A donor emails your development director to say she’s moving to Arizona and wants her membership card sent to the new address. The director replies, updates nothing in Altru, and goes on vacation. Three weeks later the renewal letter goes to the old house, and nobody can find the email that explains why.
Emails sent in bulk through Altru’s marketing and communications tools leave a trail on the constituent. The everyday one-off messages from someone’s Outlook or Gmail inbox do not. As far as we know, Altru has no built-in connector that captures messages from a staff mailbox automatically. If that matters to you, confirm with Blackbaud support whether anything has changed for your version. In practice, logging a one-off email in Altru is a manual habit. The goal is to make that habit quick and consistent enough that people actually keep it up.
Where an email can live on the constituent record
You have three reasonable places to put it. Pick one as the default so staff aren’t guessing.
Notes (the usual choice)
The documentation area of a constituent record holds notes, and notes can have a type, a date, a title, an author, and free-text content. For most organizations this is the right home for a one-off email: it’s quick to add, everyone with access to the record can see it, and notes can be pulled into queries later. Ask your administrator to add a note type called something like Email if one doesn’t exist yet. That single code table value is what makes the notes reportable.
Attachments
When the exact wording matters, such as a complaint, a refund agreement, a bequest conversation, or permission to use someone’s photo, save the email as a PDF and attach it to the record. A note that summarizes the email plus an attachment of the original is the strongest version. Pick one file format for everyone. PDFs open reliably for everyone, and saved mail-client files may not.
Interactions, if your setup uses them
Some Altru databases track contacts with constituents as interactions, with a contact method and a status. If your organization already records phone calls and meetings that way, logging emails there too keeps all the touchpoints in one list. If nobody in your shop uses interactions today, don’t introduce them just for email. Test it in a sandbox first and make sure the fields you need show up in queries.
A logging convention people will follow
The hard part is consistency, not the software. A short written standard does more than any training session. Here’s one that works:
- Type: Email (always the same value).
- Date: the date the email was sent or received, not the date you logged it.
- Title: direction plus subject, e.g. “Inbound: address change” or “Outbound: group visit deposit reminder.” Someone scanning a list of notes can tell at a glance what happened.
- Content: two or three sentences on what was asked, what was promised, and any follow-up date. Paste the original text below the summary if it’s short.
- Action taken: if the email triggered a change elsewhere in Altru, like an updated address, a new email preference, or a refunded order, say so in the note so the next person doesn’t redo it.
Agree on what not to log, too. Never paste full card numbers, bank details, or passwords into a note, even if a guest sent them. Summarize (“guest sent card details by email; told them we can’t accept payment that way”) and delete the original from the inbox.
Decide which emails are worth logging
Logging every “thanks, see you Saturday” will bury the useful notes, and staff will stop doing it. A practical line: log an email if it changes something about the relationship or if someone else might need it later. That usually means:
- Address, name, or communication preference changes
- Complaints, refunds, and exceptions you granted
- Major gift, planned giving, or sponsorship conversations
- Group and school visit arrangements, deposits, and changes
- Membership disputes, like “I renewed but never got my card”
Households and organizations
Log the email on the individual who actually wrote or received it, not on the household. If the message affects the whole household, such as a move, mention that in the note and update the household-level information as well. For a school or corporate partner, log it on the contact person and decide whether your team also wants a copy on the organization record. Choose one approach and write it into your standard.
Make the notes useful later
Once emails are going in with a consistent type, you can build a constituent query that returns notes of type Email within a date range, with author and title as output fields. That gives managers a simple way to spot-check whether logging is happening, and it gives a gift officer a quick history before a meeting. If you also track follow-up dates in the note text, a periodic review of recent Email notes catches promises that slipped.
Quick answers
Can Altru pull emails in from Outlook or Gmail automatically?
Not natively, as far as we know. Some organizations route important messages through a shared mailbox and have one person log them daily, which is easier to sustain than asking everyone.
Do emails sent through Altru’s own communications need to be logged by hand?
Generally no. Those are tracked through the communication or appeal records Altru creates. Check how they appear on a test constituent before telling staff to skip them.
