The event coordinator opens the organization calendar on Monday morning, sees the gala on Saturday, and wants to know what’s still open: the caterer confirmation, the sponsor follow-up call, the walkthrough with facilities. None of it is there. The event shows up, but the work behind it doesn’t.
That gap catches a lot of Altru users. Here’s what the organization calendar is built to show, where tasks and interactions actually live, and the practical ways to get a dated view of that work for your team.
What the organization calendar is for
Altru’s organization calendar is a scheduling view. It’s designed to show what is happening at your site and when: events, scheduled programs, and the times and locations attached to them. That makes it useful for spotting conflicts and answering “what’s on Thursday?”
Tasks and interactions are a different kind of record. They describe work someone has to do or has done, and they’re tied to people and records rather than to the public schedule:
- Event tasks belong to an individual event record, usually with an owner and a due date.
- Interactions belong to constituent records: a call, a meeting, an email, a planned follow-up, each with a date, a status, and an owner.
In our experience, the organization calendar does not lay those items out alongside events, and we’re not aware of a setting that turns that on. Calendar behavior can vary with your configuration and security rights, though, so before you build a workaround, confirm it: open the calendar with a user who has full rights, check every view and filter option available, and if nothing surfaces, ask Blackbaud support directly whether your version supports it. That ten-minute check can save you from building a report you didn’t need.
Getting a dated view of tasks and interactions
Assuming the calendar can’t show them, the goal is the same: one place where someone can see what’s due this week and who owns it. A few approaches work well.
1. Build a query on interactions by date
An interaction query filtered to a date range and a status of pending (or whatever “not done yet” means in your setup) gives you the closest thing to a to-do calendar. Useful output fields:
- Date, so you can sort chronologically
- Owner or fundraiser, so each person can filter to their own items
- Constituent name and lookup ID, so you can jump to the record
- Category, subcategory, and summary, so the list makes sense without opening anything
Use a relative date filter (this week, next 30 days) instead of fixed dates so the query stays current without editing. Save one version per owner, or one shared version that people sort themselves.
2. Build a separate query for event tasks
If your team uses tasks on event records, create a query on those tasks with the event name, event start date, task name, owner, due date, and completion status. Filter to incomplete tasks due before the event starts. Sorting by event date first and due date second gives coordinators a run-of-show checklist for everything coming up.
If you can’t find event tasks as a query source in your database, that’s worth a support ticket rather than guessing. Available query views depend on your Altru version and your security role.
3. Put both in front of people regularly
A query nobody opens doesn’t help. Pick one habit and stick with it:
- Run both queries at the start of a weekly events meeting and walk through them line by line.
- Export them to a spreadsheet each Monday and share it with the team.
- If your team lives in Outlook or Google Calendar, someone can add the handful of key deadlines from the export by hand. It’s manual, but for a small events team it’s often enough.
Habits that make the lists trustworthy
The queries are only as good as the data going in. A few conventions make a big difference:
- Always assign an owner. An interaction or task with no owner disappears from every per-person view.
- Always set a date. Undated items won’t show up in a date-filtered list, which is exactly where they need to be.
- Close things out. If people complete the work but never mark the interaction or task complete, the list fills with noise and stops being read.
- Use consistent categories. Agree on a short set of interaction categories for event work (for example, vendor, sponsor, volunteer, facilities) so the query can be filtered cleanly.
Quick answers
Can I add a task directly to the organization calendar?
Not that we’re aware of. The calendar reflects scheduled events and programs. Add the task to the event record or log a pending interaction on the relevant constituent, then track it with a query.
Should I create a fake “event” just to make a deadline show on the calendar?
We’d avoid it. Placeholder events can clutter scheduling, show up in event reporting, and confuse staff looking for real programming. A shared query is cleaner.
Who should own these queries?
Whoever runs event planning meetings. If the person who relies on the list also maintains it, it stays accurate.
