Case Study: Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) achieves 100% upgrade time savings and 50% reduced IT effort with Blackbaud CRM + Blackbaud Cloud Operations

ELCA’s Strategic Shift to Blackbaud Cloud Operations Enhances Mission and Engagement

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a denomination of nearly 3.3 million members across more than 8,900 communities, was running Blackbaud CRM on-premises since 2009. After the pandemic left its data center underused and the economics and effort of maintaining servers, upgrades, and disaster recovery no longer made sense, ELCA needed a more secure, cost-effective way to offload infrastructure so staff could focus on mission-driven work and compliance.

ELCA migrated to Blackbaud CRM + Blackbaud Cloud Operations, gaining built-in encryption, redundancy, and managed infrastructure that eliminated the need for server upgrades and DR replication. The move delivered immediate benefits — 100% time savings on upgrades, a projected 50% reduction in IT-staff time, lower infrastructure and recovery costs, and easier integration with data lakes, financial systems and SKY API to improve engagement and future innovation.

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA)

Jonathan Beyer

Executive for Information Technology & Digital Solutions