A donor lands on your giving page, types $100 into the gift amount, and then sees another prompt asking whether they’d like to make an additional donation. To them, that’s a strange question, since they’re already donating. Some skip it, some hesitate, and a few type another amount and end up with two gifts they didn’t mean to give. The finance team then has to sort out a refund or a split gift.
That extra prompt makes sense in a ticket or membership cart, where it’s a gentle add-on. On a form whose only job is collecting a gift, it’s redundant. Here’s how the field behaves in Altru, what your options are, and what each one costs you.
Why the field shows up on donation forms
In Altru, the “additional donation” prompt belongs to the online shopping cart, not to any single web form. It’s set up once and then appears wherever a guest checks out online, which is why it follows donors onto the donation form too. Many organizations find there isn’t an obvious per-form switch to show it on ticketing and hide it on giving.
Altru’s web form options change over time, so before you plan around this, confirm how your own instance behaves. Open your cart and donation form settings in a test environment if you have one, or ask Blackbaud support directly whether the prompt can be suppressed on a single form. If it can, you’re done. If not, these are the realistic choices.
Option 1: Turn the prompt off everywhere
If the additional donation prompt brings in little money on your ticket and membership forms, the simplest fix may be to disable it for the whole cart, assuming your configuration offers that setting (confirm with Blackbaud support if you can’t find it). Donors stop seeing the double ask, and nobody has to maintain a workaround.
Before you do, pull the numbers. Use a revenue query to find online transactions from the last year that included an add-on gift from the cart, and total them. Posting the add-on to its own designation, if you haven’t already, makes this much easier to isolate. For some organizations that’s pocket change. For others, especially those with strong general admission traffic, it’s a meaningful slice of unrestricted giving. Make the call with your development director based on that figure.
Option 2: Keep it, but make it less confusing
If the add-on gift earns its place on ticketing, you can soften the experience on the donation form without removing anything:
- Rewrite the label and help text, if your configuration allows it, so it reads as optional and clearly separate from the main gift. A specific line such as “Add an optional gift to support daily operations” is clearer than a generic “Additional donation.”
- Point the add-on at a different designation than your main appeal, such as an unrestricted or general operating fund. That way, when a donor does fill it in, the gift lands somewhere useful and is easy to tell apart in reports.
- Add a line of copy near the gift amount on the donation page itself, explaining that the checkout may offer an optional extra gift and that it can be left blank.
None of this removes the field, but it cuts down on accidental second gifts and on support emails asking why there were two charges.
Option 3: Hide it with styling
Some organizations hide the element with custom CSS on the page that hosts the donation form. It can work, but treat it as fragile. If the form markup changes in an Altru update, the field can quietly reappear, or the rule can hide something it shouldn’t. Hiding a field visually also doesn’t change what the form submits. If you go this route, test a real transaction afterward, check that it posts to the right designation, and recheck after every Altru release.
Cleaning up gifts that already came in doubled
Whatever you decide going forward, look back once. Build a query that surfaces donors with more than one online gift on the same day, then review which of those pairs came from the cart add-on. Review them with finance and decide on a single rule: either keep both gifts and acknowledge the total, or refund the extra. Pick one approach so staff aren’t deciding case by case. Make sure the acknowledgment letter reflects what you actually kept, since a donor who notices two receipts will usually call.
A different donation page altogether
Some organizations stop trying to bend the Altru donation form and replace the page instead. Social Good Checkouts is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that stands in for Altru web forms for donations, tickets, and memberships, with Apple Pay and Google Pay. Gifts write back to Altru, so your revenue records and reporting stay where they are.
Quick answers
Will turning off the prompt affect past transactions?
No. It changes what donors see from then on. Gifts already recorded stay as they are.
Is the add-on gift tracked separately from the main gift?
Check a recent test transaction in your instance to see exactly how it posts. Either way, giving the add-on its own designation is the easiest way to report on it separately from your main appeal.
