The Smiths have been members for nine years. Dad bought the original family membership, Mom renewed it twice, and their daughter gave a gift membership to her grandparents last spring. Ask Altru “how much has this family given us?” and you’ll usually get three partial answers, one per person, because revenue in Altru is recorded against the constituent who paid, not against the household they belong to.
Rolling that up to the household is possible, but in most databases it takes some query work and a little math outside Altru. Here’s how to approach it, and where the gaps are.
First, decide which “household” you mean
Membership and development staff often say “household” for three different things:
- The Altru household record. A household constituent with individual constituents linked to it as members. This is what you set up when you link spouses or a family together.
- The membership itself. A family membership already groups a primary member with additional members and cardholders, whether or not those people share a household record.
- The mailing address. People who live at the same address, linked or not. This is the loosest definition, and the one your direct-mail vendor probably uses.
These don’t always line up. Grandparents on a gift membership aren’t in the giver’s household. Two adults on one membership might never have been linked as a household. Pick the definition that matches the question you’re answering before you build anything. For “total membership revenue per family,” the membership is often a cleaner grouping than the household record, because the membership already ties the people together.
Approach 1: Revenue query plus a household identifier
This is the most reliable route in most Altru databases, because it starts from the revenue itself.
- Start a revenue query and filter to the revenue you care about: membership payments, a date range, and whatever designations or programs apply. Exclude refunds or include them as negatives, but decide which on purpose.
- Add the payer’s constituent ID and name to the output.
- Browse the constituent fields for household information and add the household’s lookup ID and name. Field names and where they sit vary, so expand the constituent area of the query and look for household-related fields rather than expecting a specific label.
- Add the amount and date, then preview results for a family you know well and check the numbers by hand.
- Export and roll up. In a spreadsheet, pivot on household ID and sum the amount. Rows with a blank household ID are individuals with no household; decide whether to treat each as its own household or leave them out.
This gives you one line per household with a total, which is usually what leadership is asking for.
Approach 2: Start from the household and reach into revenue
You can also build a constituent query filtered to households and try to reach each member’s revenue from there. Some organizations get this to work; others find that the summary fields available at that level don’t total revenue the way they expect, or that the query returns one row per member per transaction and becomes hard to read.
If you try this, test it in query preview on two or three households where you already know the right answer. If the totals don’t match Approach 1, trust Approach 1. If you’re unsure whether your version of Altru exposes household-level revenue totals directly, ask Blackbaud support before investing time in a complex query. It’s a quick question for them and saves a lot of guesswork.
Approach 3: Use the membership as the grouping
For membership-specific reporting, a membership query can be simpler. Pull each membership’s ID, membership program and level, primary member, and the related transaction amounts, then sum by membership ID. You’ll get “what has this membership brought in across renewals,” which for many teams is the real question behind “household revenue.”
The limit is that it ignores anything outside the membership, such as donations or tickets the same family bought separately. If you need that too, combine it with Approach 1.
Things that throw the totals off
- Double counting. If revenue is recorded on a household constituent and on its individual members, a naive rollup counts some gifts twice. Check whether your organization ever records revenue directly on household records.
- Household changes. When people divorce, marry, or move, their household link changes. Most queries show the household as it is today, not as it was when the payment was made, so historical totals can shift after a data cleanup.
- Duplicates. One person entered twice won’t roll up correctly, because only one of the records may be linked to the household. Duplicate constituents are a bigger cause of wrong household totals than anything in the query.
- Gift memberships. Revenue sits with the giver, while the membership benefits sit with the recipient. Decide which side gets credit in your report.
- Recognition vs. payment. If you use recognition credits or soft credits for spouses, a revenue query on payers won’t include them. That’s often correct for finance and wrong for donor relations, so label the report clearly.
Making it repeatable
Once the numbers check out, save the query with a clear name and a note in its description about which definition of household it uses. If you need a household total visible on the constituent record itself, look into whether a smart field can calculate it, and test it on a handful of records before relying on it in a list or segment.
The spreadsheet rollup is the part that tends to go stale, since someone has to re-export and re-pivot every time. Social Good’s Data Bridge syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets, so a saved household revenue query can feed a sheet whose pivot table stays current without manual exports. Altru still holds the actual revenue; the sheet is just where the rollup happens.
Quick answers
Can Altru total revenue by household out of the box?
Not in a way most teams find straightforward. Revenue belongs to the paying constituent, so a household total usually means pulling household IDs into a revenue query and summing outside Altru. Confirm with Blackbaud support if you think your setup offers more.
Why do my household totals change from month to month for the same period?
Usually because household links or duplicate records were updated. The query reflects current relationships, not the ones in place when the payment was made.
