A development associate spends twenty minutes entering a complicated gift with a split designation and a tribute, walks away to answer a donor’s call, and comes back to a sign-in screen. The work is gone. Ask around any Altru office and you’ll hear a version of that story, followed by the obvious question: can we just make the timeout longer?
Short answer: probably not from inside Altru. Below is why, what you can actually influence, and the habits that keep a timeout from costing your staff real work.
Who controls the Altru timeout
Altru is hosted by Blackbaud, and you sign in through Blackbaud ID. The idle session limit is part of that hosted environment, not a setting in your organization’s Altru administration area. We aren’t aware of a customer-facing option to lengthen it, and we’d be cautious about anyone who says there is one without showing you where it lives.
If you want a definitive answer for your account, open a case with Blackbaud support and ask two specific questions:
- What is the current idle timeout for our Altru environment, and is it the same for every user?
- Is any part of it adjustable at the organization level, either in Altru or in Blackbaud ID?
Asking it that way gets you a yes or no instead of a general help article. Write the answer down somewhere your team can find it, because the question will come up again with every new hire.
What about our own single sign-on?
Some organizations connect Blackbaud ID to their own identity provider, such as Microsoft Entra ID or Okta, so staff sign in with their work account. Your IT team controls how often that identity provider asks people to reauthenticate. That’s a separate thing from Altru’s idle timeout. Loosening your identity provider’s policy may reduce how often people see your company sign-in page, but it doesn’t follow that an idle Altru session will stay open longer. Test it before you promise anyone a fix.
Why the limit exists
It helps to explain this to staff, because a timeout feels arbitrary until you think about what’s on the screen. Altru holds donor giving history, home addresses, membership details, and payment activity. Front desk computers sit in public spaces. An unattended, signed-in workstation in a lobby is exactly what a short idle limit is designed to prevent, and card-handling standards generally expect sessions to lock after a period of inactivity. Even if you could stretch the timeout, your finance or IT team may not want you to.
Protecting work in progress
Since the limit isn’t likely to move, the practical goal is making sure a timeout costs a few seconds, not a lost record.
- Save in stages. For long entries, save the constituent or record first, then come back to add relationships, notes, and attributes. A partially complete saved record beats a perfect unsaved one.
- Draft long text elsewhere. Write lengthy notes, proposal narratives, or tribute wording in a document first and paste them in. That’s also kinder to your spell-check.
- Finish transactions before stepping away. At the ticket counter, complete or cancel the order before helping someone across the lobby. An abandoned cart in a timed-out session can leave staff unsure whether a payment went through.
- Check after any timeout during payment. If a session expires mid-sale, look up the order or the day’s transactions before charging the guest again. Duplicate charges are a worse problem than re-entering an order.
- Run long reports and exports from a quiet desk. Big queries and exports take time. Start them when you can stay with them, and confirm they finished before you leave.
A note on “keep alive” workarounds
Browser extensions that auto-refresh a page or simulate activity come up in every conversation about timeouts. We don’t recommend them on Altru workstations. They defeat a security control your organization likely relies on for audits, they can refresh a page at the wrong moment and discard what you were typing, and installing them may break your IT policy. If the timeout is genuinely blocking a workflow, that’s worth raising with Blackbaud rather than working around quietly.
Does Altru warn you before it logs you out?
Many staff report being signed out with no visible countdown, which is what makes the lost-work moments so frustrating. Behavior can vary depending on which part of the product you’re in and whether another browser tab kept the session active, so test it yourself: leave a test record open, note the time, and see whether any warning appears before the session ends. Knowing the real number, rather than guessing, lets you train staff with confidence.
If a warning before logout matters to your team, tell Blackbaud through your account contact or support case. Product changes like that are driven by customers describing the concrete impact, so be specific about what was lost and how often.
Quick answers
Can an Altru system administrator change the timeout?
Not that we’re aware of. Confirm with Blackbaud support for your specific environment.
Will keeping Altru open in another tab keep me signed in?
Sometimes activity in one tab keeps the session alive for others, but don’t rely on it. Save your work instead.
Does a timeout lose saved data?
No. Anything you saved before the session ended stays saved. Only unsaved changes on the open screen are at risk.
