Picture a married couple who share a household in Altru. One spouse writes the check every year; the other has never given under their own name. Last year the gift came from the first spouse’s record. This year it came from the second spouse’s record, maybe because the card on file changed. Run a LYBUNT list (“last year but unfortunately not this year”) at the individual level, and the spouse who gave last year shows up as lapsed, even though the household gave exactly what it always does.
Send that person a “we miss you” appeal and you’ve annoyed a loyal donor. The fix isn’t to delete anyone from a list by hand every cycle. It’s to decide what a “donor” means for this list and build the query around that decision.
Start by choosing the unit you’re counting
Every LYBUNT list answers one question: who gave in the earlier period and hasn’t given in the current one? The household problem comes from answering that question about individuals when your donors really behave as households. Before touching a query, settle which of these you want:
- Household-level LYBUNT. A household is lapsed only if no one in it gave this year. This is usually what development staff mean when they say “lapsed donor.”
- Individual-level LYBUNT. Each person is judged on their own giving. Useful for stewardship of specific relationships, but it produces the false positives described above.
- Individual list, household-checked. You keep individuals as the output (so the letter goes to the right name) but drop anyone whose household gave in the current period. For most appeals, this is the version you actually want.
Find out how your current list is built
Whether you’re using a standard Altru report or a query someone built years ago, check two things before changing it:
- Who gets credit for a gift. Look at how revenue is recorded on a few known couples. Is the payment on one spouse’s constituent record, on the household record, or both? Altru’s handling of household giving and revenue credit can vary with how your records were set up and how staff enter gifts, so look at real examples rather than assuming.
- What the list’s source is. If the report or query starts from individual constituents and looks only at their own revenue, it will never see a spouse’s gift. If you’re not sure whether a built-in report can roll giving up to the household, test it on a handful of households you know, or ask Blackbaud support directly.
Building the household-checked version
The most dependable approach is to build it yourself with queries and selections, so you can see exactly what each step does.
1. Last-period givers
Create a constituent query that returns everyone with qualifying revenue in the prior period (prior fiscal year, prior calendar year, whichever you report on). Decide up front which revenue counts: donations only, or memberships too? Many organizations exclude membership dues from LYBUNT so a lapsed member isn’t treated as a lapsed donor. Save it as a selection.
2. Current-period givers, by household
Create a second query of constituents who gave in the current period. Then widen it to the household: include the household record and every member of any household where at least one person gave. How you do this depends on the fields available in your query views for household membership; the goal is a selection that says “this person, or someone they share a household with, gave this year.” Save that as a selection too.
3. Subtract one from the other
Build the final query from the first selection and exclude anyone in the second. What’s left is people who gave last year and whose entire household has been silent this year. That’s a LYBUNT list you can mail from with confidence.
4. Pick one name per household
Even after the exclusion, a lapsed couple may appear twice. Decide whether the appeal goes to the household (using household addressee and salutation) or to the individual who last gave. Either is fine; mixing them is what produces duplicate letters to the same mailbox.
Things that will quietly break it
- Households that aren’t really households. If spouses were never joined in Altru, no household logic can link them. Spot-check your largest LYBUNT names before a mailing and join records where it’s clearly right.
- Duplicate constituents. A donor who exists twice can look lapsed on one record and active on the other. Clean those up first, or the list will keep surfacing them.
- Former households. Divorces, deaths, and adult children moving out all change who belongs together. A household that gave as a unit last year may now be two separate donors, and that’s worth a human look rather than an automatic exclusion.
- Soft credits and tributes. If your staff use soft credit to recognize a spouse, decide whether soft credit counts as “giving” for LYBUNT purposes and apply it the same way in both periods.
Reviewing the list before it goes out
A LYBUNT list is only as good as the last time someone actually read it. Before each appeal, sort by last year’s gift amount and look at the top twenty or so names. Those are the ones where a wrong “we miss you” costs the most, and they’re also the ones most likely to have a spouse, family foundation, or donor-advised fund giving on their behalf under a different record.
If your development team prefers to review in a spreadsheet, Data Bridge can sync the final Altru query to Google Sheets, so the list they’re marking up stays current with Altru instead of being a one-time export that’s stale by the time it’s reviewed. The exclusion logic itself still lives in your Altru queries.
Quick answers
Can I just mark one spouse as “do not solicit”?
You can, but it hides that person from every appeal, not just LYBUNT, and it breaks the day the other spouse stops giving. Household-aware query logic is cleaner.
Should LYBUNT run on fiscal or calendar years?
Whichever your development team reports on. Use the same definition in both selections, or you’ll get people who look lapsed only because of the date boundary.
