accept online donations, and providing instant access to better information. The Raiser’s Edge also integrates with Microsoft® Office® to enable users to take advantage of additional functionality.

In addition to the standard functionality of The Raiser’s Edge, we have built a number of extended applications that may be enabled directly within The Raiser’s Edge and address the specific needs of various vertical markets. Our extended applications are described below.

The Financial Edge

The Financial Edge is an accounting application designed to address the specific accounting needs of nonprofit organizations. As with our other core applications, The Financial Edge integrates with The

Raiser’s Edge to simplify gift entry processing, relate information from both systems in an informative manner and eliminate redundant tasks. The Financial Edge improves the transparency and accountability of organizations by allowing them to track and report from multiple views, measure the effectiveness of programs and other initiatives, use budgets as monitoring and strategic planning tools, and supervise cash flow to allocate resources efficiently. As a result, The Financial Edge provides nonprofit organizations with the means to help manage fiscal and fiduciary responsibility, enabling them to be more accountable to their constituents. In addition, The Financial Edge is designed specifically to meet governmental accounting and financial reporting requirements prescribed by the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. We employ certified public accountants who work with our product development, professional services and customer support teams and who can apply their specialized training and background to assist our customers using The Financial Edge to help them comply with these accounting and reporting requirements. We released version 7.4 of The Financial Edge in December 2004.

As with The Raiser’s Edge, we have built extended applications that may be enabled directly within The Financial Edge to address the specific functional needs of our customers. We currently offer 26 such extended applications to accompany The Financial Edge, examples of which are described below.

The Education Edge

Our education administration products are a comprehensive student information management system designed principally to organize an independent school’s admissions and registrar processes, including capturing detailed student information, creating schedules, managing feedback and grading processes, producing demographic, statistic and analytical reports, and printing report cards and transcripts. With our education administration products, an organization can keep biographical and address information for students, parents, and constituents consistent across all of its Blackbaud software products. This integrated system allows an independent school to reduce data-entry time and ensure that information is current and accurate throughout the school. To date, we have marketed our education administration products under

the names Admissions Office and Registrar’s Office. We released a new version of our education administration offering in June 2004 under the name “The Education Edge”. This new version has additional functionality and an enhanced platform.

The Patron Edge

The Patron Edge, which we launched in June 2004, is a comprehensive ticketing management solution specifically designed to help large or small performing arts organizations, museums, zoos, and aquariums boost attendance and increase revenue. The Patron Edge can be used in conjunction with The Raiser’s Edge to allow for comprehensive marketing based on donor profiles or as a standalone ticketing and subscription sales management tool. The Patron Edge offers a variety of ticketing methods and allows customers to save time by streamlining ticketing, staffing, scheduling, event and membership management, and other administrative tasks. The Patron Edge decreases costs incurred by customers by reducing box office expenses and eliminating the transaction fees common to other online ticketing solutions.

The Information Edge

The Information Edge is an open and scalable business intelligence solution designed specifically to meet the needs of nonprofit organizations. We launched The Information Edge in August 2003. The Information Edge is an analysis and reporting tool that allows an organization to extract, aggregate and analyze its data to gain insight from multiple data sources and provide opportunities to increase revenues. The Information Edge extracts data from multiple highly indexed transactional databases, including The Raiser’s Edge, and integrates that data into a data warehouse that allows high-speed queries, complex analysis and reporting across the organization including remote locations. The Information Edge is optimized to assist an organization with its direct marketing and fundraising programs, including donor segmentation and campaign strategy.

Blackbaud Internet applications

We provide a variety of applications that allow our customers to use our fundraising, accounting and administration products via the Internet. For example, our NetSolutions product enables a nonprofit to conduct online fundraising, e-marketing, event management and volunteer coordination. We launched NetSolutions in August 2000 and released our most recent version in February 2004. Through December 31, 2004, we had sold our NetSolutions product to over 1,000 customers. We also offer our NetCommunity product, which allows our customers to establish an online community that offers interaction among constituents, email marketing and online-giving tools. NetCommunity integrates with The Raiser’s Edge, allowing nonprofits to leverage a single donor database.

In addition, we have web-enabled most of our applications to allow nonprofit organizations of all sizes to easily and efficiently interact with wider audiences through dynamic content and email campaigns securely from anywhere in the world. These solutions provide a wide variety of web-based online services including the ability for constituents to register for events, update demographic information, support an organization by volunteering and make donations. We provide real-time integration between our Internet and core applications, which significantly enhances the effectiveness of our solutions by tying all information directly to the back-office, which provides an organization with a single, comprehensive view of its constituents and volunteers.

Consulting services

Our consultants provide installation and implementation services for each of our software products. These services include:

In addition to these services, we apply our industry knowledge and experience, combined with our service offering expertise and expert knowledge of our products, to evaluate an organization’s needs and provide operational efficiency and business process improvement consulting for our customers. This work is performed by our staff of consultants who have extensive and relevant domain experience in fundraising, accounting, project management and IT services. This experience and knowledge allows us to make recommendations and implement solutions that ensure efficient and effective use of our products. In addition, we offer software customization services to organizations that do not have the time or in-house resources to create customized solutions using our core products. We believe that no other software company provides as broad a range of consulting and technology services and solutions dedicated to the nonprofit industry as we do.

Education services

We provide a variety of classroom, onsite and self-paced training services to our customers relating to the use of our software products and application of best practices. Our software instructors have extensive training in the use of our software and present course material that is designed to include hands-on lab exercises as well as a course workbook with examples and problems to solve. The education services segment has historically shown some seasonality, as our customers generally attend more training sessions during the second and third quarters of the year. Key aspects of our education services include:

Analytic services

We provide custom modeling and analytical services, including ProspectPoint and WealthPoint, to help nonprofit organizations maximize their fundraising results.

ProspectPoint, which we introduced in February 2001, is a custom modeling service designed specifically for nonprofits. ProspectPoint employs patent-pending modeling techniques to identify and rank the best donor prospects in an organization’s database and capture the distinct characteristics that define an organization and its constituencies, providing a better opportunity to maximize gift revenue. We use these proprietary statistical models to help our customers identify an individual’s propensity to make any of a number of different types of gifts, including annual fund gifts, major gifts and planned gifts. Our

consultants use the ProspectPoint results to prepare customized fundraising plans, which are delivered to our clients with a series of implementation recommendations for increasing the yield of its fundraising efforts.

We released WealthPoint in July 2003 as our wealth identification and information service. It provides a nonprofit organization with financial, biographical and demographic data on the individuals in its database, enabling the organization to identify its wealthiest donors and to plan the most effective donor cultivation strategies. We match donor and prospect names recorded in The Raiser’s Edge or any other database against sources of publicly available information about an individual’s assets or activities. After the names are matched against the public sources, we then return the data to the clients in a software application that allows them to query, report on, and manipulate the data.

In addition to these modeling and identification services, we offer services that enrich the quality of the data in our customers’ databases. These include a service that finds outdated address files in the database and makes corrections based on the requirements and certifications of the United States Postal Service and a service that uses known fields in an organization’s constituent records to search and find lost donors and prospects. In addition to these services, we offer services that append to a prospect record important additional information, such as phone, email, age, gender, deceased record, county, and congressional district.

Maintenance and subscriptions

The vast majority of our customers choose to receive annual maintenance and support from us under one of our tiered maintenance and support programs. In each of the past three years, an average of more than 94% of our customers have renewed their annual maintenance and support contracts for our products. For an annual fee, our customers receive regular upgrades and enhancements to our software and unlimited phone and email support, with extended hours for upgraded maintenance customers. Our maintenance and support customers also receive around-the-clock access to our extensive online support resources, including our self-help knowledge management system, the FAQ section of our web site, and weekly technical bulletins. Subscriptions cover hosted solutions, data enrichment services and training programs purchased on a subscription basis.

Customers

We have customers in each of the principal vertical markets within the nonprofit industry. In 2004, we had over 12,700 customers, over 12,300 of which pay us annual maintenance and support fees. These organizations range from small, local charities to health care and higher education organizations to the largest national health and human services organizations. No one customer accounts for more than 2% of our annual revenue.

Sales and marketing

We sell all of our software and related services through our direct sales force, which is complemented by our team of account development representatives responsible for sales lead generation and qualification. We also sell The Financial Edge application indirectly through our network of value-added resellers. As of December 31, 2004, we had approximately 215 sales and marketing employees, 175 of whom comprised our direct sales force and account development representatives. These sales and marketing professionals are located at our headquarters in Charleston and in metropolitan areas throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. We plan to continue expanding our direct sales force in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Our sales force is divided into three main areas of responsibility:

In addition, we have a dedicated portion of our outside sales team focused exclusively on large, enterprise-wide accounts and a group of sales engineers who support both new and existing customers. In general, each sales representative is assigned responsibility for handling just one product line in a designated geographic area, except for sales representatives for the K-12 education market who are responsible for selling all of our software products in that market. We frequently lead our sales efforts with the sale of one of our primary products, such as The Raiser’s Edge, then sell the customer additional products and services, such as vertical-specific software applications and related implementation and technical services.

We conduct a variety of marketing programs that are designed to create brand recognition and market awareness for our products and services. Our marketing efforts include participation at tradeshows, technical conferences and technology seminars, publication of technical and educational articles in industry journals and preparation of competitive analyses. Our customers and strategic partners provide references and recommendations that we often feature in our advertising and promotional activities.

We believe relationships with third parties can enhance our sales and marketing efforts. We have, and intend to seek to establish additional, relationships with companies that provide services to the nonprofit industry, such as consultants, educators, publishers, financial service providers, complementary technology providers and data providers. For example, we have developed a business solutions provider network with a number of resellers and accounting firms. These companies promote or complement our nonprofit solutions and provide us access to new customers.

We believe that active participation in charitable activities is good for the community and helps us build relationships with our clients and enhances our employees’ awareness of their activities. We have established a number of employee volunteer activities and are actively involved with a number of local and regional charities and nonprofit organizations, further demonstrating our dedication to assisting these organizations.

Competition

The market for software and related services for nonprofit organizations is fragmented, competitive and rapidly evolving, and there are limited barriers to entry for some aspects of this market. We expect to encounter new and evolving competition as this market consolidates and matures and as nonprofit organizations become more aware of the advantages and efficiencies that can be attained from the use of specialized software and other technology solutions. A number of diversified software enterprises have made recent acquisitions or developed products for the market, including Intuit, Sage and SunGard. Other companies that have greater marketing resources and generate greater revenues and market recognition than we do, such as Microsoft, Oracle and PeopleSoft, offer products that are not designed specifically for nonprofits but still provide some of the functionality of our products and could be considered competitors. In addition, these larger companies could decide to enter the market directly, including through acquisitions of smaller current competitors.

We mainly face competition from four sources:

Although there are numerous general software developers marketing products that have some application in the nonprofit market, these competitors have generally neglected to focus specifically on the nonprofit

market and typically lack the domain expertise to cost effectively build or implement integrated solutions for the needs of the nonprofit market.

We compete with custom-developed solutions created either internally by the nonprofit organization or outside custom service providers. However, building a custom solution often requires extensive financial and technical resources that may not be available or cost-effective for the nonprofit organization. In addition, in many cases the customer’s legacy database and software system were not designed to support the increasingly complex and advanced needs of today’s growing community of nonprofit organizations.

We also compete with providers of traditional, less automated fundraising services, including parties providing services in support of traditional direct mail campaigns, special events fundraising, telemarketing and personal solicitations. We believe we compete successfully against these traditional fundraising services, primarily because our products and services are more automated, robust and efficient than the traditional fundraising methods supported by these providers.

Research and development

We have made substantial investments in research and development, and expect to continue to do so as a part of our strategy to introduce additional products and services. As of December 31, 2004 we had approximately 160 employees working on research and development. Our research and development expenses for the years ended December 31, 2004, 2003 and 2002 were $17.9 million, $15.5 million and $14.4 million, respectively.

Technology and architecture

We utilize a three-tier Component Object Model, or COM-based development model, because it allows our customers to extend and modify the functionality of our applications without requiring them to make any source code or data modifications themselves. This is important for customers that want to customize our applications by incorporating their own business logic into key areas of the applications. The end result is a robust customization platform through which the application can be modified and extended without requiring source code alteration.

The architecture of our COM-based development model ensures our applications are:

We have and intend to continue to license technologies from third parties that are integrated into our products. Currently, we believe that the loss of any third party technology integrated into our products would not have a material adverse effect on our business. However, our inability to obtain licenses for third party technology for future products could delay product development, which could harm our business and operating results.

Intellectual property and other proprietary rights

To protect our intellectual property, we rely on a combination of patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret laws in various jurisdictions, and employee and third-party nondisclosure agreements and confidentiality procedures. We have a number of registered trademarks, including Blackbaud and The Raiser’s Edge. We have applied for additional trademarks. We currently have six patents pending on our technology, including functionality in The Financial Edge, The Information Edge and ProspectPoint.

Employees

As of December 31, 2004, we had approximately 880 employees, consisting of 215 in sales and marketing, 160 in research and development, 380 in customer support, and 125 general and administrative personnel. None of our employees are represented by unions or covered by collective bargaining agreements. We are not involved in any material disputes with any of our employees, and we believe that relations with our employees are satisfactory.

Where you can find additional information

Our website address is www.blackbaud.com. We make available free of charge through our website our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, and all amendments to those reports as soon as reasonably practicable after such material is electronically filed with or furnished to the SEC.

Risks and uncertainties

This report contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Our actual results could differ materially from those discussed in this report. Factors that could cause or contribute to these differences include, but are not limited to, those discussed below and elsewhere in this report and in any documents incorporated in this report by reference.

If any of the following risks, or other risks not presently known to us or that we currently believe to not be significant, develop into actual events, then our business, financial condition, results of operations or prospects could be materially adversely affected. If that happens, the market price of our common stock could decline, and stockholders may lose all or part of their investment.

The market for software and services for nonprofit organizations might not grow, and nonprofit organizations might not continue to adopt our products and services.

Many nonprofit organizations have not traditionally used integrated and comprehensive software and services for their nonprofit-specific needs. We cannot be certain that the market for such products and services will continue to develop and grow or that nonprofit organizations will elect to adopt our products and services rather than continue to use traditional, less automated methods, attempt to develop software internally, rely upon legacy software systems, or use generalized software solutions not specifically designed for the nonprofit market. Nonprofit organizations that have already invested substantial resources in other

fundraising methods or other non-integrated software solutions might be reluctant to adopt our products and services to supplement or replace their existing systems or methods. In addition, the implementation of one or more of our core software products can involve significant time and capital commitments by our customers, which they may be unwilling or unable to make. If demand for and market acceptance of our products and services does not increase, we might not grow our business as we expect.

We might not generate increased business from our current customers, which could limit our revenue in the future.

Our business model is highly dependent on the success of our efforts to increase sales to our existing customers. Many of our customers initially make a purchase of only one or a limited number of our products or only for a single department within their organization. These customers might choose not to expand their use of or make additional purchases of our products and services. If we fail to generate additional business from our current customers, our revenue could grow at a slower rate or even decrease. In addition, as we deploy new applications and features for our existing products or introduce new products and services, our current customers could choose not to purchase these new offerings.

If our customers do not renew their annual maintenance and support agreements for our products or if they do not renew them on terms that are favorable to us, our business might suffer.

Most of our maintenance agreements are for a term of one year. As the end of the annual period approaches, we pursue the renewal of the agreement with the customer. Historically, maintenance renewals have represented a significant portion of our total revenue, including approximately 48% and 49% of our total revenue in 2004 and 2003, respectively. Because of this characteristic of our business, if our customers choose not to renew their maintenance and support agreements with us on beneficial terms, our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed.

A substantial majority of our revenue is derived from The Raiser’s Edge and a decline in sales or renewals of this product and related services could harm our business.

We derive a substantial majority of our revenue from the sale of The Raiser’s Edge and related services, and revenue from this product and related services is expected to continue to account for a substantial majority of our total revenue for the foreseeable future. For example, revenue from the sale of The Raiser’s Edge and related services represented approximately 70% and 72% of our total revenue in 2004 and 2003, respectively. Because we generally sell licenses to our products on a perpetual basis and deliver new versions and enhancements to customers who purchase annual maintenance and support, our future license, services and maintenance revenue are substantially dependent on sales to new customers. In addition, we frequently sell The Raiser’s Edge to new customers and then attempt to generate incremental revenue from the sale of additional products and services. If demand for The Raiser’s Edge declines significantly, our business would suffer.

Our quarterly financial results fluctuate and might be difficult to forecast and, if our future results are below either any guidance we might issue or the expectations of public market analysts and investors, the price of our common stock might decline.

Our quarterly revenue and results of operations are difficult to forecast. We have experienced, and expect to continue to experience, fluctuations in revenue and operating results from quarter to quarter. As a result, we believe that quarter-to-quarter comparisons of our revenue and operating results are not necessarily meaningful and that such comparisons might not be accurate indicators of future performance. The reasons for these fluctuations include but are not limited to:

Our operating expenses, which include sales and marketing, research and development and general and administrative expenses, are based on our expectations of future revenue and are, to a large extent, fixed in the short term. If revenue falls below our expectations in a quarter and we are not able to quickly reduce our operating expenses in response, our operating results for that quarter could be adversely affected. It is possible that in some future quarter our operating results may be below either any guidance we might issue or the expectations of public market analysts and investors and, as a result, the price of our common stock might fall.

We encounter long sales and implementation cycles, particularly for our largest customers, which could have an adverse effect on the size, timing and predictability of our revenue and sales.

Potential customers, particularly our larger enterprise-wide clients, generally commit significant resources to an evaluation of available software and require us to expend substantial time, effort and money educating them as to the value of our software and services. Sales of our core software products to these larger customers often require an extensive education and marketing effort.

We could expend significant funds and management resources during the sales cycle and ultimately fail to close the sale. Our core software product sales cycle averages approximately two months for sales to existing customers and from six to nine months for sales to new customers and large enterprise-wide sales. Our implementation cycle for large enterprise-wide sales can extend for a year or more, which can negatively impact the timing and predictability of our revenue. Our sales cycle for all of our products and services is subject to significant risks and delays over which we have little or no control, including:

If we are unsuccessful in closing sales after expending significant funds and management resources or if we experience delays as discussed above, it could have a material adverse effect on the size, timing and predictability of our revenue.

We have recorded a significant deferred tax asset, and we might never realize the full value of our deferred tax asset, which would result in a charge against our earnings.

In connection with the initial acquisition of our common stock by our current stockholders in 1999, we recorded approximately $107 million as a deferred tax asset. Our deferred tax asset was approximately $88 million as of December 31, 2004, or approximately 55% of our total assets as of that date. Realization of our deferred tax asset is dependent upon our generating sufficient taxable income in future years to realize the tax benefit from that asset. In accordance with Financial Accounting Standards Board

Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 109, deferred tax assets are reviewed at least annually for impairment. Impairment would result if, based on the available evidence, it is more likely than not that some portion of the deferred tax asset will not be realized. This impairment could be caused by, among other things, deterioration in performance, loss of key contracts, adverse market conditions, adverse changes in applicable laws or regulations, including changes that restrict the activities of or affect the products sold by our business and a variety of other factors. If an impairment were to occur in a future period, it would be recognized as an expense in our results of operations during the period of impairment. Depending on future circumstances, it is possible that we might never realize the full value of our deferred tax asset. Any future determination of impairment of a significant portion of our deferred tax asset would have an adverse effect on our financial condition and results of operations. See our discussion of “Deferred taxes” in “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations — Critical accounting policies and estimates”.

Nonprofit organizations might not use the Internet to facilitate their fundraising and organizational efforts in a manner sufficient to allow us to make a profit or even recapture our investment in this area. In addition, even if they increasingly use the Internet for these purposes, if we fail to capitalize on this opportunity, we could lose market share.

The market for online fundraising solutions for nonprofit organizations is new and emerging. Nonprofit organizations have not traditionally used the Internet or web-enabled software solutions for fundraising. We cannot be certain that the market will continue to develop and grow or that nonprofit organizations will elect to use any of our web-enabled products rather than continue to use traditional offline methods, attempt to develop software solutions internally or use standardized software solutions not designed for the specific needs of nonprofits. Nonprofit organizations that have already invested substantial resources in other fundraising methods may be reluctant to use the Internet to supplement their existing systems or methods. In addition, increasing concerns about fraud, privacy, reliability and other problems might cause nonprofit organizations not to adopt the Internet as a method for fundraising. If demand for and market acceptance of Internet-based products for nonprofits does not occur, we might not recapture our investment in this area or grow our business as we expect. On the other hand, even if nonprofits increasingly use the Internet for their fundraising and organizational efforts, if we fail to develop and offer products that meet customer needs in this area, we could lose market share.

Our failure to compete successfully could cause our revenue or market share to decline.

Our market is fragmented, competitive and rapidly evolving, and there are limited barriers to entry for some aspects of this market. We mainly face competition from four sources:

The companies we compete with, and other potential competitors, may have greater financial, technical and marketing resources and generate greater revenue and better name recognition than we do. If one or more of our competitors or potential competitors were to merge or partner with one of our competitors, the change in the competitive landscape could adversely affect our ability to compete effectively. For example, a large diversified software enterprise, such as Microsoft, Oracle or PeopleSoft, could decide to enter the market directly, including through acquisitions.

Additionally, Sage and Intuit have recently made acquisitions and product development efforts in the nonprofit market. Our competitors might also establish or strengthen cooperative relationships with our

current or future resellers and third-party consulting firms or other parties with whom we have relationships, thereby limiting our ability to promote our products and limiting the number of channel partners available to help market our products. These competitive pressures could cause our revenue and market share to decline. For more information on our competitors, see “Business — Competition”.

We might not be able to manage our future growth efficiently or profitably.

We have experienced significant growth since our inception, and we anticipate that continued expansion will be required to address potential market opportunities. For example, we will need to expand the size of our sales and marketing, product development and general and administrative staff and operations, as well as our financial and accounting controls. There can be no assurance that our infrastructure will be sufficiently scalable to manage our projected growth. For example, our anticipated growth will result in a significant increase in demands on our maintenance and support services professionals to continue to provide the high level of quality service that our customers have come to expect. If we are unable to sufficiently address these additional demands on our resources, our profitability and growth might suffer. Also, if we continue to expand our operations, management might not be effective in expanding our physical facilities and our systems, procedures or controls might not be adequate to support such expansion. Our inability to manage our growth could harm our business.

Because competition for highly qualified personnel is intense, we might not be able to attract and retain the employees we need to support our planned growth.

To execute our continuing growth plans, we need to increase the size and maintain the quality of our sales force, software development staff and our professional services organization. To meet our objectives successfully, we must attract and retain highly qualified personnel with specialized skill sets focused on the nonprofit industry. Competition for qualified personnel can be intense, and we might not be successful in attracting and retaining them. The pool of qualified personnel with experience working with or selling to nonprofit organizations is limited overall and specifically in Charleston, South Carolina, where our principal office is located. Our ability to maintain and expand our sales, product development and professional services teams will depend on our ability to recruit, train and retain top quality people with advanced skills who understand sales to, and the specific needs of, nonprofit organizations. For these reasons, we have from time to time in the past experienced, and we expect to continue to experience in the future, difficulty in hiring and retaining highly skilled employees with appropriate qualifications for our business. In addition, it takes time for our new sales and services personnel to become productive, particularly with respect to obtaining and supporting major customer accounts. In particular, we plan to continue to increase the number of services personnel to attempt to meet the needs of our customers and potential new customers. In addition to hiring services personnel to meet our needs, we might also engage additional third-party consultants as contractors, which could have a negative impact on our earnings. If we are unable to hire or retain qualified personnel, or if newly hired personnel fail to develop the necessary skills or reach productivity slower than anticipated, it would be more difficult for us to sell our products and services, and we could experience a shortfall in revenue or earnings, and not achieve our planned growth.

Our services revenue produces substantially lower gross margins than our license revenue, and an increase in services revenue relative to license revenue would harm our overall gross margins.

Our services revenue, which includes fees for consulting, implementation, training, data and technical services and analytics, was approximately 31% of our revenue for 2004, 29% of our revenue for 2003 and approximately 25% of our revenue for 2002. Our services revenue has substantially lower gross margins than our product license revenue. An increase in the percentage of total revenue represented by services revenue would adversely affect our overall gross margins.

Certain of our services are contracted under fixed fee arrangements, which we base on estimates. If our estimated fees are less than our actual costs, our operating results would be adversely affected.

Services revenue as a percentage of total revenue has varied significantly from quarter to quarter due to fluctuations in licensing revenue, economic changes, changes in the average selling prices for our products and services, our customers’ acceptance of our products and our sales force execution. In addition, the volume and profitability of services can depend in large part upon:

Any erosion of our margins for our services revenue or any adverse changes in the mix of our license versus service revenue would adversely affect our operating results.

Failure to adapt to technological change and to achieve broad adoption and acceptance of our new products and services could adversely affect our earnings.