The director of development has a lunch with a longtime supporter on Thursday and asks for “the donor profile.” In some fundraising systems that’s a single printable report. In Altru it usually isn’t. The information is all there, but it lives across the constituent record, revenue history, memberships, and relationships, and nobody has packaged it as one page.
The good news is that you can build that page yourself, once, and reuse it for every briefing. Below is how to decide what belongs on it and the three realistic ways to produce it from Altru.
First, check what your version already gives you
Before building anything, look at what Altru shows on a constituent record today. The record itself pulls together contact details, revenue, memberships, relationships, and interactions, and some organizations find that a screen share or a printout of a few tabs is enough for an internal meeting. Also browse the reports that ship with Altru and any custom reports your organization already has; someone before you may have built a giving summary that nobody remembers.
If you can’t find a report that produces a single donor summary, don’t assume one is hiding behind a setting. Ask Blackbaud support directly whether a constituent profile report is available for your version, or test candidates in a sandbox. It’s faster than guessing, and it tells you whether you need one of the options below.
Decide what a “profile” means at your organization
The most common reason donor profiles go stale is that nobody agreed on what goes in them. Settle that with whoever reads them (usually the ED and development officers) before you build. A typical one-page profile covers:
- Who they are: name, preferred salutation, household members, spouse or partner, address, best email and phone.
- Giving summary: lifetime giving, first gift date, most recent gift, largest gift, and giving by year for the last few years.
- Membership: current level, member since date, expiration, and whether they’ve upgraded or lapsed.
- Engagement: event attendance, volunteer activity, recent interactions or notes from staff.
- Relationships: board connections, employer, foundation or donor-advised fund ties.
Keep it to what someone actually reads in five minutes. A profile with forty fields gets skimmed, and the important line gets missed.
Three ways to produce it
1. A constituent query plus a formatted export
This is the approach most Altru admins land on. Build a constituent query that outputs the fields you agreed on, filtered to a single constituent or a selection. Smart fields are useful here: if your organization has smart fields for lifetime giving, first and last gift, or largest gift, add them as output columns so you aren’t summing revenue by hand.
Export the results and drop them into a Word mail merge or a formatted spreadsheet template. The template does the “profile” look; the query does the data. Once both exist, generating a new profile takes a couple of minutes: change the filter, run, export, merge.
Watch for one thing: revenue and membership history are one-to-many, so a query that tries to show every gift on one row will either duplicate the constituent or truncate the history. Use summary smart fields for the headline numbers and a separate revenue query if you need the gift-by-gift list.
2. A custom report
If profiles are requested often, a custom report gives you a polished, repeatable output that anyone with the right permissions can run by entering a constituent. Building one takes report-writing skills that many small Altru shops don’t have in house, so this is often a job for a consultant or a staff member comfortable with report design. It’s worth it when you’re producing profiles weekly; it’s overkill for a few a year.
3. A manual briefing template
For organizations with a handful of major donors, a shared document template that a staff member fills in from the constituent record is perfectly fine. It also leaves room for the things Altru doesn’t hold well, like context from a conversation or what the donor cares about. The cost is time and the risk that numbers are copied wrong, so have someone double-check giving totals against revenue history before the meeting.
Clean data first, or the profile will be wrong
A profile is only as accurate as the constituent record behind it. Before you hand one to leadership, check:
- Duplicates. If the donor exists twice, half their giving may be sitting on the other record. Search by email and address, not just name.
- Household versus individual credit. Decide whether the profile shows the individual’s giving, the household’s, or both, and label it. Mixing them is the fastest way to embarrass someone at lunch.
- Soft credits and tribute gifts. Confirm whether your query or smart fields include them, and state which on the profile.
- Membership revenue. Some organizations count membership dues as giving and some don’t. Pick one and be consistent.
Make it repeatable
Whichever route you choose, save the query with a clear name, store the export template somewhere shared, and write a short checklist covering how to run it, what to verify, and who to send it to. The first profile takes an afternoon. Every one after that should take minutes, and anyone on the team should be able to produce it when the request arrives on a Wednesday afternoon.
Quick answers
Is there a one-click donor profile in Altru?
Not one we’d count on. Check your available reports and ask Blackbaud support for your version; otherwise a query plus a formatted export is the dependable route.
Can I generate profiles for a whole list of donors at once?
Yes, with the query approach. Filter to a selection of constituents, export, and a mail merge produces one page per donor.
