Transition to Blackbaud ID with Multi-factor Authentication by January 23, 2024

Christin Grissom

Blackbaud ID (BBID) with multi-factor authentication (MFA) sign-in will be enforced for locally authenticated users within Award and Stewardship Management™ starting in waves between January 9 - January 23, 2024. After January 23, 2024, users who are not logging in with SSO or BBID need to set up BBID with MFA or they will not be able to sign in. All solution functions and features outside of local authentication will be unchanged. Individual(s) listed as an Organizational Administrator for your site have been emailed supporting information about these changes.

Why are Changes Needed: To enhance login requirements throughout our environment and safeguard your organization and your data, BBID with MFA will be enforced. BBID is identity management used by Blackbaud solutions that enables users at your institution to access your Blackbaud products and services – such Raiser’s Edge NXT, Financial Edge NXT, the Community, and more with a single account. We are proactively making the change to enforce MFA to align with industry standard security measures.

Additional benefits include: 

• Blackbaud ID exclusively focuses on authentication and staying current with the ever-evolving security landscape. By transitioning to Blackbaud ID, your data is secured behind stronger authentication standards, and the Award & Stewardship Management™ development team can focus on other mission-driven initiatives to better serve you. Blackbaud ID allows you to securely sign in to the Blackbaud solutions ecosystem. By default, it uses Blackbaud's secure authentication service, but users can opt to authenticate through social sign-in instead. And organizations can also enable single sign-on (SSO) to sign in through their identity providers and manage the users in their claimed domains.
• Blackbaud ID provides enhanced password protection and brute force protection on all login attempts.
• Blackbaud ID allows you to enhance security with multi-factor authentication through text messages or mobile authenticators.
• Blackbaud ID provides secure access to multiple Blackbaud solutions and Support resources.
• Blackbaud ID allows users to authenticate through social sign-in using credentials from a social networking service, such as Apple or Google. These users then use their social sign-in accounts for authentication requirements, password resets, and other support needs.

Who Will Be Affected: Any users who currently use your institution’s SSO to login to your site are not affected and their login process will not change. Users who will be affected are:

• All locally authenticated or allow list users (such as admins, applicants, references, reviewers, prospective students, and donor contacts).  
• Any locally authenticated or allow list users users (such as reviewers, references, donor contacts, and prospective students) of organizations that have an SSO.   
• Any customers using LDAP as their authentication method.

What Actions Do I Need to Take:

If your users authenticate locally:

• Set up Single Sign-on (SSO) (recommended). See Blackbaud Award Management Authentication Options for more information.  
• Or, have users create a BBID to login. 

If you have a combination of users that use your institution’s SSO and login locally:

• Use the Remote Identity API to allow references, reviewers, and donor contacts associated with your institution to login via your SSO.
• Or, have users create a BBID to login. 

If you use LDAP to authenticate:

The use of LDAP as an authentication option will be discontinued on February 1, 2024. Support for LDAP Authentication was deprecated on August 31, 2022. In preparation for this change, we recommend:

• Review Your Authentication Options and migrate to SSO as soon as possible. Migrations can take up to 3 weeks to complete.
• Until your migration is complete, continue logging in to your site as usual. SSO

migrations not completed by February 1, 2024 will be switched to local authentication and users will need a BBID and MFA to sign in to your site.

FAQs & Preparation Tips: review our help resources here. 

Additional Resources: 

• About Blackbaud ID – benefits and managing your BBID
• FAQ & Help Tips for Award and Stewardship Management™ BBID and MFA
• How to Create a BBID for Award and Stewardship Management
• Enable users to authenticate using your organization identity provider and SSO
• Remote Identity API – steps to allow users associated with your institution to login via your SSO

Non-Administrator users should contact their System Administrator for support. System and Organizational Administrators, contact Blackbaud Customer Support for additional help.

Chelsea Sherbut

Hi @Christin Grissom! We are wondering if our Community Forum access will require a BBID even though we are SSO for our Award Management product. Our community forum access, I think, is not via SSO but separate log-ins.

Christin Grissom

@Chelsea Sherbut, access to The Community will not change. You'll continue using your same login process to access information here.

Chelsea Sherbut

@Christin Grissom Thanks for the confirmation on that!

Christin Grissom

@Chelsea Sherbut, no problem at all. Let us know if you come across any other questions.

Tamara Tsang

@Christin Grissom Did something change in recent months with BBID, screens, troubleshooting instrucitons, etc? It's obviously been in use for over a year now, but the opp admins and I have had a huge uptick in the number of inquiries from the roles that use BBID, instead of SSO to sign in. In my particular case, reviewers who had access for incoming freshman apps in March 2025 could not get back in for incoming transfer apps in April. It was bizarre!

Christin Grissom

@Tamara Tsang, our Product team has confirmed that no changes were made to Award Management that would have caused this to occur. Would you mind submitting a ticket to Customer Support to investigate and to ensure that there are no potential configuration issues?