A member moves across town, gets a new email address, and keeps getting renewal notices at the old one. Eventually they call, someone at the desk types the new address into the constituent record, and with luck it’s spelled right. Multiply that by a few thousand households and you can see why so many membership managers want members to keep their own contact details current.
Here’s how to think about self-service profile updates when Altru is your membership database: what Altru handles on its own, the tradeoffs of each approach, and what to settle before you put any “update your info” link on your website.
What Altru gives you out of the box
Altru’s public-facing tools are built around transactions: buying tickets, joining or renewing, donating. When a member completes a web form, the contact information they enter is checked against existing constituent records. Depending on how your organization has set up matching, the result may be an updated record, a new address or email added alongside the old one, or an entirely new constituent. Test a few scenarios so you know which one you get.
What we’re not aware of in standard Altru is a logged-in member account where someone can open their own record, review it, and edit it without buying something. If you aren’t sure whether your configuration includes anything like that, ask Blackbaud support or test it in a sandbox before planning around it. Don’t assume it’s there.
That leaves three realistic options.
Option 1: Let renewals do the updating
The simplest path is to treat every online renewal as a chance to refresh contact data. Members re-enter their name, address, and email at checkout, and Altru’s matching takes it from there.
- Pros: nothing new to build, and the data comes in at the moment members are paying attention.
- Cons: it only happens once a year. A member who moves in month two stays wrong for ten months. And if matching doesn’t recognize them, perhaps because they typed a new email, you get a duplicate record instead of an update.
If you rely on this, review the records your web forms create or modify every week. A simple query on recently added constituents who have a membership should catch many of the duplicates before they turn into split giving histories.
Option 2: A contact update form that staff process
Some organizations put a basic form on their website (name, member number, new address, new email, phone) that emails the membership office. Staff look up the record and make the change by hand.
- Pros: a person checks every change, so you avoid overwriting a household’s address because one spouse moved out, or replacing a good email with a typo.
- Cons: it’s manual work that competes with everything else in renewal season, and the member gets no confirmation that anything happened. They also can’t see what you currently have on file, so they don’t know whether they need to submit the form at all.
If you go this way, keep the form’s fields to what you will actually process, and send an acknowledgment when the change is done. Also keep the submissions out of a shared inbox nobody owns.
Option 3: A real member self-service page
The version members actually expect is the one they use with their bank or airline: sign in, see your membership level and expiration, see what you’ve bought, fix your address, done. Reaching that with Altru means adding a tool that reads and writes Altru data on the member’s behalf.
Before picking anything, work through these questions with your team:
- How will members prove who they are? Showing someone’s address and purchase history to the wrong person is a real privacy problem. Email-based sign-in tied to the email on the constituent record is common, which means your email data needs to be clean first.
- Which fields can members change? Address, email, and phone are usually fine. Name changes, household membership, and the second cardholder on a dual membership are better left to staff.
- How do households work? Decide whether either adult on a household membership can edit shared details, and what happens when they disagree.
- What history is worth showing? Membership status and expiration are the big ones. Past ticket purchases and gifts are nice to have, but check that what members would see matches what’s on their receipts, or you’ll get confused calls.
- Who gets notified? A change of address can matter to development staff and to your mailing schedule. Decide whether edits trigger a note, a report, or nothing.
Clean up before you open the door
Whatever option you choose, self-service exposes the state of your data. Members who sign in and see two addresses, an old last name, or a lapsed membership they renewed last month will call. Spend some time on duplicates and stale emails before launch, and pick a few staff members to test it with their own records first.
Where Social Good fits
If you want option 3 without leaving Altru, our Membership Portal lets members view their status, renew, upgrade, and update their profile online against live Altru data, so changes land in the same constituent records your staff already use.
Quick answers
Will online updates overwrite the old address?
That depends on the tool and your settings. Test with a staff record and check what the constituent record looks like afterward: a replaced address, a second address, or a new record.
Should members be able to change their email themselves?
Yes, as long as there’s verification. Email is often how they sign in, so an unverified change can lock a member out or hand their account to someone else.
