A longtime donor mentions at a member event that she cares most about the conservation program and her grandkids’ summer camp. Your development officer nods, remembers it for a week, and then it’s gone. Next spring she gets a generic annual fund appeal. That’s the gap donor interest tracking is meant to close: getting what people tell you, and what their giving already shows, onto the constituent record where queries and appeals can use it.
Altru doesn’t hand you a finished “donor interests” module that does this on its own, so the work is mostly design: deciding what an interest is at your organization, picking where it lives on the record, and making sure someone actually enters it. Here’s how I’d set it up.
Start with a short, fixed list
Before you touch Altru, agree on the interests you’ll track. Keep it to the things you would actually segment an appeal or an invitation by. For a zoo or aquarium that might be conservation, animal care, education programs, camps, and capital projects. For a historic site it might be preservation, collections, archaeology, and public programs.
Two rules save a lot of cleanup later:
- Use a controlled list, not free text. “Conservation,” “conservation programs,” and “consrv” are three different values to a query.
- Cap it. If the list runs past a dozen or so, nobody will pick the right one at a busy event table, and you’ll end up with a junk “Other.”
Where to store interests in Altru
You have a few reasonable options on the constituent record. Each has trade-offs.
Constituent attributes (usually the best fit)
Attributes are custom fields you define, and most Altru administrators use them for exactly this kind of data. Create an attribute category such as “Donor Interest” with a code table of your fixed values, and allow multiple entries per constituent so one donor can carry several interests. Attributes can be pulled into constituent queries, which is what makes them useful for appeals and event invitations.
If you also want to know how you learned the interest, add a date and use the comment field for the source (“told us at gala,” “survey response”). That context matters when a gift officer is deciding whether an interest is still current.
Constituent codes or solicit codes
These are tempting because they’re already there, but they’re meant for other jobs: classifying who someone is, and recording how they want to be contacted. Mixing interests into them makes both harder to report on. I’d leave them alone for this.
Notes
Notes are good for the story (“lost her husband, gives in his memory to the raptor center”) but poor for segmentation, since you can’t reliably query free text. Use a note for the narrative and an attribute for the searchable value.
Your Altru version and configuration may offer other places for this data. If you’re unsure whether a dedicated interest field exists in your database, check a test record in your sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before building around it.
Let giving history do some of the work
Stated interests are only half the picture. What people actually give to is often the more reliable signal. If your revenue uses distinct designations (or campaigns and appeals) for things like the conservation fund or education programs, a revenue query can find everyone who has given to a given designation in the last few years.
That gives you two ways to use the data:
- Query on the fly. Combine “has a Conservation interest attribute” OR “gave to the conservation designation” in one query when you build an appeal list.
- Back-fill attributes. Periodically add the attribute to donors whose giving shows the interest, so the record tells the whole story to anyone who opens it. If you do this in bulk, test the process on a handful of records first.
This only works if designations are set up cleanly. If everything lands in “General Operating,” fix that going forward before expecting giving history to tell you much.
Get interests onto the record
The field design is the easy part. Collection is where most interest tracking quietly fails. A few habits help:
- Make it part of contact reports. After any meaningful donor conversation, the officer adds or confirms interest attributes, not just a note.
- Ask directly. Add an “Which areas matter most to you?” question to membership and donation forms or donor surveys, mapped to the same fixed list, and have someone enter responses as attributes.
- Use event attendance. Someone who comes to every behind-the-scenes conservation talk is telling you something. Review event registrations after each program and tag accordingly.
- Review quarterly. Run a query of major and mid-level donors with no interest attribute at all. That list becomes the next round of conversations.
Put it to use
Tracking is only worth the effort if it changes what donors receive. Once interests are queryable, you can segment appeal letters by interest, invite the right people to program-specific tours, and give gift officers a quick read before a meeting. A simple constituent query showing name, giving totals, interest attributes, and last gift designation makes a useful prep sheet.
Start small: one attribute category, a short list, and one appeal segmented by it. If response improves or donors comment that the letter felt personal, you’ll have the case for keeping the data up.
Quick answers
Can one donor have more than one interest?
Yes, if you configure the attribute to allow multiple entries per record. Decide up front, and test it in your sandbox.
Should I track interests for members, too?
If members are your future donor pipeline, yes. The same attribute works for any constituent, and it’s often where mid-level prospects first show up.
