You may have received notice that Blackbaud, a private, highly regarded company that provides cloud-based service platforms to assist a wide-range of nonprofits – including hundreds of colleges and universities – manage constituent information, recently notified the University of North Carolina System of a data security incident . The cybersecurity team at Blackbaud used independent forensics experts and law enforcement to investigate the incident, and have assured the University that they have no reason to believe any data was misused or will be disseminated . Blackbaud has additionally implemented monitoring procedures to identify future potential misuse or dissemination of the data.
UNC Charlotte does not employ the Blackbaud solution for our constituent management platform, reducing our exposure to this incident. We do use a Blackbaud product, ResearchPoint software, to assist us in analyzing our fundraising efforts. ResearchPoint only maintains publicly available information such as constituent names, addresses and birthdates. This software does not include sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, credit card or financial institution information.
Based on Blackbaud’s assurances and our limited use of Blackbaud’s ResearchPoint, which only uses our publicly accessible data, this security incident should not create any vulnerabilities for you . Regardless, we will continue to work with Blackbaud to confirm they take the necessary steps to minimize the impact of the incident and ensure it does not happen again. We take protection of your information very seriously, and encourage you to remain vigilant, as always, to the threat of identity theft.
If you have any questions or concerns about this matter, please email us at donorrelations@uncc.edu .
Thank you for your support of UNC Charlotte.
Sincerely,
Niles Sorensen
Vice Chancellor for University Advancement