“Count part of the membership as a donation” can mean three different things, and each one gets solved somewhere different. Before you change anything in Altru, figure out which of these your finance, development, or membership lead actually wants:
- A tax-deductible portion on the receipt. The member paid $150, the benefits are worth less than that, and the acknowledgment should say how much is deductible.
- Fundraising credit. Development wants some of the membership revenue to show up in giving totals, donor recognition, or campaign reports.
- Accounting treatment. Finance wants part of each membership sale booked to a contribution account instead of earned revenue.
These overlap, but they are not the same request. Plenty of organizations try to solve all three by turning a single payment into two revenue types and end up with messy records. Here’s how to think about each one.
1. The deductible portion: usually a receipting question
If the goal is an accurate acknowledgment, you often don’t need to split the transaction at all. What you need is a known value for the member benefits at each level, so the receipt can state the payment amount, the value of benefits received, and the difference.
Altru memberships carry benefits, and acknowledgment letters can be built from queries and fields on the revenue and membership records. Whether your setup already stores a dollar value for each level’s benefits, and whether that value flows into your acknowledgment letters, depends on how your membership programs were configured. Check one level end to end: look at the program, run a test membership sale in a sandbox if you have one, and see what your acknowledgment template can pull. If you can’t find a clean field for it, ask Blackbaud support before you build a workaround.
A few points worth raising with your accountant, not settling on your own:
- US charities generally have to give a written disclosure when a payment over $75 is partly a contribution and partly in exchange for goods or services.
- IRS guidance lets some low-cost annual membership benefits, such as free admission or member discounts, be disregarded for memberships at or below a certain amount. Which of your levels qualify is a judgment call for your finance team.
- Higher levels with events, parking, or guest passes need a real fair market value estimate, and someone should update it when benefits change.
2. Fundraising credit: decide whether it should be a separate gift
If development wants the money to count as giving, the cleanest approach is to make it an actual separate gift. Ask the member for it as one.
- At the front desk: offer a donation as its own line in the same sale (“Would you like to add a gift to your membership today?”). Confirm in a sandbox that your daily sales or membership sale process lets you add a donation to the same transaction and that it posts as donation revenue with the right designation.
- Online: add an optional gift to your membership web form if your form supports it. Test it with a real card in a test environment and check that two revenue lines land in Altru, not one.
- Upper-level tiers: some organizations price premium levels as “membership plus gift,” for example a base level price with the remainder explicitly presented as a contribution. That works when the member sees and agrees to the split at the time of purchase, and the two amounts are recorded separately.
What tends to go wrong is quietly re-labeling part of a plain membership payment as a donation after the fact. The member didn’t intend a gift, your receipts and your reports disagree, and recognition lists start including people who only bought a membership.
3. Accounting treatment: often belongs in the GL, not the constituent record
If finance only needs a share of membership revenue booked as contributions, that may be better handled in how revenue maps to GL accounts or in the accounting system itself. Keeping the membership record intact in Altru means renewal dates, member counts, and retention reports still work, while finance gets the split they need for the books.
Talk to whoever owns your GL mapping before touching transactions. Altru’s general ledger setup and how revenue posts to your accounting package vary by organization, so the person who maintains that mapping is the right one to say whether a split by membership level is possible there.
Moving money on a transaction that already happened
Sometimes a member writes in after renewing to say “please count the extra $50 I paid as a gift.” For a one-off like this:
- Check whether the revenue has already been posted to the GL. Editing posted revenue usually means an adjustment, and finance should know about it.
- Decide whether to adjust the existing payment’s application or to refund and re-enter it as two items. Try both in a sandbox first; the right path depends on your posting process.
- Make sure the membership itself still shows the correct level, dates, and amount after the change.
- Send a corrected acknowledgment showing the gift separately.
- Add a note on the constituent record saying what changed and who approved it.
If this happens more than now and then, that tells you the front desk or web form should be offering a gift line up front.
A simple way to settle it internally
Put membership, development, and finance in one short meeting and agree on three things: what the deductible amount is for each level, whether any part of a membership counts as fundraising credit (and if so, only when the member adds it as a separate gift), and where the accounting split happens. Write the answers down. Then set up Altru to match those decisions instead of patching individual transactions every time someone asks.
Quick answers
Can one Altru payment be applied partly to a membership and partly to a donation?
Payments can generally cover more than one item in a sale, so adding a donation alongside a membership is the usual route. How your specific sales and web form workflows handle it is worth confirming in a sandbox or with Blackbaud support.
Do I have to split the payment to show a deductible amount?
Not necessarily. A deductible amount on the acknowledgment comes from the payment minus the value of benefits, which is a receipting setup question, not a transaction split.
