Blackbaud’s Knowledgebase is built for searching, not browsing. Type in an error message or a task and you’ll usually find something useful. Try to answer a different question, like “what has Blackbaud published about Altru lately?”, and it gets harder. Search results are ranked by relevance, so a fix posted last week can sit below an article from years ago that happens to match your keywords better.
No single “newest articles” page for Altru exists that we can point you to with confidence. You can still get a reliable picture of what’s new by combining a few sources. Here’s how we keep up.
Start with the Knowledgebase search itself
Before you try workarounds, check what the search page offers right now. Blackbaud updates its support site from time to time, and the filters change.
- Filter to Altru. Most of the noise in a broad search comes from other Blackbaud products. Narrowing by product is the single biggest improvement.
- Look for a sort or date option. If the results page offers sorting by date or a “last updated” filter, use it. If you don’t see one, it isn’t there today. Don’t spend time hunting for a hidden setting.
- Check the dates on each article. Articles usually show when they were created or last modified. An old article with a recent update date often means Blackbaud added a workaround or changed the guidance, so it’s worth rereading.
- Use broad, time-sensitive words. Searching on terms like “known issue,” “workaround,” or the name of a recent update tends to bring up newer material than searching on a feature name alone.
Use a web search with a date filter
This is the closest thing to a “newest first” view. Open any Knowledgebase article and note the domain in your browser’s address bar. Then search Google with the site: operator and the word Altru, for example site:[that domain] altru, and add a topic if you have one.
Next, use Google’s search tools to limit results to the past week, month, or year. The dates Google uses aren’t always exact, and not every article gets indexed right away, so treat this as a rough feed rather than a complete list. Even so, it surfaces recent articles the Knowledgebase’s own relevance ranking tends to bury.
Read the Altru release notes
Many new Knowledgebase articles follow a product update: a changed behavior, a new setting, or a known issue that came with a release. Altru’s release notes and “what’s new” documentation tell you what changed. That gives you better search terms, and it explains why a cluster of new articles appeared.
Make reading them a habit after each update, even when nothing seems broken. Changes to web forms, memberships, or daily sales tend to show up at the front desk before anyone on staff has read about them.
Follow the Altru community
The Blackbaud Community has an Altru group where administrators post questions and Blackbaud staff share announcements. When a new issue is going around, it often shows up there before anyone thinks to search the Knowledgebase, and replies often link to the relevant article. If the community lets you follow a group or turn on email notifications, do that. A weekly skim is usually enough.
Let your support cases do some of the work
When you open a case with Blackbaud support, ask whether a Knowledgebase article exists or is planned for the issue. If one is published later, you’ll have the article number and can find it directly. It’s also worth asking support how they recommend tracking new Altru articles. If a notification or subscription option exists, they’ll know.
Keep a short internal log
On a team with more than one Altru user, the useful articles get found once and then forgotten. A shared document or spreadsheet with a few columns is enough:
- Article title and link
- Date you found it, plus the article’s own updated date
- Which Altru area it affects (memberships, revenue, queries, web forms, and so on)
- What, if anything, you changed because of it
After a few months, this log is often more useful than the Knowledgebase search for your own organization. It’s the list of things that actually affected your setup, in the order you ran into them. It also helps a lot when you onboard a new staff member or hand off admin duties.
A simple monthly routine
- Run the date-filtered web search for Altru and skim anything from the past month.
- Read release notes for any update since your last check.
- Skim the Altru community group for new threads that link to articles.
- Add anything relevant to your internal log and share it with the people it affects.
That takes about half an hour, and it means you hear about a known issue before someone at the ticket counter does.
Quick answers
Can I sort Knowledgebase results by newest?
It depends on what the search page offers when you look. If you don’t see a date sort or filter, use a date-limited web search instead.
Is there an RSS feed or email digest of new Altru articles?
We’re not aware of one we can confirm. Blackbaud support is the right place to ask, since any notification options would be theirs to describe.
