Marc Chardon
Analyst · Stifel, Nicolaus
Thank you, Tony. Thanks to all of you for joining us this afternoon to review our first quarter results, which represented a solid start to 2012.
Revenue is at the high end of our guidance. We continue to make progress evolving toward a subscription-based business model, and our Enterprise business unit delivered very strong performance. We enjoyed a particularly strong quarter for our Blackbaud CRM offering. Holding a record performance during 2011, we're off to a great start in '12, with Blackbaud CRM representing the largest contributor to our first quarter sales.
Of course, the biggest news came last week when we received regulatory approval to move forward with our acquisition of Convio, which we expect to close tomorrow. Blackbaud is now well positioned to deliver a best-of-both-worlds offering to non-profit organizations, including the most comprehensive CRM and online fund raising solutions. We believe our combined organization is much better positioned to meet the multichannel supporter engagement needs of nonprofitable organizations and both teams are eager to move forward.
In addition to being great news for our employees, customers and prospects, we're very excited to have the opportunity to become one of the largest subscription-based software as a service vendors in the world.
Let me provide a brief overview of our first quarter financial performance. We do lever at revenue of $94.7 million, which was at the high end of our guidance of $93 million to $95 million, and represented a 9% growth on a year-over-year basis. The fastest-growing component of our revenue continues to be subscriptions, which at $28.1 million grew 17% year-over-year.
The continuing evolution of our business towards subscription-based offerings means that subscription units outnumbered perpetual license sales units by a ratio of over 5:1 during the quarter. We continue to see strong demand for our subscription offerings, including our online fundraising solutions, our vertically-focused package offerings and also the hosted versions of the Raiser's Edge and the Financial Edge.
Turning to profit. Our first quarter margin was down compared to historic levels as expected or previously communicated. We continue to expect our profit margins to scale over the course of the year, culminating in the 20% non-GAAP operating margin for stand-alone Blackbaud for the full year 2012. We also believe our increased investments in the first half of 2012 will put Blackbaud in a much better position to scale effectively and efficiently in the coming years.
From a market perspective, fundraising activity levels remain above pre-recessionary levels and there is modest growth. We would not characterize the giving environment as robust, but it's moving in the right direction. Moreover, we believe that nonprofit organizations feel more comfortable moving forward technology investment, and many feel that it's become necessary to move their organizations to modern state-of-the-art solutions if they want to continue to be successful in their missions.
We believe that we are still in the early stages of addressing a $16.5 billion global market opportunity for delivering such solutions to the nonprofit industry. With our organic growth and the acquisition of Convio, we're not far from becoming a $500 million revenue run rate company, which while quite sizable, still represents a small fraction of our total potential market opportunity.
We believe that roughly half of this market opportunity is in what we characterize as the enterprise segment of the market. A majority of the largest and most sophisticated nonprofit organizations in the world are still running their core operations on legacy systems that are decades old. There is growing pressure to move to modern solutions that provide a true 360-degree view of their supporters and deliver coherent and coordinated multi-channel communications in ways that were simply not available at the time this legacy solutions were first put in play.
As I mentioned a moment ago, our Enterprise business delivered a very strong performance in the first quarter, particularly with our Blackbaud CRM offering. We closed 6 new Blackbaud CRM deals during the first quarter, including 3 in the higher education space: UCLA, University of California San Diego and the University of Toronto, which is the largest university in Canada.
Our growing momentum in the higher education market is particularly exciting because it represents the largest segment of the Enterprise market opportunity. Our win rate and our growing momentum in this vertical are based on CRM capabilities specifically designed for large universities, and on the growing number of large-scale implementations now under our belt. Along those lines, I'm pleased to share that the University of Michigan went live at the end of the first quarter, with a simultaneous launch of what is by far the most extensive implementation of our Blackbaud CRM offering and our Internet solution together. We are very proud of our joint success with one of the bellwether institutions of higher education, and we look forward to the Michigan team sharing their experience with prospects and customers including during our annual users conference.
During the first quarter, we also closed Blackbaud CRM deals with the Shriners Hospitals for Children, Americares and an international charity organization, which collectively highlight that we're seeing demand from a global perspective with hospitals and in human services, and that we're leveraging our acquisition of PIDI. America has made the decision to upgrade from PIDI to Blackbaud CRM.
I'm also pleased to share that we've made good progress on the 4 early adopters CRM deployments that we discussed on the last quarter's call. One of these customers, as you may remember, was already in production at the time of our fourth quarter call. Another went live with 2 sites during the first quarter. We expect to move the third into production during this current quarter. And with the fourth customer, our plan remains unchanged, to launch in the second half of the year. As a reminder, this small handful of early adopter customers have truly unique characteristics that made their implementations significantly more challenging. While painful to go through, these experiences pushed our services and development organizations to grow in ways we will benefit from over the longer run. Most important, we believe our current and future Blackbaud CRM customers will benefit from this learning as well.
To summarize the performance of our Enterprise business unit: strong new sales activity, continued progress bringing customers into production, a healthy pipeline of opportunities and an increasingly strong position within a multi-billion dollar market opportunity, particularly after we move forward with Convio and have a best-of-both-worlds offering as I'll highlight in a moment.
Our General Markets business unit also delivered a solid performance for the quarter. We believe the mid-market, which is served by this business unit, represents another multi-billion dollar market opportunity that is just as large as the high end of the market. Blackbaud is well recognized as the market leader in this mid-market as we already serve approximately 25% of the available customers in the segment. While meaningful, this still is a very large greenfield opportunity. What's more important is the fact that we believe we only serve approximately 5% of the available revenue opportunity in this market. As there is significant opportunity to expand our share of wallet with our existing customers, considering the breadth and depth of our product suite, as well is our range of analytic and other services. Our general market business continues to see a significant shift towards subscription based offerings. As I mentioned earlier, total subscription units outnumbered perpetual licenses by over 5:1 in a quarter. While this can have a negative impact on reported revenue growth in the near term, it's a very positive trend for our business from a long-term perspective as it leads to a higher level of revenue visibility and predictability.
We had solid growth in our Blackbaud CR offering during the first quarter, which we are pleased with, considering that our acquisition of Convio was pending during the quarter. Online fundraising solutions continue to be a key driver of the growth in our subscription revenue and are also seeing growing contributions to our subscription business across the breadth of our product suite. For example, during the first quarter, approximately 1/3 of the Raiser's Edge units sold by the General Markets business were completed on a subscription basis, which is up from the high single-digit range during the year-ago quarter.
We also launched a new Financial Edge subscription offering at the beginning of 2012, and it performed very well during the quarter. Financial Edge units grew up approximately 50% year-over-year, with our new subscription offering being a key driver. In addition, we believe that our new subscription offering is appealing to a wider audience. In the past, most of our Financial Edge units were driven by back-to-base sales to our over 26,000 customers. During the first quarter, our subscription base offering drove approximately 1/2 of our total financial unit sales to our brand-new customers.
ALTRU, our integrated software as a service offering for the arts and culture vertical continues to enjoy solid customer demand and growth. We crossed an important milestone for ALTRU during the quarter, surpassing 100 unit sales since launching the solution, with nearly 20% of those sales coming during this last first quarter. This unique offering is tailored to meet the specific challenges faced by arts and cultural organizations and we believe there's a long runway growth for this attractive segment of the market. Our eTapestry offering also enjoyed rapid unit growth in the quarter. eTapestry is our SaaS-based fund raising offer. It's targeted at the over 1 million small non-profit organizations that need a simple solution.
Nonprofit organizations in this segment of the market face similar challenges as midsized and margin nonprofits and they can benefit from leveraging easy-to-use and simple modern technology solutions to optimize their fundraising efforts. We've learned a lot since acquiring eTapestry from pricing, packaging and the go-to-market perspective, and we believe we're starting to hit our stride at the low end of the market. In addition to continually improving from a go-to-market perspective, we are also pleased to have introduced innovations that we believe will benefit our general market customers in particular
We recently introduced the first major update to the Raiser's Edge in 2 years with brand new capabilities such as our Giving Score analytic tool, as well as improvements in query, events and duplicate prevention. In addition, on the next several months, we plan on introducing Raiser's Edge mobile apps for the iPhone, iPad, Android devices and BlackBerry.
NetCommunity, our online eMarketing and fundraising solution built specifically for Raiser's Edge customers, was also recently upgraded for the more than 3,000 customers that use it to support their fundraising activities on a daily basis. I'm also quite pleased with the performance of our International business during the first quarter. They delivered 18% growth in revenues, enjoyed strong adoption of our subscription-based offerings and closed their first CRM deal of the year. The leadership changes that we've put in place in the International business are having a positive impact, and we continue to believe that we have a significant opportunity to expand our presence internationally, both at the high end of the market, as well as at the low end. Our Everyday Hero acquisition, for example, delivered more than 40% growth over the same period last year on strong donation volume and the launch of our corporate giving portal.
Of course, we're very excited about our soon-to-be closed acquisition at Convio. As announced last week, we received regulatory approval from the government to move ahead with the acquisition. We have subsequently completed the cash tender process and as I mentioned earlier, we plan on closing tomorrow. We've already completed our preliminary merger integration plans, and both companies are eager to begin working together to discuss the details of our future product roadmaps and strategic plans, not only internally, but also with each other -- each of our respective customer bases. We've got a lot of work ahead of us, but this is truly an exciting time for us and for our customers as we believe this combination is great news for customers, employees, partners and, of course, shareholders.
We believe our acquisition of Convio is happening at just the right time. Market demand has improved coming out of the recession, both companies have solid market momentum and online fundraising is the fastest growing channel for donations. While still only a fraction of overall Giving, it has reached the point of critical mass, and it will only become more significant overtime.
The amount of fundraising that's transacted through the combination of Blackbaud and Convio is over $6 billion annually. While this is quite substantial, it still represents less than 3% of the total annual donations raised in the U.S. alone. The addition of Convio will significantly enhance our ability to bring value to this large and under-served market.
Convio is recognized as the leading provider of SaaS-based online fundraising solutions, particularly for large cause and cure nonprofits and advocacy-based organizations. This is a highly complementary offering to Blackbaud's area of strength in CRM for large enterprises, as well as complementary to our verticals -- our other verticals in which we've established very strong market momentum such as our higher education vertical as I noted earlier.
Convio will bring over 1,500 customers to Blackbaud, many of which are good prospects for other complementary solutions on Blackbaud's broad portfolio suite. They also bring significant demand expertise, innovation and thought leadership to Blackbaud and there is an included online fundraising, business intelligence, and scaling of software as a service business.
In summary, the first quarter was a solid start to the new year. We made great progress with our CRM business while expanding withstanding the breadth and momentum of our subscription-based offerings. As we look ahead, we're very excited about the prospects for our company, post the acquisition of Convio. We're poised to deliver best-of-both worlds offering, combining best-in-class solutions for both CRM and online fundraising, we are also poised to become one of the largest software as a service vendors in the world.
$500 million in revenue is well within our sites and we've significantly improved our position to ultimately scale Blackbaud to our longer-term growth of $1 billion or greater in annual revenue.
With that, let me turn the call over to Tony to discuss our financials in more detail.