A year-end appeal sounds simple: pick the people, write the email, hit send, count the gifts. In practice the hard parts are all on the Altru side. Who exactly gets it, who must not get it, and whether the gifts that come back can be tied to the email that prompted them. Get those three right and the sending tool matters less than you’d think.
This guide covers how to get a fundraising email out of Altru data, the routes organizations actually use, and the mistakes that tend to show up in the first campaign.
Decide how the email will actually go out
There are three common routes. None is wrong; they trade effort against control.
1. Altru’s own email tools
Altru includes marketing and communications features that can send email to a list built from a query. The advantage is that everything stays inside Altru: the audience, the send, and the record of who was contacted. The trade-off is that design options and reporting are usually more limited than a dedicated email platform. What your organization can do here depends on your Altru setup and licensing, so before you plan around it, send a test to a small internal query and confirm the result looks the way you expect. If you’re unsure whether a feature is available to you, Blackbaud support can tell you.
2. Export to an email platform
Many teams run a query in Altru, export it, and upload the list to Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or a similar tool. You get better templates and open/click reporting. You also get a copy of your donor list that starts going stale the moment you export it, plus the manual work of re-exporting before every send. Unsubscribes that happen in the email platform also don’t flow back to Altru on their own, which is a real problem by the second or third campaign.
3. An automated connection
The third option is a tool that reads an Altru query on a schedule and sends from it, so the list is current at send time and nobody is exporting spreadsheets. This makes the most sense for anything recurring, such as a multi-touch appeal or a monthly giving reminder.
Build the audience in Altru first
Whatever route you choose, the audience is a constituent query. Start broad, then subtract. A typical year-end list might be:
- Include: donors who gave in the last two or three years, current and recently lapsed members, and perhaps frequent visitors with valid email addresses.
- Exclude: constituents marked deceased, anyone with an email or solicitation opt-out, records with no primary email, and board members or major-gift prospects whose relationship managers want to make a personal ask instead.
- Consider excluding: people who already gave to this campaign. Thanking someone and then asking them again three days later is the most common complaint fundraising teams hear.
Two data issues deserve a look before the first send. Households: decide whether a couple gets one email or two, and check how your query handles household members who share an address. Duplicates: if the same person exists as two constituent records, they’ll get the appeal twice and their giving history is split, which can also put a current donor in your “lapsed” segment by mistake. Running a duplicate review before a big appeal is worth the hour.
Make the gifts traceable
An email that raises money you can’t attribute is hard to justify next year. Before sending:
- Set up the coding you’ll use to track the campaign, such as an appeal or campaign code, and agree on it with whoever enters gifts and reconciles batches.
- Point the email at a donation page that records that code. If your online donation form can carry a source or appeal value, use a distinct link for this email. If it can’t, at least use a dedicated form or page so the gifts are easy to identify later.
- Tell the gift entry team what to code checks and phone gifts that mention the email, since many responses to an email appeal don’t come through the email at all.
- Save the audience query (or a static copy of it) so you can later compare who was asked against who gave.
Plan the sequence, not just one email
Most campaigns perform better as a short series: an initial ask, a reminder to people who haven’t given, and a final message near the deadline. That only works if each send re-runs the audience query and drops anyone who has already given. With manual exports, this is where mistakes creep in, because someone forgets to refresh the list. Put the exclusion in the query itself, not in a step someone has to remember.
Don’t forget the follow-up on the other side: a prompt, accurate acknowledgment for each gift. Altru handles acknowledgment letters, but if you want a branded email thank-you within minutes of an online gift, confirm how your current setup sends it and test it with a small gift before the campaign launches.
A short pre-send checklist
- Test send to staff, checked on a phone and a desktop.
- Donation link opens the right form and carries the right code.
- Audience count is roughly what you expected (a sudden jump usually means a broken exclusion).
- Unsubscribe link works, and you know how opt-outs get back into Altru.
- Someone owns the reminder sends and the post-campaign report.
Where Social Good fits
For teams who want the automated route, Email Designer sends branded emails, including appeals and gift acknowledgments, directly from Altru queries without manual exports. Because each send reads the query at that moment, donors who gave since the last message drop out of the next one as long as your query excludes them.
Quick answers
Can I send a fundraising email to everyone in Altru with an email address?
You can, but you shouldn’t. Exclude opt-outs, deceased records, and people already being solicited personally, and check for duplicates first.
How do I know which gifts came from the email?
Use a dedicated donation link that records a campaign or appeal code, and brief the gift entry team on coding offline responses.
