A board member asks for “everyone whose largest gift was over $1,000.” You pull up a constituent in Altru, see a neat little summary of first, last, largest, and cumulative giving, and think the answer is already sitting there. Then you open a second record and the numbers don’t match what the development director remembers. Before anyone builds a list, a mailing, or a stewardship plan on those figures, it’s worth knowing what they actually count.
This guide explains what each of the four fields is meant to show, the questions you should answer about how your database populates them, and how to check the numbers yourself instead of taking them on faith.
The four fields in plain terms
- First gift: the earliest qualifying gift on the constituent’s record, usually shown with its date and amount. It tells you how long someone has been giving, which matters for “donor since” recognition and for spotting long-term loyal donors.
- Last gift (latest gift): the most recent qualifying gift. This is the field people use most, because it drives lapsed-donor lists and renewal timing.
- Largest gift: the single biggest qualifying gift, not the biggest year. A donor who gave $250 four times in one year still has a largest gift of $250.
- Cumulative giving (lifetime giving): the total of all qualifying gifts across the life of the record.
The word doing all the work in those definitions is qualifying. Every disagreement about these numbers comes back to what your Altru database counts as “giving.”
The questions that change the numbers
Altru records far more than donations: memberships, ticket sales, event registrations, store sales, pledges, and payments. Whether each of those feeds the giving summary is what makes one organization’s “cumulative giving” look nothing like another’s. Work through these with your own data:
Are memberships counted as giving?
Many institutions treat membership as earned revenue; others treat some or all of it as contributed. If your summary includes memberships, a family that has renewed for ten years can look like a major donor without ever making an outright gift. Know which way your setup leans before you segment on it.
Pledges or payments?
A $5,000 pledge paid in five installments could show up as one $5,000 largest gift or as five $1,000 payments, depending on what is counted. That difference changes both the largest gift and potentially the last gift date.
Whose credit is it?
Gifts paid by one person but credited to another (a spouse, a household, a family foundation, a matching employer) raise the question of whether the summary follows the payer or the recognition credit. Household records add another layer: is the number for the individual or for the household?
What happens to refunds, adjustments, and write-offs?
If a gift was refunded or a pledge balance written off, check whether the summary reflects the net amount. Stale totals here are a common source of “that number looks too high.”
We’re deliberately not going to tell you exactly how Altru answers each of these for every configuration, because it depends on your revenue setup and we’d rather you confirm than guess. The test below takes about fifteen minutes.
How to verify what your fields include
- Pick five constituents you know well. Include one pure donor, one member who has never made an outright gift, one pledge donor, one person with a refund on record, and one household where a spouse gave.
- Write down what you expect. For each, note what you believe their first, last, largest, and cumulative giving should be.
- Compare against the record. Open each constituent and compare the summary to the revenue history on the record. Every mismatch tells you something about the rules.
- Reproduce it in a query. Build a revenue query for those five constituents, filtered to the revenue types you think should count. If your query total matches the summary, you’ve found the definition.
- Document it. Put the answer in one sentence somewhere your whole team can find it, such as “Cumulative giving includes donations and pledge payments, excludes memberships and tickets.”
If a result still doesn’t make sense, ask Blackbaud support how the summary is calculated in your version, and include the specific constituent and gift so they can trace it.
When the built-in summary isn’t the number you need
Sometimes the default definition is fine for a quick glance at a record but wrong for a particular report. Development may want lifetime giving without memberships; membership may want it with them. In that case, don’t fight the summary. Build what you need:
- Smart fields let you calculate first, latest, largest, and total revenue for a constituent with filters you choose, such as specific revenue types, designations, or date ranges. They’re the cleanest way to get a “lifetime contributed giving” number that means exactly what your team says it means. Smart fields refresh on a schedule, so check when yours last ran before trusting a report.
- Queries work well for one-off lists (“largest single gift over $1,000 in the last five years”) where you want to see every gift behind the result.
- Naming matters. If you create a custom version, give it an unambiguous name like “Largest Outright Gift (excl. membership)” so nobody confuses it with the standard summary.
A few habits that keep these numbers trustworthy
- Clean up duplicate constituent records. Giving split across two records makes both summaries wrong, and merging is the only real fix.
- Agree on soft credit and household rules before a campaign, not halfway through one.
- When you share a report built on these fields, add a single line explaining what’s included. It heads off the “that’s not what I gave” phone call.
Quick answers
Is “largest gift” the biggest year or the biggest single gift?
The biggest single qualifying gift. For the biggest year, use a query or a smart field grouped by year.
Why does a member show lifetime giving when they’ve never donated?
Most likely your configuration counts membership revenue as giving. Confirm it with the five-record test above.
Can I change what the standard fields include?
We wouldn’t assume you can. Build a smart field with the exact definition you want, and keep the standard summary as a general-purpose glance.
