You mail a renewal appeal to a few thousand lapsing members. Every letter carries a finder number so you can tell which segment and which package brought each renewal back. At the desk, staff key it in and the response lands on the right appeal. Online, where a large share of renewals now come in, the number often goes nowhere, and your appeal results look worse than they really were.
It helps to remember what a finder number is for. It isn’t the goal in itself. It’s a shortcut for matching a response to the person and the mailing that prompted it. For renewals, you usually already know who the person is, which leaves you more options than it first seems.
Start by confirming what your web form actually captures
Don’t assume either way. Whether an Altru membership web form can collect a finder number or source code, and whether that value ties the revenue to a marketing effort, depends on the form type and how your forms were set up. Before you build any workaround:
- Run a test renewal in your sandbox (or a low-risk live test with a staff record) through the online form you send people to.
- Open the resulting revenue and membership records and look for any appeal, source, or marketing effort link.
- If you find nothing and aren’t sure whether a setting exists, ask Blackbaud support directly: “Can our online membership renewal form capture a finder number and credit the appeal?” Get the answer in writing so the next administrator has it.
If the form handles it, the remaining work is making the field obvious to members, who rarely type in a code nobody asked them for. If it doesn’t, use one or more of the approaches below.
Option 1: Match by constituent instead of by number
This is the most dependable fix for renewals, and it doesn’t need anything from the member. Everyone you mailed already has a constituent record and sits on your appeal’s recipient list. A renewal from that person within your response window is, for reporting purposes, a response.
- Build a query of membership transactions in the response window (for example, 60 to 90 days after the drop date), limited to online channels if you can tell them apart.
- Filter or join it to the constituents on the mailing’s recipient list.
- Use that result to credit responses to the effort, either by updating the revenue’s appeal where your process allows it or by keeping it as the official response report.
The catch: duplicates. If a member renews online under a new email address and that ends up creating a second constituent record, the match fails. Clean up and merge duplicates regularly, or this method undercounts.
Option 2: Give each segment its own link
When the mailing goes out by email, or the print piece carries a short URL or QR code, send each segment or package to its own renewal page or a link with its own tracking parameter. You lose individual-level detail, but you get a clean segment-level count without asking anyone to type anything. If you test two letter versions, two URLs are enough to compare them.
Keep a simple key, such as a shared spreadsheet listing URL, segment, appeal, and drop date, so the numbers still make sense next year.
Option 3: Ask, but make it easy
If you really do need the finder number itself, ask for it in plain language and show members where to find it: “Have your renewal letter handy? Enter the code above your name.” Expect partial completion. Treat the typed codes as a bonus on top of constituent matching, not a replacement for it.
Whatever field collects the value, check that the data actually reaches Altru in a form someone can query. A code stored only in an email confirmation or a payment processor note is effectively lost.
Agree on the attribution rules before the next drop
The technical piece is usually smaller than the policy piece. Decide, and write down:
- Response window: how long after the drop a renewal still counts for that appeal.
- Overlap: what happens when a member got both the letter and an email. Do you credit the first effort, the last one, or both?
- Organic renewals: whether auto-reminder or walk-up renewals from mailed members count toward the appeal or get reported separately.
- Who reconciles: which person runs the match query and when, so the appeal report isn’t finished three months late.
With those rules written down, online and offline renewals are counted the same way, and the gap between “what the desk recorded” and “what the web brought in” stops distorting your results.
Where Social Good fits
If you’re rethinking the online renewal experience anyway, Checkouts replaces Altru web forms for memberships with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that writes the data back to Altru. If appeal attribution matters to you, raise it when you talk to us so we can review your setup together. Either way, keep constituent matching as your baseline.
Quick answers
Do I need finder numbers at all for renewals?
Not necessarily. Since renewing members already have records, matching by constituent against the recipient list is often more complete than relying on typed codes.
Why are my online appeal results so low?
Usually because online renewals aren’t linked to the appeal, not because the mailing failed. Run the constituent match before you judge the package.
