Let me go ahead and get started. My name's Austin. I'm a Software Equity Research Associate at Citizens JMP. And I'm just delighted to have Blackbaud here with us. We have Jeffrey Kline, Senior Manager, Corporate Strategy and Development, and Sudip Datta, Chief Product Officer from Blackbaud. So I think the way we're gonna do this is I'm gonna hand it over to Jeffrey and Sudip, and they're gonna go through a brief presentation. Then I'm gonna ask a few questions, and I can open it up to the audience if there are questions out there as well. So Jeffrey, take it away.
Sounds good. Thanks, Austin. So just a couple, couple slides that Sudip and I can run through just to level set people, especially folks who aren't maybe aren't quite as familiar with the Blackbaud story yet. Starting with investment highlights, we are the clear leader in the market we serve. So we provide purpose-built, mission-critical solutions to what we broadly define as the social impact market. And you can think of that as both nonprofits as well as corporations in support of their corporate social responsibility initiatives. Our end market is one that is sometimes a bit, misunderstood or underappreciated. But just to give you a couple stats, specific to the U.S. market we serve, roughly 1.5 million registered nonprofits in the U.S. Approximately $500 billion is donated annually to charitable causes in the U.S.
Nonprofits actually represent the third-largest employment sector in the U.S. economy behind retail and manufacturing. So a bigger part of the overall economy than I think most people realize. Talking about Rule of 40 goals, so coming out of the COVID period, we published a Rule of 40 goal framework with the intention of achieving Rule of 40 by sometime in 2025. We were actually able to pull that forward, and we achieved Rule of 40 for the first time in Q3 of 2023. We achieved it again in Q4 of this past year. At the midpoint of our guidance, we expect to be a Rule of 40 company for the full year. So pretty happy with the progress we've made there on an accelerated timeline. All of this financial acceleration has been underpinned by what we call our five-point operating plan.
That's really just a series of initiatives, operational initiatives that span the entire company. So it's everything from Sudip's org and product and innovation to bookings growth and acceleration, transactional revenue optimization, which is about 1/3 of our total revenues being transactional or payments-driven. The fourth initiative is actually our newest initiative and has to do with a new approach to pricing and renewal contract terms in our social sector. So the piece of our business that's serving core nonprofits, not the corporate side. And that's been going really well and driving incremental revenue growth for us. And then finally, a keen attention to cost management. So you'll see in a couple slides here when we go over margins, we've made tremendous progress on that front.
Then lastly, talking a bit about capital allocation in our stock repurchase program, if you've, you know, looked at our stock or the news around our stock in the last day or so, we recently announced our intention to buy back between 7% and 10% of outstanding shares this year. We've bought back about $77 million since December. Then yesterday, we also announced an incremental $200 million in the form of an accelerated share repurchase with Bank of America. So between that $77 and the new $200, we're right at about that 7% already and then have the ability to do a bit more to get closer to that 10%, over the course of the rest of the year.
So Blackbaud, at a glance, we started about 40 years back, in the early 1980s as a billing management company for a school in New York. Fast forward 40 years, we are still anchored to that vision of social impact and corporate impact, as Jeff mentioned. We are possibly pretty unique, like, especially as a public company. We are almost like a market definer here, that we are totally anchored and dedicated to this space. We have $1.2 billion of annual recurring revenue, 3,000 remote employees. Quite a, I'm not going to read through the numbers, so some big numbers there. $100 billion plus donated through our platform every year across multiple countries. I think the key point here is that we are a mission-driven company, and that mission shows in our products, which is purpose-built for the social impact sector.
Over the last five years, we forayed it also into the corporate impact space, right, with our acquisition of YourCause and EVERFI. We are going to talk about that more. Back to you, Jeff.
You wanna do one more on the product here?
Sure. So, when I talk about social impact and corporate impact, it's a portfolio of multiple products, right? It's not one single product. So we are a product portfolio company, supporting fundraising and engagement. And when I think about it this way, when donors come and donate to a charitable cause, that donation goes through a life cycle, right? It lands into a CRM platform, gets disbursed out through a financial accounting system, financial management, and then gets kind of analyzed and then replayed back to the donor for further donations.
So fundraising and engagement, financial management, grant and award management, organizational and program management, especially in the education K-12 education space, and then, as I talked about, corporate impact, like social CSR, corporate social responsibility, and enabling the education and literacy for some of the environmental and social causes, that's also part of our portfolio. And the whole thing is backed by a payments platform. Jeff talked about, like, we'll be talking about more about the payments business. But the thing is, it's when donors come and donate to a charitable cause, it goes through our payments platform and payments accounts for about one-third of our business, right?
I already talked about kind of data intelligence, like how the data gets stored in our platform and gets gleaned for insights, for which we leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to generate those insights and help our customers raise more money. But all these products are supplemented by our services organization, which includes consulting and implementation services. So long story cut short, right, we are not one single product company. It's a portfolio of products. And as we talk more about our innovation, you will see, like, how we are stitching all these products together to bring what we call Connected Systems into the market. Back to you, Jeff.
So shifting gears a little bit to the financial side, this is just a quick slide on 2024 total company guidance. So at the midpoint, you can see here $1,185 million total revenue represents about a 7.2% organic growth point rate at the midpoint, 33% adjusted EBITDA margins, $4.25 of non-GAAP EPS, and $264 million of adjusted free cash flow. The free cash flow number is up $50 million year-over-year, and on a margin basis, up 300 basis points. Driving incremental free cash flow has been a big focus for us and obviously making, big, big progress on that front. The last three slides are actually, incremental materials that we released in an 8-K yesterday. So coming off our Q4 earnings call, we had a number of calls with investors, like we do every quarter.
There were a couple recurring areas that were coming up in questions, and I think where there was either a lack of understanding or maybe misunderstanding related to 2024 guidance as well as capital allocation strategy. So we felt that it was prudent to put out some incremental information about the business, to help clear up some of those questions proactively. I'd say the punchline on the revenue slide you see here is really the disaggregation between what we're calling the social sector and the corporate sector and how that adds up to the 7.2% total company growth. So on the social sector side of the business, that is the nonprofit side. It represents a little over 85% of total revenues. That business is growing high single digit to even potentially low double digit. We've got about a 9% midpoint here.
That's really supported by that new renewal pricing, and contract terms initiative I mentioned as part of our five-point operating plan. You can see the acceleration in revenue growth there from 2% to 5% to 9%. The upside there is offset a bit by the corporate sector, right? That is the one piece of our portfolio where I will say that some of those solutions are a bit more discretionary in nature. And we're seeing between tightening corporate budgets, increasing inflation rates, the amount of budget dollars that some of these companies are able to allocate to these CSR initiatives, not as great as they otherwise were. So we're seeing some pressure on bookings and churn. And that's leading us to a, you know, an estimate or a forecast of about - 4%. So you can see how that's diluted to total company growth.
The one thing I will say about that is we are still very optimistic about that space long term. About half our TAM sits on the corporate side of the business. And we think that when the economy does shift back, budgets open up again, we're really well positioned as a leader in that space, to re-accelerate that growth to a point where it's either neutral or even accretive to total company growth again. Moving to the profitability side, you know, we've made really tremendous progress on the EBITDA margin front the last few years. So 740 basis points of expansion in 2023. About half of that came from revenue growth. The other half came from cost initiatives. So we had a RIF last year, cut about 600 heads. That's a big portion of it.
We've closed some private data centers as we've moved to third-party cloud, renegotiated some key vendor contracts. All of that together kind of accumulated to that 740 basis point increase last year. We're projecting another 80 basis point increase this year from 32.2% to 33% at the midpoint of guidance. That would have been even greater if not for a one-time step up in cybersecurity investment. So in the absence of that, it would have been closer to 35%. We made the decision to pull forward some of the milestones in our cybersecurity roadmap. And in order to do that, we made investment in talent, third-party resources, software, tooling, hardware, right? Much of that expense will be ongoing. So it is a step up. It's not gonna all pull back. Some of it will.
But I think the point to make is you're not going to see that approximately $20 million increase year-over-year again in 2025 or 2026. A lot more of that leverage is gonna be more important in the margin profile of the business going forward. And then I think last slide just to end on, we hit on this a little bit in the investment highlights, but the highlight, I think, of our capital allocation strategy near term is on returning capital share to shareholders via share repurchases. So in 2023, we were very, very focused on paying down debt. We had levered up to acquire the EVERFI business, got down to our target debt-to-EBITDA ratio of about 2.0, in the fourth quarter of last year. And at that point, we did resume share repurchases.
We purchased about $41 million under our prior $250 million authorization in December and January. In about mid-January, we increased that authorization from $250 million to $500 million and replenished it. And we've repurchased then an incremental $36 million against the new authorization. And then, as I mentioned before, incremental to all of that is now a new $200 million ASR with Bank of America, which we announced yesterday. All of that together gets us to about that 7% mark. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, we have the ability, depending on a number of factors, to buy more than that over the course of the year and get, you know, closer to the high end of that 7%-10% range. Beyond 2024, we have said that minimally, we expect to offset our SBC.
So we'll minimally buy back the dilution from our stock-based comp and again could buy back shares in excess of that while also evaluating potential for small M&A opportunities and debt repayment. So I think with that, Austin, we can probably turn it back to you.
Great. Yeah, I think we have a lot to unpack here. I mean, that was a great presentation there. I think, Sudip, I wanna start with you to talk a little bit more about product. You guys have a lot going on there, right? So you talked about a number of new features, a number of new products and things going on at bbcon. Maybe tell me a little bit more about some of the things you're doing with the new online giving forms, or donation forms, grant applicant experience, how you're connecting the data flows, and overall just making the solutions better for your customers.
Sure. So, I will try to address the question on donation forms through, addressing the second part of your question, which is the overall product portfolio. So in bbcon, just to set the context for everyone, bbcon is our annual conference, like Blackbaud Conference, right? That was held in October 2023 last time, and there we announced certain initiatives. So the first one was what we call Connected Systems, right? Because as I described, the product portfolio, I mentioned that we are not a single product company, which we are a multi-product company. So how do these products some of these products work together, right? And give a seamless experience to our customers, so that's Connected Systems, right? The second thing we announced was the focus on artificial intelligence, right?
There are specific use cases in our space, which pertain to machine learning and artificial intelligence. We want to address those targeted use cases. The third one was around ecosystem and partnerships. Those were the key themes announced at bbcon. Now, if I come back to the first one, which is about Connected Systems, let me give a specific example, right? When nonprofits use our products and when I ask them, like, "What do you use our product for?" the number one answer I get is, "We want to generate more revenue." They want to collect more, right? How do they collect more? Through a layer of engagement. Basically, they would reach out to the donors and their supporters to say, "Donate for this particular cause." The supporters would come and donate to that cause, right?
And that is what we call the donation forms. That's the layer of engagement, right? That the money that they donate through that layer of engagement gets into our CRM platform, which is our system of records, what we call, right? And we have the most powerful CRM platforms for the social sector out there. And it gets into our CRM platform. And then the money gets dispersed through our accounting system, right? And that's our Financial Edge NXT product, right? And the data that gets stored in the CRM platform gets gleaned through our analytics engine to generate insights who could be the prospective donors if the organization wants to reach out next time, right? So it's a life cycle.
Now, when it comes to the layer of engagement, which is the donation forms that Austin talked about, we launched a slew of innovations into the market. That's what we call the Optimized Donation Form. Why is it optimized? Because think of the donor experience, right? Today, when you want to donate for a cause, right, you go through multiple forms like what we call the questionnaire, right, and then donate to the platform. And now that experience has to be absolutely seamless. Otherwise, our customers see what we call the churn rate, right? People drop off in the middle of the experience, number one. So we want to improve the conversion. Number two is we have multiple options for our customers to charge or not charge for the platform fee, right?
And that is where a lot of innovation has gotten in with the introduction of what we call the Complete Cover, right? So our customers have the option, right, of them covering the platform fee, the donor covering the platform fee, or no platform fee at all, right, which is the Complete Cover where the donor gives a tip, right? And that is a model that has been successfully tried with our JustGiving product in the U.K., which we expanded and launched as a part of our bigger, bigger offering within the U.S., right? That's what we call the Complete Cover, right? So a lot of choices to our customers, right? The experience is optimal and backed by A/B testing, what we call for those who are not familiar with A/B testing: it's a choice A versus choice B and which one generates more money.
So we ran through multiple iterations of A/B testing to really give an optimized experience for our customers. And then that whole information gets fed into our analytics engine to give a very personalized experience for the donor next time, right? So that's where AI comes in. And we send an acknowledgment, AI-generated acknowledgment to our donors, right? That's our other innovation that we launched recently. So a lot happening in terms of donation forms with the single most objective of generating more revenue for our customers. Because when we talk to our customers, that's what they want, generate more for us for good charitable causes.
Great. That was really helpful. Jeffrey, maybe one for you. You guys reported about three weeks ago, right? So I'm wondering, with this new share repurchase you just announced, why now?
Yep.
I understand this is partially funded through a credit facility. Maybe you could clarify why, why do it that way, why now, and why do it that way?
Yep. Yeah. So a little more clarity on that. I spoke to this earlier, but we started those buybacks in December. At that point, our stock was trading in the mid-70s, even approaching 80. And at those levels, I think management had such confidence in kind of the forward outlook for the business that we viewed the stock price at those levels as being undervalued relative to what we saw in the business, hence why we were in the market repurchasing. We saw a pullback in the price of the shares of about 10%-12% coming off of the Q4 earnings, largely, I think, in reaction to a bit of misalignment between guidance and expectation. So if we were buying back in the mid-70s and high-80s, we certainly viewed high-60s, low-70s as an attractive price point.
and that's, I think, why we started more aggressively pursuing something like an ASR to bring a bigger block of shares in all at once at what we thought was a very attractive price point, not only for the company but for our shareholders as well. From a financing perspective, we finance these repurchases through a mix of cash on hand, operating cash flow. So again, the adjusted free cash flow we're expecting for this year is $264 million, so significant free cash flow, as well as incremental capacity on our existing debt facility. So we had capacity on the existing revolver, and we've funded the ASR with the incremental debt capacity there.
Okay. Great. That's a helpful clarification. So I think with just a few minutes left, I'd love to open it up to the audience if you guys have any questions. Sure.
Maybe just one. I looked at the company a few years ago, and the organic growth profile seems to be more in that kind of low to mid-single-digit range. It's.
Yep.
Like now, kind of 70%, maybe in this high-single-digit range. Is that kind of the right range investors should expect going forward? And maybe what were some of the drivers to, to bump you up to these higher levels?
Yeah. It's a really good question. So I think to answer the second part of your question first, yes, I think that high single-digit range, at least for the near term, is where we see ourselves for sure. I think the lower single-digit range we were in a few years ago was definitely in part driven by COVID, right? We have aspects of our customer base that rely very much on in-person events. So I think museums, zoos, botanical gardens, all the runs, walks, rides, some of that did move online, right, which benefited our payments business. But there were big portions of our portfolio that were hurt by the COVID period. And those have since recovered. So that's fueling some of that comeback. The pricing initiatives that I touched upon are definitely a part of the story.
And we're starting to see that growth acceleration in the back half of 2023 and then certainly into 2024. That initiative applies to our social sector, contractual revenue business. So if you go back to that revenue disaggregation chart, it's that 55% of revenues at the top of the chart. And there's really a couple main changes there. So historically, we were renewing customers on one-year terms, so year to year. And the price increase at renewal was low- to mid-single digits. Starting in March of 2023, we changed all that. So the vast majority of renewals are now on three-year terms. So they're locked up for longer. There are now price increases in all three years of that deal. So it's not just year one. There's also embedded escalators in years two and three.
The price increase in year one is now significantly higher than it used to be, in large part because of what I'd call a one-time catch-up or inflationary adjustment. You can really think of those price increases as year one being mid- to high teens and then years two and three with the embedded escalators being mid- to high single digits. All three of those, a good bit higher than we were historically. And again, applying that to about 55% of our revenue base over the next couple years has a meaningful impact on total revenue. We actually quantified the impact of those pricing initiatives on 2024 growth. And about 50% of that 7.2% growth rate is coming from those pricing initiatives. And it will have a multi-year tailwind. Of the eligible cohort, 35% renewed in 2023, so that's now complete.
Another 30% will be eligible in 2024 this year, 25% in 2025, and then the remaining 10% in 2026. So a multi-year tailwind with that initiative as well.
Any more questions? Sure.
Talk about the competitive landscape. Is there an area that you focus on, you know, or maybe give way to other competitors, like the ideal customer profile?
Yeah. And I'll, I'll let Sudip chime in on some of this too if you'd like. We do not have a single competitor that we can point to and say, "That's who we see all the time," right? Fairly broad portfolio. We play in a lot of different end markets. So the competitive set differs between each of those. So who we compete against in CRM is different than the financial general ledger, is different than payments, is different than K-12 education, is different than corporate, right? So it's a bit hard to define in that sense. I'd say one of the key differentiators for us goes back to the comments Sudip was making about Connected Systems, right? We have by far the broadest suite of solutions, and we sell a portfolio, right, of connected solutions.
Most of our competitors are either selling point solutions or they're selling, especially at the upright end of the market, more horizontal-type platforms. So at the very high end, right, we may see one of the bigger CRM players, but those are not solutions that are purpose-built for these nonprofit entities. Ours is made for them out of the box, much easier to pick up and use. So I'd say from a competitive differentiation standpoint, that's what we're selling on oftentimes.
Great. All right. I think with that, we're really pleased to have Jeffrey and Sudip at the Citizens JMP Technology Conference. Thank you all for attending this session. And thank you guys for joining.
Yeah.