Gift memberships bought online cause a specific kind of mix-up. The buyer pays, names a recipient, and says where the card should go: to the buyer so they can wrap it, or straight to the recipient. Weeks later the card goes out to the wrong address, or the right one with the wrong name on the envelope, because nobody looked at the delivery note when the cards were printed.
The fix usually isn’t to print delivery details on the card. It’s to make sure those details travel with the card through your fulfillment process. Here’s how to think about it and set it up in Altru.
Separate two questions: who the card is for, and where it goes
A membership card describes the member: the recipient’s name, membership level, expiration date, and member ID or barcode. That information belongs on the card and comes from the recipient’s membership record.
Delivery information describes the shipment: a mailing name, an address, maybe a gift message or a “hold until” date. Most of it should never be printed on the card itself. It belongs on the envelope, the carrier letter, or the packing slip that goes with the card.
Keep those two apart and the problem gets smaller. You don’t need to change the card layout. You need a mailing list that pairs each new gift card with the right delivery address.
Step one: find out where the delivery info actually lands
This is the part people skip, and it decides everything else. Depending on how your online gift membership form was set up, the delivery details might end up in different places:
- On the recipient’s constituent record as their address, if the buyer entered the recipient’s address as part of the gift.
- Only on the buyer’s record, with the recipient created with little more than a name.
- In a custom field, attribute, or note attached to the transaction or membership, if someone added a delivery-choice question to the form.
- Nowhere useful, if the form never asked.
Don’t guess. Place a test gift membership order through your live web form (or in a sandbox if you have one), choosing “send to recipient” one time and “send to me” the next. Then open the buyer’s record, the recipient’s record, the membership, and the revenue, and note exactly where each piece of information showed up. If you can’t find the delivery choice anywhere, that’s your answer: the form isn’t capturing it in a form you can query, and you’ll need to fix that before anything else. Blackbaud support can confirm what your form version is able to store if you’re unsure.
Step two: make the delivery choice queryable
If the delivery choice is buried in a free-text note, it’s hard to use at scale. The most reliable setup is a simple, structured value, such as a membership or constituent attribute with two options like “Mail to recipient” and “Mail to purchaser.” Whether you can map a web form question directly to an attribute depends on how your form and Altru are configured, so test it. If it can’t be mapped automatically, have whoever processes web transactions set the attribute during their review. It takes a few seconds per gift and saves a lot of guesswork later.
Step three: build a fulfillment query that joins card and delivery
Whatever you use to print cards today (Altru’s membership card process, an export to a print vendor, or a mail merge), the data behind it is a list of memberships. Build a membership query for newly sold gift memberships that pulls:
- Recipient name, level, expiration, and member ID (for the card).
- The delivery choice attribute.
- The recipient’s preferred address.
- The purchaser’s name and preferred address.
- Any gift message, if you capture one.
In your export or merge, add a “ship to” set of columns: if the delivery choice is “Mail to purchaser,” use the purchaser’s name and address; otherwise use the recipient’s. You can do that with a formula in the spreadsheet, or by splitting the query into two runs, one per delivery choice. Two runs is often simpler for staff to understand.
Now the card prints from the recipient columns and the envelope or carrier letter prints from the “ship to” columns. The card stays clean and the package goes to the right place.
Add a carrier letter when the card goes to the buyer
When the card goes to the purchaser, include a short letter that says who the gift is for and that the card is ready to pass along. Otherwise buyers sometimes assume the card is theirs. If the card goes to the recipient, the letter should name the giver (“A gift from …”), because a card arriving from nowhere confuses people and sometimes gets thrown out.
Common snags
- Overwriting the recipient’s address. If staff paste the purchaser’s address onto the recipient record to make the mailing work, the recipient’s renewal notices go to the wrong house next year. Keep addresses on the people they belong to and handle “ship to” in the fulfillment list.
- Households. If the recipient is added to an existing household, check that your query pulls the address you expect and not a household-level address that’s out of date.
- Timed gifts. Holiday gifts often need to arrive by a date, not just whenever. If you ask for a delivery date, add it to the query and sort by it.
- Batch timing. If cards print weekly, make sure the delivery attribute is set before that run, not after.
Quick answers
Can Altru print the purchaser’s address on the recipient’s card automatically?
I wouldn’t count on it, and you probably don’t want it there anyway. Check your card layout options to see what fields are available. The cleaner approach is a separate envelope or letter driven by a query.
What if our web form doesn’t ask about delivery at all?
Add a delivery question to the form if your form setup allows it. Until then, contact gift buyers whose orders don’t make the destination clear before you mail anything.
