Every Monday someone on staff logs into Altru, runs last week’s attendance and revenue numbers, exports them to Excel, tidies the columns, and emails the file to the director, the finance office, and the board chair. It eats a good part of the morning, and when that person is on vacation, the email just doesn’t go out.
The natural question is whether Altru can do this by itself: run a report on a schedule and drop it in people’s inboxes. The honest answer is that delivery is not where Altru shines, and the realistic fix is usually a combination of better-built queries and a tool outside Altru that handles the “send it every Monday” part.
What Altru gives you on its own
Altru is strong at producing the numbers. Reports, queries, smart fields, and the daily sales and revenue areas all give you accurate data on demand. What it doesn’t do well is deliver that data to people who never log in.
Because Altru is a hosted system, you don’t have access to the server-level job scheduling that self-hosted databases offer. Some Altru processes may be able to run as scheduled jobs, but many organizations find there’s no simple “email this report to these five people every Monday at 7 a.m.” setting for standard reports or ad-hoc queries. If you think your version or configuration supports something closer to that, test it before building a routine around it: try it in your sandbox environment if you have one, or ask Blackbaud support directly what scheduling and delivery options your subscription includes.
Step one: make the report worth automating
Before you worry about delivery, fix the report itself. Most “scheduled report” headaches are really query headaches. A report that needs ten minutes of cleanup every time can’t be automated no matter what tool you use.
- Use relative date filters. Build queries with filters like “last week,” “this month,” or “yesterday” instead of fixed dates. A query that has to be edited before every run isn’t a scheduled report, it’s a chore.
- Name output columns for the reader. Rename fields in the query output so a board member sees “Membership Revenue” instead of a technical field path.
- Use smart fields for totals that are slow to calculate. Lifetime giving, membership counts, and similar rollups are easier to pull reliably when they’re stored as smart fields rather than calculated on the fly in a big query.
- One query per audience. Finance wants revenue by account. The education director wants school group counts. Trying to serve both from one export is how a report grows to forty columns nobody reads.
- Save it as a shared query with a clear name, so it doesn’t live only in one person’s personal list.
Step two: decide who actually needs a push
Not every report needs to land in an inbox. Sort your recipients into two groups:
- People who already use Altru. Department heads with Altru logins can usually just run a saved, shared query or report when they need it. Give them a short list of the three they should look at and skip the email.
- People who never log in. Board members, executive directors, outside accountants, and grant reporting partners. These are the ones who truly need delivery, and they almost always prefer a link to a live sheet or dashboard over an attachment.
That second group is where the weekly manual export usually comes from, and it’s the part worth solving properly.
Step three: pick a delivery method you can sustain
Manual, but documented
If you only have one or two reports, a written routine may be enough. Put the steps in a shared document: which query, which export format, who gets it, and a backup person for each week. Add a recurring calendar reminder for both people. This doesn’t save time, but it stops the report from vanishing when someone is out.
Move the data somewhere that can schedule
The more durable fix is to get the query results out of Altru and into a tool that is good at sharing. Google Sheets, for example, can be shared with view-only access, and dashboards built on top of a sheet (Looker Studio is a common choice) can be set up to email a summary on a schedule. Once the data refreshes from Altru without anyone exporting it, the “report” becomes a link people can open whenever they like, and the scheduled email is just a reminder that it’s there.
The weak point is the refresh. If someone still has to export from Altru and paste into the sheet, you’ve only moved the manual step, not removed it.
A few cautions
- Watch what’s in the file. Constituent names, emails, and addresses shouldn’t travel to people who only need totals. Build summary queries for broad audiences and keep record-level detail to the staff who need it.
- Agree on definitions. “Attendance” in a daily sales report and “attendance” in a scanned-tickets query may not match. Label which one you’re sending so finance and operations stop arguing about a number that was never meant to be the same.
- Retire reports nobody reads. Once something is automated, it tends to run forever. Check once or twice a year whether recipients still open it.
Where Social Good fits
The refresh step is what Data Bridge handles. It syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets and other tools such as Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, so a well-built query can feed a sheet or dashboard without someone exporting it by hand each week. Altru stays where the data is entered and maintained; the sheet just becomes the easy place for non-Altru users to read it.
Quick answers
Can Altru email a report automatically on a schedule?
Not in the simple, set-it-and-forget-it way most people expect. Confirm what your subscription supports with Blackbaud support, and plan on a workaround for recipients who don’t log in.
Should we send attachments or links?
Links to a shared, view-only sheet or dashboard are usually better. They’re always current, they don’t pile up in inboxes, and you can change who has access without resending anything.
