The request usually sounds simple: “Can you pull everyone who gave to the education fund, with their mailing address and email?” Then the first attempt comes back with the same donor listed six times, half the emails blank, and a few addresses for people who moved two years ago. A fund query in Altru isn’t hard, but it does reward a little planning before you start dragging fields onto the output.
This guide covers how to think about the query, which choices cause duplicate rows, and how to check the list before it goes to a mail house or into an email tool.
Decide what one row should mean
Before opening the query designer, answer one question: is each row a gift, or is each row a person?
- One row per gift is what you want for a finance reconciliation or a gift history review. Repeat donors will appear more than once, and that’s correct.
- One row per donor is what you want for a thank-you mailing, an impact report, or an email list. Repeat donors should appear once.
Most “fund with addresses and emails” lists are the second kind. That decision drives which source you start from and how you handle the output.
Building the query
1. Start from a revenue-based source
Fund information lives on revenue, so start an ad-hoc query from a revenue source rather than a constituent source. That lets you filter directly on the fund the money was applied to. The exact source names vary by how your Altru instance is set up, so if you see more than one revenue-related option, test each with a small date range and compare counts.
2. Filter on fund and date
Add the fund (or funds) you care about as a filter, plus a date range. Without a date range you’ll get every gift ever applied to that fund, which is rarely what anyone means. If the gift was split across several funds, the revenue will still match as long as one portion went to your fund, but the amount column may show the full gift unless you output the amount applied to the fund specifically. Check that with a known split gift before trusting the totals.
3. Pull contact fields through the constituent
Addresses and emails belong to the constituent, not the gift. Expand the constituent node within the revenue source and look for the primary address and primary email fields. Use primary wherever you can. If you browse into the full address or email collections instead, every constituent with two addresses or three emails will produce two or three rows, and that’s the most common reason fund lists come out bloated.
For a mailing, output the address pieces as separate columns (street lines, city, state, ZIP, country) rather than one combined block. Mail houses and merge tools handle separate columns far better.
4. Add the fields that keep you out of trouble
- Constituent lookup ID, so you can trace any row back to a record
- Deceased status
- Any do-not-mail, do-not-email, or solicit codes your organization uses
- Household information, if you mail to households rather than individuals
It’s easier to filter these out in the query, but outputting them for the first run lets you see what you’d be excluding.
5. Collapse to one row per donor
If you need a donor list, you have a few options. Some query outputs let you summarize or remove duplicate rows; whether that’s available depends on the source view and fields you’ve chosen, so try it in your instance. Another reliable approach is a two-step one: save the revenue query as a selection of constituents, then build a constituent query that uses that selection as a filter and outputs name, primary address, and primary email. That second query naturally returns one row per person.
Checking the list before you use it
- Compare counts. Note the number of distinct donors and the number of gifts. If your donor list has more rows than distinct donors, something is still multiplying.
- Sort by lookup ID and scan for repeats.
- Sort by email and look for blanks and for one email shared by different constituents. Shared emails often mean duplicate records, which are worth merging before the next mailing.
- Spot-check five donors against their constituent records, including one you know gave more than once.
- Look at the address dates or status if your data includes them, and decide what to do with addresses that haven’t been confirmed in years.
Common snags
Anonymous gifts. Decide in advance whether anonymous donors belong on a thank-you list. Usually they still get thanked, but they shouldn’t appear in a published donor roll.
Gifts from organizations. A company or foundation gift will bring back the organization’s address, not the person who handled the gift. If you need a contact name, you’ll have to add relationship fields or handle those rows by hand.
Tribute and soft-credit gifts. If your fund receives memorial gifts or soft credits, confirm whether your query is returning the payer, the soft-credit recipient, or both. Ask Blackbaud support if the behavior isn’t clear from your test results.
Reusing the list
Save the query with a clear name that includes the fund and the purpose, and turn the date range into something you adjust each time rather than rebuilding from scratch. If the fund list feeds an email platform or a shared spreadsheet on a regular schedule, the export-clean-upload routine gets old quickly. Social Good’s Data Bridge syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign and similar tools, so a saved fund query can stay current in those places without manual exports.
