County comes up the moment someone outside the membership office needs a number. A county arts council grant asks how many visitors came from inside the county. A state tourism report wants visitor origin by region. A board member wants to know whether your free-admission program actually reaches the neighboring county it was designed for. Then you open Altru and find the county field blank on most constituent addresses.
The short answer: Altru stores county as part of an address, but don’t count on it filling that field in for you from the ZIP code or city when staff or web buyers enter an address. In practice, county gets populated in two ways: someone picks it by hand, or you add it in bulk after the fact. This article covers both, plus the catches that trip people up.
First, confirm what your database does today
Before planning a cleanup, spend ten minutes checking your own setup. Behavior can vary depending on how your address forms and any address validation options were configured, and it’s worth knowing for sure rather than assuming.
- Add a test constituent with a full U.S. address and save it without touching the county field. Reopen the record and see whether county was filled in.
- Buy a ticket through your web form using a test address, then check the resulting constituent record the same way.
- Run a quick constituent query on primary address county, grouped as blank vs. not blank. That tells you how big the gap actually is.
- Check your county code table. County values in Altru come from a code table, so whatever you load later has to match its entries exactly.
If you can’t tell whether your account includes any address verification service that supplies county, ask Blackbaud support directly. That’s a quick question for them and saves you from building a workaround you don’t need.
Filling in county for existing records
For the backlog, the practical route is: export addresses, figure out county outside Altru, and bring it back in.
1. Export what you have
Build a constituent query that outputs the constituent lookup ID, the address’s identifying fields, street, city, state, ZIP, and current county. Filter to U.S. addresses with a blank county. Limit it to primary addresses if that’s all your reporting uses; it keeps the file manageable.
2. Look up county by ZIP
The common free source is the HUD USPS ZIP code crosswalk, which maps ZIP codes to counties. Match your export against it in a spreadsheet.
The catch: a ZIP code doesn’t always sit in a single county. Some ZIPs cross county lines, and that’s more common in rural areas and at metro edges. For those, the crosswalk lists more than one county along with the share of addresses in each. You have three options:
- Assign the county that holds most of the ZIP’s addresses and accept a small error rate.
- Run only the split ZIPs through a geocoding service that returns county from the full street address.
- Leave split ZIPs blank and review them by hand if the counts matter for a grant.
For a grant report that hinges on “in county vs. out of county,” the split ZIPs right on your own county line are the ones to get right. Everything else can usually take the majority-county answer.
3. Match your code table
Check the county names you’re about to load against the county code table in Altru. “St. Louis” vs. “Saint Louis” or a missing “County” suffix will either fail on import or, worse, create near-duplicate entries. Add any missing counties to the table before importing, and keep the spelling consistent.
4. Update the addresses in bulk
Use Altru’s import tools to update the existing address records with the county value. Exactly which import type and matching fields you need depends on your setup, so do two things before running the full file:
- Import a handful of records first and open each one to confirm county landed on the right address and nothing else changed.
- Make sure the import updates the existing address instead of adding a second one. A duplicate address on thousands of records is a much bigger cleanup than a blank county.
If you aren’t sure how to set up an address update import, Blackbaud support or the Altru community forums are good places to ask before you start.
Keeping new addresses from coming in blank
The backlog is a one-time project; new records are the ongoing problem. Without automatic population, you’re choosing between a few imperfect habits:
- Repeat the cleanup on a schedule. Save the “blank county” query and run the same export, lookup, and import every quarter or before each grant deadline. This is the most realistic option for most organizations, since web sales create most new addresses and nobody is there to pick a county.
- Train desk and membership staff to pick county when they enter or edit an address by hand. It helps, but it won’t cover web transactions.
- Report on ZIP instead of county where the funder allows it. Some reports only need “local vs. non-local,” which you can define as a list of ZIP codes in a query without touching the county field at all.
That last option is worth a look before you commit to a big cleanup. A saved query with your service-area ZIP codes, maintained once, may answer the question you were actually asked.
Quick answers
Does Altru look up county from the ZIP code on its own?
Don’t assume it does. Test it with a new record in your own database, and ask Blackbaud support whether any address service available to your account supplies county.
Can I use city to figure out county?
It’s less reliable than ZIP. Mailing city names often don’t match municipal boundaries, and many cities span more than one county.
Should I clean up all addresses or only primary ones?
Start with primary addresses. That’s what most visitor origin reporting uses, and it keeps the file and the test pass small.
