A local credit union sponsors your summer camp. The gift is recorded on the organization record, which is correct. Then the thank-you letter goes out addressed to “Riverside Credit Union,” opens with “Dear Riverside Credit Union,” and lands in a general mailbox where nobody knows who wrote the check. The person who actually championed the sponsorship never sees it.
What you want on that letter is the organization’s name and a real person: “Ms. Dana Ortiz, Riverside Credit Union,” with a salutation of “Dear Dana.” Getting there in Altru is mostly about where the contact’s name comes from and how your acknowledgement template is built, not about a single setting.
Why organization letters come out wrong
Altru’s addressee and salutation name formats are built around individuals: first name, last name, title, spouse. An organization constituent record has a name, but it doesn’t carry a person’s name formats of its own. So when an acknowledgement pulls “addressee” and “salutation” for an organization, there’s not much for it to work with, and you get the org name repeated in both places, or a blank.
The person you want to thank lives on a separate individual constituent record, connected to the organization through a relationship. The trick is pulling that person’s name into the organization’s letter.
Whether your version of Altru offers an organization-specific addressee format that automatically includes the primary contact is worth checking directly. Look at the name format options your administrator can configure, and if you don’t see one, ask Blackbaud support before building a workaround. The approach below works either way.
Step 1: Make the relationships trustworthy
Everything downstream depends on each organization having one clearly identified contact. Before touching templates:
- Pull a list of organizations that gave in the last year or two.
- For each, confirm there’s a relationship to an individual and that one of them is marked as the primary contact (or whatever contact designation your team uses consistently).
- Flag organizations with no contact, or with several and no primary. Those are the letters that will break.
- Agree on who owns this. Development staff who manage sponsors usually know who the right person is; data entry staff usually don’t.
This cleanup is the unglamorous part, and it’s also the part that makes the rest work.
Step 2: Add the contact’s fields to your acknowledgement output
Whatever feeds your acknowledgement letters, whether that’s a revenue query, an export, or the data source behind your letter process, needs extra fields when the donor is an organization:
- Organization name
- The primary contact’s addressee and salutation (taken from the individual’s record through the relationship)
- The primary contact’s job title, if you store it on the relationship
- The address you want to mail to (more on that below)
In a query, this usually means going from the revenue record to the constituent, then through relationships to the related individual, filtered to the primary contact. Test the output for a handful of known sponsors before trusting it. A relationship join that isn’t filtered tightly will give you one row per related person, and you’ll print duplicate letters.
Step 3: Build the address block with a condition
Rather than maintaining two separate letter templates, most teams use one Word merge template with conditional fields. The logic is simple:
- If the donor is an organization and a contact name exists: print the contact’s addressee on the first line, the organization name on the second, then the address. Use the contact’s salutation.
- If the donor is an organization with no contact: print the organization name, then the address, and fall back to a neutral salutation such as “Dear Friends at Riverside Credit Union.”
- If the donor is an individual: use their normal addressee and salutation.
Word’s IF fields handle this fine. Include a “constituent type” or “is organization” column in your output so the template has something reliable to test against, rather than guessing based on whether a first name is blank.
The other direction: individuals at a business address
A related problem shows up when an individual donor wants mail sent to their office. Their address type is “Business,” but the letter goes to “Mr. Tom Reyes, 400 Main Street, Suite 200,” with no company name, and the mailroom has no idea who Tom is.
A few ways to handle it:
- Pull the employer from the relationship. If Tom has an employment relationship to the organization, add the employer name to your output and print it as a line beneath his name when the preferred address is a business address.
- Put the company in the address lines. Some teams type the company name as the first address line. It’s quick and it mails correctly, but it pollutes the address with a non-address value, which can cause problems with address validation and with any export that splits address lines. Use it sparingly and document it if you do.
- Check whether your address records support a separate company or attention line. If they do, that’s the cleanest place for it. If you’re not sure, test in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support.
Testing before the next mailing
Run a short test batch that includes at least one of each case: an organization with a primary contact, an organization without one, an individual at home, and an individual at a business address. Print the merged letters and read the address block and salutation on each. It takes ten minutes and catches nearly everything.
Then write the rule down for whoever enters gifts: when a gift comes from a company, record it on the organization, confirm the primary contact relationship exists, and add one if it doesn’t. That habit is what keeps “Dear Riverside Credit Union” out of your outbox.
Quick answers
Should the gift go on the contact’s record or the organization’s?
If the organization’s money paid for it, record it on the organization. Use the relationship to thank the person. Soft credit to the individual is an option if your team wants their giving history to reflect it.
What if the contact changes jobs?
End-date the old relationship and add the new contact. Your letters will follow the relationship, so keeping it current matters more than editing old letters.
