The year-end letter goes out, gifts start arriving through your website, and when someone asks how the appeal did, the online gifts have no appeal on them. Front-desk and mailed gifts are coded because a person entered them. Web gifts came in on their own, so the appeal field is empty, and online revenue ends up as one undifferentiated pile.
There is no single fix for this. What works is a mix of setup before the campaign and a cleanup routine after it. Here is how to approach both, and where you’ll want to check your own Altru configuration before you count on anything.
First, confirm what your donation forms can do
Before you build workarounds, find out what your current Altru donation web forms can set on their own. Depending on your setup and version, a form may let you set a default designation or other revenue details for every gift that comes through it. Whether it can stamp an appeal, and whether the donor can pick one, is something to verify rather than assume.
The quickest way to find out:
- Open the configuration for one of your donation forms and look at every revenue-related option it offers.
- Make a small test gift through that form (in a sandbox if you have one, or a live gift you refund afterward).
- Open the resulting revenue record and see which fields were filled in automatically.
If the appeal is populated, you’re mostly done: build a form per campaign and point each campaign’s links at its own form. If it isn’t, ask Blackbaud support whether there’s a supported way to set an appeal on web gifts in your environment before you move on to the approaches below.
Give each campaign its own front door
Even when a form can’t write the appeal for you, a dedicated form per campaign still pays off, because it gives you something to sort by afterward. A few habits help:
- One form per appeal you care about measuring. Your general “Donate” page form is one bucket. The spring appeal email links to a different form. The year-end letter’s printed URL goes to a third.
- Use a different designation where it makes sense. If the campaign genuinely funds something specific, a separate designation is reportable and stays on the gift.
- Name forms so they sort well. Include the fiscal year and the campaign in the name, so retired forms don’t get mixed up with current ones.
- Retire forms on schedule. When the campaign ends, redirect its URL to your general form so late gifts don’t land on a stale page.
Back-fill the appeal after the gifts arrive
For many organizations the reliable answer is a short weekly routine that adds the appeal to online gifts after they post.
Build a query that finds the gaps
Create a revenue query that returns gifts where the appeal is blank and the gift came in online. How you identify “came in online” depends on your data: the form or designation it used, the payment method, the batch it posted through, or the date range of a campaign push. Add the constituent name, amount, date, and designation as output columns so the person doing the cleanup has enough context to decide.
Decide the rules before anyone edits
Write down how an uncoded web gift gets assigned. For example:
- Gift came through a campaign-specific form: assign that campaign’s appeal.
- Gift came through the general form within a set number of days after a mailing or email to that donor: assign the appeal they received.
- Anything else: assign a general “Online, unsolicited” appeal, rather than leaving it blank.
That last bucket matters. A blank appeal and a deliberately “unsolicited” appeal look different in reports, and you only want to see blanks when something actually needs attention.
Update the records
For a handful of gifts, editing each revenue record by hand is fine. For larger volumes, look into whether your Altru environment supports a bulk update on revenue from a query or selection. If you’re not sure, check with Blackbaud support or test on a copy first. Hand-editing a few hundred gifts in December is where errors creep in.
Track online gifts even when no appeal applies
Sometimes the real question isn’t “which appeal” but “how much came in online at all.” You don’t need an appeal code for that. A revenue query filtered by the forms, designation, payment method, or batch your web gifts use will give you an online total by month. Save it and add it to the regular reporting packet so nobody has to rebuild it each quarter.
If you use a general “Online, unsolicited” appeal as described above, it also does double duty: it gives you a clean count of web gifts that weren’t tied to any outreach, which is useful when you’re deciding whether the website deserves more attention.
Keep it from drifting
- Run the gap query on a fixed day each week during campaigns and monthly the rest of the year.
- Have the person who builds the email or letter also confirm the link goes to the right form before it’s sent.
- At fiscal year end, compare appeal totals to your online total. A large gap means gifts are still slipping through uncoded.
Quick answers
Can a donor choose the appeal on the form?
Donors usually don’t know your appeal names, and asking them adds friction. If you want their input, a simple “How did you hear about us?” question is easier to answer, and you can map their answer to an appeal during cleanup. Confirm your form supports a custom question before you plan around it.
Should we change the appeal on gifts from past years?
Only if those reports are still being used to make decisions. Otherwise, start the routine at the beginning of the current fiscal year and note the change in your reporting so year-over-year comparisons aren’t misread.
