The auctioneer calls for $1,000 paddles, forty hands go up in ninety seconds, and someone at a back table is trying to write down bidder numbers on a legal pad. Live giving moments raise a lot of money fast. They also produce the messiest data your development team will touch all year, unless you decide before the event how each gift is going to land in Altru.
Altru doesn’t have a dedicated “paddle raise mode.” What it does have is the usual set of tools: constituent records, donations, pledges, daily sales, web forms, batches, and queries. The job is choosing which of those fits the way your event actually collects money, then setting it up ahead of time so the cleanup takes a morning instead of two weeks.
First, decide how money changes hands in the room
There are really three patterns, and many galas use more than one.
1. Commitments now, payment later (classic paddle raise)
Guests raise a paddle, a spotter records the bidder number and level, and nobody pays on the spot. In Altru terms, each raised paddle is a promise, not a payment. You have two reasonable ways to record it:
- Enter it as a pledge on the guest’s constituent record, then apply the payment when it arrives. This keeps an honest picture of what’s outstanding and lets you run a query of unpaid commitments for follow-up.
- Wait and enter only the donation once payment comes in. Simpler, but you lose visibility into who still owes, and the event total in Altru will lag the number announced from the stage.
How pledges and pledge payments behave depends on how your revenue setup is configured. Before you commit to the pledge route, test the full cycle (pledge, partial payment, payment in full, acknowledgment) in a sandbox or with a test constituent, and ask Blackbaud support if anything doesn’t post the way your finance team expects.
2. Pay at a station during the event
Some events run a giving table or checkout station where guests pay before leaving. If your staff already use daily sales at the front desk, a donation can usually be added to a sale there, which means the gift posts with a payment attached instead of needing to be reconciled later. Confirm that your daily sales setup includes donations with the right designation before event night; a station that can only sell tickets won’t help you.
The weak point here is the line. A paddle raise finishes in minutes, and a single checkout station can’t process forty card payments that quickly. Plan for more stations or a second option.
3. Guests give on their own phones
A QR code on the table card or the big screen, pointing to an online donation form, lets guests pay as the paddles go up. The gift arrives already paid and with the donor’s own name, email, and address, which removes most of the “who is bidder 214?” problem. Whether this works smoothly depends on your donation form: it needs to load fast on a phone, accept the amount the guest wants to give, and be easy to finish in under a minute while someone is still talking from the stage.
Set up Altru before the event
Most of the post-event pain comes from decisions nobody made in advance. Settle these with development and finance at least a couple of weeks out:
- Designation, campaign, and appeal. Create (or pick) the coding for event-night giving so every gift from the room rolls up in one place. Decide whether paddle-raise gifts get coded separately from ticket revenue, because they usually should.
- A bidder list tied to constituent records. Export the guest list with constituent IDs and assign paddle numbers against it. On the night, a bidder number then maps straight to a real record instead of a name someone has to search for.
- Who enters what, and when. Assign one person to enter paddle commitments, ideally in a batch the next morning, while the spotter sheets are fresh. Batches give you a chance to review totals before anything commits.
- Acknowledgment rules. Agree on when a pledge gets a thank-you versus when the payment does, so donors don’t get two letters or none.
- Tax language. Ticket purchases for a gala usually include a benefit the guest received; a paddle-raise gift often doesn’t. Have finance confirm how each should be receipted, and make sure your acknowledgments say the right thing.
The morning after
Run through this while the event is still everyone’s first priority:
- Reconcile three numbers: the total announced from the stage, the spotter sheets, and what’s in Altru. Differences are almost always a missed paddle, a duplicate entry, or a couple who gave jointly but were recorded twice.
- Check for new constituents. Online gifts from guests who used a different email than the one on file can create duplicate records. Review constituents added in the last day or two before you send acknowledgments.
- Build a follow-up query of unpaid commitments, sorted by amount, and schedule the first reminder within a week. Paddle-raise commitments get harder to collect the longer they sit.
- Note what broke for next year: slow form, missing bidder numbers, coding confusion. The fix is almost always setup, not effort on the night.
Where Social Good fits
The phone-giving option is where we can help. Checkouts gives you a branded, mobile-friendly donation checkout that supports Apple Pay and Google Pay and writes the gift back to Altru, so a guest scanning a table QR code can finish a donation in a few taps and the record is already there the next morning. The pledge and reconciliation steps above still apply either way.
Quick answers
Can Altru track paddle raise gifts separately from ticket sales?
Yes, through how you code them. Give event-night giving its own designation or appeal and a query will separate it cleanly from ticket revenue.
Should we take card numbers on paper during the raise?
Avoid it. Writing down card details creates a security problem you then have to manage. Collect commitments on paper and payments through a secure channel.
