Two renewal letters land in the same mailbox, one addressed to each spouse. Nobody complains about the postage, but they do notice, and some of them call to ask whether their membership was charged twice. Sending one piece per household is a small change that saves money and makes your organization look like it knows who its members are.
Altru doesn’t have a single “mail once per household” checkbox that works the same way across every mailing. What it does have is household records, membership records with a primary member, and queries you can shape before anything goes to the printer. The right approach depends on what you’re mailing and who should be named on it.
First, decide who the mailing is really for
Before building anything, answer two questions:
- Is this a membership mailing or a general one? Renewal notices, card mailings, and member event invitations belong to the membership. Appeals, newsletters, and general announcements belong to the household or the individual.
- Whose name goes on the envelope? “The Garcia Household,” “Maria and James Garcia,” and “Maria Garcia” are three different outputs, and each one points you to a different source of data.
Once that’s settled, pick one of the approaches below. You may end up using different ones for different mailings, and that’s fine.
Option 1: Membership mailings go to the primary member
For renewals and other member communications, the cleanest list is usually built from the membership, not from constituents. Each membership has a primary member and may have additional members on the card. If you query on memberships and return only the primary member, you get one row per membership by design.
A few things to watch:
- Make sure the query isn’t joining to all members on the membership, which brings the duplicates right back.
- Check how your organization handles two memberships in one home (for example, a family membership plus a separate gift membership). Those are legitimately two memberships, and you’ll need to decide whether they get two letters.
- If you want both adults’ names on the envelope, use the household’s addressee or a combined name format rather than adding the second member as a separate row.
Option 2: General mailings go to the household
When individuals are grouped into households in Altru, the household itself carries a name and an address. Building your mailing list from households (or returning the household for each constituent and keeping only one row per household) gives you a single address block per home.
The practical way to do this in a constituent query:
- Include the household ID or household name as an output field.
- Filter out constituents who are deceased, marked do-not-mail, or missing a valid address.
- Collapse the results so each household appears once. Depending on how your query is built, that may mean querying households directly or selecting distinct household values. If you’re unsure your query actually returns one row per household, export it and count unique household IDs against total rows.
- Include individuals who are not in any household, so single-person homes don’t fall off the list.
That last step catches a lot of people. A query that only pulls households will quietly drop every constituent who was never grouped into one.
Some organizations designate a primary contact or head of household. Whether and how that’s available in your Altru queries can vary with your setup, so confirm it in a test query (or ask Blackbaud support) before building a mailing that depends on it.
Option 3: Deduplicate by address after export
If your household data is patchy, you can still get to one piece per home by deduplicating on address in a spreadsheet or with your mail house. It’s a reasonable fallback, but know its limits:
- Address formatting differences (“Street” vs. “St.”, missing apartment numbers) cause misses unless the data is standardized first. Most mail houses can run address standardization for you.
- It can collapse people who share an address but aren’t a household, such as roommates or adult children with their own memberships.
- It fixes this one mailing, not the underlying data. The same duplicates show up next time.
Use it to get a mailing out the door, then use what you found to clean up households in Altru.
The real fix is household data
Every option above works better when households are accurate. If you’re finding a lot of duplicates, a few habits help:
- Group people into households at the point of entry. When staff add a second adult at the membership desk or in group sales, link them to the existing household instead of creating a standalone record.
- Review new constituents regularly. A short monthly query of new records sharing an address with an existing constituent turns up most missed household links.
- Merge true duplicates. Two records for the same person is a different problem from two people in one house, and it causes double mailings too. Clean those up before you assume your household logic is wrong.
- Write down the rule. Decide which mailings go one per household and which go to individuals (tax receipts and acknowledgments often need to go to the actual donor). Keep that list with the query names so the next person building a mailing uses the right one.
Test before you print
Run the query, export it, and spot-check a handful of households you know: a married couple who are both members, a family with a gift membership, a single member, a recently deceased constituent. If each one comes out the way you expect, the list is ready. If not, it’s much cheaper to find out now than after the letters are stamped.
Quick answers
Does Altru have a setting to mail only one person per household?
Not as a universal switch that we’re aware of. You control it through how you build the query: by membership primary member, by household, or by deduplicating afterward. If you’re on a newer release and suspect something has changed, check with Blackbaud support.
Should acknowledgment letters go to the household?
Usually not. Gift acknowledgments and receipts should go to the person who gave, even if they share a home with another donor.
