A longtime member buys two adult tickets online. She uses her work email this time instead of the personal address she gave you at the membership desk three years ago. When the sale lands in Altru, that new email can mean a brand-new constituent record: no membership history, no giving history, and a second copy of her in every mailing list you pull. Multiply that by a few hundred transactions a month and the duplicate problem stops being occasional cleanup and becomes a steady stream.
The fix starts before the buyer clicks “Pay.” The goal is simple: get people to type the address you already have for them. Below is what tends to work, what is hard to do with standard Altru web forms, and how to catch the duplicates that still slip through.
Why the email field matters so much
When an online sale comes into Altru, the email address is usually one of the strongest signals used to decide whether the buyer is an existing constituent or someone new. Name alone isn’t reliable (there are a lot of people named Jennifer Smith), and many buyers skip or mistype address fields. So when the email doesn’t match anything on file, the odds of a new record go way up, even if the name and street address are identical.
How strictly your database matches incoming online transactions to existing records depends on your configuration and on how your team processes web transactions. If you aren’t sure what your matching criteria are today, confirm them before changing anything else. Test a few sample purchases in a sandbox, or ask Blackbaud support how your duplicate-matching settings treat a known name with an unknown email.
What you can realistically change on the form
Standard Altru web forms give you limited room to add logic around the email field. As far as we know, there isn’t a simple built-in option that looks up the address as someone types and says “We have a different email for you.” If you think your version supports something like that, check with Blackbaud rather than assuming it does or doesn’t.
What you almost always can control is the wording. Small copy changes make a real difference:
- Put the instruction right above the field, not in a footer. Something like: “Members: please use the email address on your membership so we can link this purchase to your account.”
- Explain the benefit to the buyer. “Using the same email keeps your member discount, history, and tax receipts in one place” works better than “to avoid duplicate records,” which is your problem, not theirs.
- Repeat it on member-specific pages. Renewal and member-ticket pages are where a mismatch hurts most, so the reminder belongs there even if you skip it elsewhere.
- Avoid asking for email twice in different places. If a form collects a “billing email” and a “contact email,” people often fill them in differently, and you end up with two addresses to reconcile.
Tell people which address you have before they shop
Buyers can’t reuse an email they don’t remember giving you. A few low-effort habits help:
- Show the email on file in renewal notices and membership emails. A line like “This notice was sent to the address on your membership” reminds people which inbox you know about.
- Confirm the address at the front desk. When staff look up a member at admissions, a quick “Is this still the best email for you?” keeps the record current, so the address people type online is more likely to match.
- Make membership cards and confirmations say it plainly. If the email they used for their membership appears on their confirmation, they have something to look back at.
Catch the ones that get through anyway
No wording will get every buyer to cooperate, so plan for a back-office check.
- Review incoming online transactions with matching in mind. If your team reviews web transactions before they post, train reviewers to look past the email: a familiar name plus a matching street address or phone number is often the same person.
- Run a recurring duplicate-candidate query. Build a constituent query for records created in the last week or month through online sales, and compare them against existing constituents with the same last name and ZIP code. It won’t catch everything, but it surfaces likely matches before they pile up.
- Merge, then keep the extra email. When you merge a duplicate, consider keeping the second address as an additional email on the surviving record rather than discarding it. The next time that buyer uses it, you have a better chance of matching.
- Track the trend. Count how many new online-sale constituents turn out to be duplicates each month. If the number drops after you change your form wording, you know the copy is doing its job.
Where Social Good fits
If you have pushed the standard web forms as far as wording will take you, Social Good Checkouts is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that replaces Altru web forms for tickets, memberships, and donations, with purchase data written back to Altru. Organizations use it when they want more say over the checkout experience while keeping Altru as their database. The back-office checks above are still worth doing either way.
