Altru looks like a ticketing system from the front desk, but behind it sits a full constituent database: memberships, donations, households, events, revenue, and the queries everyone else depends on. When the person who quietly kept all of that running gives notice, many organizations find out how much of the job was never written down. This guide covers how to decide what kind of Altru administration you actually need, how to structure it, and what to look for when you hire.
Start by listing the work, not the job title
“Database administrator” means very different things at a 20-person historic site and at a large zoo. Before you write a posting, spend a week writing down every recurring Altru task and who does it today. A typical list looks something like this:
- Daily: closing out daily sales, reconciling batches with finance, fixing front-desk errors, answering “how do I…” questions from staff.
- Weekly or monthly: membership renewal lists, acknowledgment letters, board and department reports, duplicate cleanup, gift entry.
- Seasonal: setting up programs, price changes, new membership levels, events, year-end giving and tax receipts.
- Occasional but critical: user accounts and security roles, web form changes, Blackbaud updates and release notes, audits, data imports.
Once it’s on paper, sort each task into one of three buckets: configuration (setting Altru up), data stewardship (keeping records clean and correct), and reporting (queries, smart fields, and getting numbers to people). Those three buckets are the real job. How much of each you have tells you whether you need a dedicated hire, a shared role, or outside help.
Three staffing models that work
A dedicated Altru administrator
This fits organizations where Altru touches admissions, membership, development, and retail every day. One person owns configuration, security, and data standards, and is the internal help desk. The risk is concentration: everything lives in one head. If you go this way, budget time for that person to document as part of the job, not as a someday project.
A shared role with clear owners
Smaller organizations often split Altru across departments. Membership owns membership programs and renewals, development owns gifts and acknowledgments, visitor services owns daily sales. This can work well, but only if one person is named as the final say on system-wide settings and security. Without that, you end up with three slightly different ways of entering the same constituent.
In-house lead plus outside support
Some teams keep a part-time internal owner and bring in a consultant or contractor for heavier work: implementations, reporting overhauls, data conversions, or covering a vacancy. This is a reasonable bridge while you hire. Make sure whoever you bring in leaves documentation behind, and that an internal staff member keeps administrator access and knows the logins.
What to look for in a candidate
Altru experience is great when you can find it, but the pool is small. In practice, the traits that predict success are broader:
- Database instincts. Comfort with queries, filters, and output fields, and an understanding of why a constituent record shouldn’t exist twice. Experience with any Blackbaud CRM, Raiser’s Edge, or another nonprofit CRM transfers well.
- Attention to money. A big part of the role is making revenue in Altru match what finance sees. Someone who has reconciled batches or worked closely with accounting will ramp faster.
- Patience with non-technical colleagues. This person will train seasonal front-desk staff and explain reports to the board. Ask how they’d teach someone to look up a member.
- A habit of writing things down. Ask for an example of documentation they’ve created. If they’ve never written a procedure, that’s a concern for a role like this.
Useful interview exercises: give them a messy sample of constituent data and ask how they’d spot duplicates, or describe a report request (“members who visited this year but haven’t renewed”) and ask how they’d approach building it. You’re testing reasoning, not whether they remember a specific screen.
Protect the handoff
The weeks before an administrator leaves are the most valuable you’ll get. Use them to capture:
- Every account with administrator rights, and who should hold them next.
- The queries, smart fields, and reports other departments rely on, with a sentence about what each one is for.
- Recurring processes and their schedule: renewal runs, batch posting, acknowledgments, year-end tasks.
- Connections to other systems, such as payment processing, the website, email tools, or finance exports, and who to call when they break.
- Known quirks and workarounds that only live in that person’s memory.
If the person has already gone, rebuild this list from the system itself. Query lists and security settings will show you most of what was built; Blackbaud support can help with questions about your account setup and access.
Don’t skip training and a backup
Even with a strong hire, plan for at least one other staff member who can handle core tasks: resetting a user, running the daily close, pulling the renewal list. Blackbaud offers training and documentation for Altru, and the user community is a good place to ask how peers handle specific processes. Check with your Blackbaud account contact about what training your subscription includes rather than assuming.
Quick answers
Do we need a full-time Altru administrator?
It depends on volume and complexity. If your task list shows daily configuration and reporting work across several departments, likely yes. If most work is routine data entry, a shared role with one named owner can be enough.
Where should the role report?
Wherever it will have authority over data standards across departments. Development and operations are both common; what matters is that the person can say no to shortcuts that hurt the database.
