A donor gives online on Tuesday. On Thursday they call: “That gift was in memory of my father. Can you make sure the family gets a card?” Simple request. Then you open the transaction in Altru and find it came through as an online order, not a standalone donation, and the tribute options you expected aren’t where you usually find them.
This is one of those spots where Altru’s structure matters more than any single setting. Below is why order-based gifts behave differently, the realistic ways to attach the tribute after the fact, and how to keep it from coming up every week.
Why an online order is different from a regular donation
In Altru, a tribute is tied to the revenue record for a gift. When you enter a donation directly, you can designate it as a tribute while you’re building the revenue, and the tribute record, honoree, and any acknowledgee all hang off that gift.
An online order is a sales transaction. The donation is one line inside it, often alongside tickets or a membership, and the whole order is processed and paid as a unit. Depending on how your web forms are set up and how the order was processed, the donation line may not expose the same tribute editing you get on a gift entered in revenue. Some admins find they can open the resulting revenue record and add a tribute there; others find the record is locked down because it belongs to an order.
We can’t promise which experience you’ll have, because it depends on your configuration and how the gift came in. Test it first on a sandbox or a low-stakes record, and if the option isn’t there, ask Blackbaud support whether tribute editing on order-generated revenue is supported in your version. That one answer decides which path below you take.
Path 1: Edit the revenue record directly
If Altru lets you add a tribute to the revenue that came from the order, this is the cleanest fix:
- Find the donor’s constituent record and open the revenue for that gift (not the order summary).
- Check whether the tribute already exists in your tributes list. Memorial funds for the same person often get created twice, so search before creating a new one.
- Add the tribute to the gift and fill in the honoree and any acknowledgee (the family member who should be notified).
- Add a short note on the revenue saying when and why the tribute was added, and who asked.
Then confirm the gift shows up wherever your tribute reporting looks, usually a tribute query or the tribute record itself. If it doesn’t, your acknowledgment process won’t catch it either.
Path 2: Refund and re-enter as a standalone donation
If the order locks the donation, some organizations reverse the donation portion and re-enter it as a regular gift with the tribute attached. This gives you a proper tribute record, but it touches money, so be careful:
- Talk to finance before you do it. A refund and re-entry affects deposits, batches, and possibly posted revenue. If the original gift has already posted to your general ledger, the reversal has to be handled the way your finance team expects.
- Don’t actually refund the donor’s card unless you’re also charging it again, which the donor didn’t ask for. You’re correcting the record, not the payment. How you do that without a second charge depends on your payment setup, so confirm the exact steps with Blackbaud support or your finance lead.
- Keep the gift date accurate. The donor gave on Tuesday. Their giving history and tax receipt should still say Tuesday.
This path is worth it for larger memorial gifts or when the tribute will collect many gifts over time. For a one-off small gift it’s often more trouble than it’s worth.
Path 3: Record it and acknowledge it manually
When neither of the above is practical, at least make the tribute visible and make sure the family hears about it:
- Add a note or attribute on the revenue and the donor’s constituent record with the honoree’s name and the acknowledgee’s contact details.
- Send the notification letter to the family by hand and record that it went out.
- Add the gift to a running list your development team checks when reporting on that tribute, so totals for “gifts in memory of” aren’t short.
The weakness is obvious: the gift won’t appear in standard tribute queries. If you choose this path, decide who owns that running list.
Stop it from happening at checkout
The after-the-fact fix is always harder than capturing it up front. A few things help:
- Look at whether your donation web form can collect tribute information directly, and whether that form creates a gift rather than an order. If donors who want to give in honor of someone are routed to a dedicated donation form, much of this problem goes away.
- If the donation must stay in the cart, add a clearly labeled field like “Is this gift in honor or memory of someone?” so staff at least get the information at the time of the gift.
- Build a short weekly query of online orders that include a donation and have something in that tribute field or comments. Process those before the week’s acknowledgments go out.
- Write down which path your organization uses so the next staff member doesn’t invent a fourth one.
Quick answers
Will adding a tribute later change the donor’s receipt?
Adding a tribute to an existing gift shouldn’t change the amount or date. Re-entering the gift can, which is why the date and amount need to match the original exactly.
Does the family need to be a constituent?
To track an acknowledgee properly in Altru, you’ll generally want them as a constituent record. If you only need to send one card, a note with their address may be enough.
What if the order included tickets too?
Only touch the donation line. Reversing the whole order to fix a tribute creates far more cleanup than it solves.
