Balfour Beatty to Build Blackbaud High Tech Campus

By Laura Calugar

Charleston, S.C.—Holder Properties, a privately held full-service commercial and residential real estate developer, has chosen Balfour Beatty Construction to build a new corporate campus for Blackbaud in Charleston’s Daniel Island community. Balfour Beatty was awarded the contract for the first phase of the project, which consists of a four-story, 172,000-square-foot office building, as well as a 650-space surface parking lot. The eco-friendly building will be designed by ASD | SKY.

Blackbaud Corp.’s headquarter in Charleston, S.C.

Blackbaud’s new corporate campus will consolidate its Charleston operations into one location situated on 13 acres in the Daniel Island area. Once complete, Blackbaud’s campus will provide a new workplace for its employees, featuring a coffee and tea bar, game rooms, ergonomic work stations and bike racks. The campus will also include outdoor recreation spaces, a basketball court, bocce ball court and hiking trails.

In order to achieve LEED certification, the green campus will include features such as car-charging stations, low energy LED lighting and building materials using low-volatile organic chemicals. As a global cloud software company, Blackbaud’s new campus will incorporate SMART boards, video conferencing and digital signage, as well as a customer technology center designed to incubate non-profit organizations. The company will also host local students on campus for Camp Blackbaud, its employee-led STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) program. Balfour Beatty will use tilt wall structure with applied finishes such as tile and plaster to enhance the speed of construction and preserve the quality of construction in time. Technologies will include building information modelling software. Digital documents will enable the team to access real-time plans on the paperless project.

“We’re honored to be Holder Properties’ construction partner in delivering this state-of-the-art corporate campus for Blackbaud. In addition to our past experience working with both Blackbaud and Holder Properties, we have a solid track record of successfully delivering projects in the Charleston market. With great experience delivering innovative corporate office projects for some of the nation’s most culture-focused companies, we are pleased for the opportunity to leverage both our proven local market and national subcontractor relationships to provide maximum value on this project,” said Russ Brockelbank, project executive for Balfour Beatty, in a prepared statement.

Headquartered in The Holy City since 1989, Blackbaud is a high-growth provider of software and services for the global philanthropic community. With site work underway, the first phase of the Blackbaud new corporate campus is scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2018.

Recently, Balfour Beatty was awarded a $196 million contract to build the North Block phase of Capitol Crossing, a $1.3 billion project in Washington, D.C.

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