Every spring the letters arrive: a school PTA, a rotary club, a hospice gala, each asking whether you’d donate a family membership to their raffle or silent auction. Saying yes is easy. Recording it in Altru so that finance, the membership team, and whoever eventually walks up to the desk with a certificate all see the same thing takes some planning.
The core difficulty is timing. When you donate the membership, you don’t know who will win it. Altru memberships belong to a constituent, so there’s nobody to attach the membership to yet. The cleanest approach separates the process into two moments: issuing a certificate now, and creating the membership later when the winner redeems it.
Step one: issue a certificate, not a membership
Resist the urge to create a membership in the requesting organization’s name. It inflates your member count, puts a school or nonprofit on your renewal mailings, and leaves you transferring or editing the record later. Instead, send the organization a printed or PDF certificate that includes:
- A unique certificate number. A simple sequence works (for example, the year plus a running number).
- The membership level it can be redeemed for.
- A redemption deadline. Six to twelve months is common. Without one, certificates surface years later at levels you no longer offer.
- How to redeem: in person at the membership desk, by phone, or by email, and whether the term starts at redemption or on a fixed date.
- A line stating it has no cash value and can’t be applied to an existing membership’s renewal, if that’s your policy.
Keep a log of every certificate issued: number, level, the organization that received it, event date, and expiration. A shared spreadsheet is fine. Some teams prefer to keep it in Altru by adding a note or attribute on a constituent record for the requesting organization, which also gives you a history of who has asked before and how often. Either works, as long as there is exactly one place the desk checks.
Step two: create the membership when the winner shows up
When someone redeems, look up (or add) their constituent record first. Raffle winners are often existing members, lapsed members, or people already in your database from a ticket purchase, so search before creating a new record to avoid duplicates.
Then add the membership at the certificate’s level for zero dollars. How you get to zero depends on your setup. Many organizations use a dedicated 100% discount reserved for donated or complimentary memberships; others use a separate complimentary membership program. Altru’s options here vary with how your membership programs and discounts are configured, so test the exact process in your sandbox or confirm with Blackbaud support before training staff, especially how a zero-dollar transaction shows up in daily sales and in revenue reports.
Whatever mechanism you choose, tag the transaction consistently so you can find these memberships later:
- Record the certificate number on the membership or in a note.
- Use a specific source or marketing code such as “Donated – auction/raffle” rather than a generic comp code shared with staff or board memberships.
- Mark the certificate as redeemed in your log so it can’t be used twice.
Keep donated members out of your core metrics
Donated memberships carry no revenue, and the people who receive them didn’t choose to join. If they’re mixed in with paid members, your average revenue per member drops and your first-year renewal rate can look worse than your paid program actually performs. Because you tagged them consistently, you can build a query that excludes donated memberships from your standard renewal and revenue reports, plus a separate one that reports on them on their own.
That separate list is worth paying attention to. Certificate winners have just spent a year visiting on someone else’s dime, which makes them some of your warmest renewal prospects. Consider giving them their own renewal message that acknowledges how they joined and offers a clear path to continue at their level.
What to tell finance
A membership you give away to another organization’s event isn’t revenue and usually isn’t a gift you receive, so there is often nothing to post. Finance may still want a yearly tally of how many certificates went out and their face value for budgeting or board reporting, and your certificate log gives them that without extra work. If your auditor wants these recorded differently, follow their lead.
When the auction is your own
The picture changes if a membership is a lot in your own gala or fundraiser. Here the winner pays you, often more than the membership’s normal price. The common practice is to treat the normal price as the membership and the amount above it as a donation, since the bidder generally can only claim the portion above fair market value as a charitable contribution. Recording it that way in Altru, as a membership at its standard rate plus a separate donation for the excess, keeps your acknowledgment letters accurate and your membership revenue comparable year over year. Confirm the treatment with your accountant, and test in your sandbox how your team will split the payment before event night.
Quick answers
Should the certificate be transferable?
Usually yes. Raffle prizes get regifted, and the whole point is that you don’t know who will end up holding it. What matters is that each number can only be redeemed once.
What if the winner is already a current member?
Decide this before you print certificates. Some organizations let the certificate extend an active membership by one term; others ask the winner to pass it to a friend. State your policy on the certificate itself so the desk isn’t negotiating it case by case.
