A donor gives online in memory of her father and types a line in the comment box asking that the card go to her mother. The email alert lands in the development inbox and shows the amount, the donor, and the form. It doesn’t show the comment. Three weeks later the acknowledgment goes out with no mention of the tribute, and nobody notifies the family.
That gap shows up anywhere an online order carries something a person has to act on: tribute and memorial notes, gift comments, the names of additional members on a household membership, or special instructions on a group purchase. The alert tells you a sale happened. It doesn’t always tell you what the buyer asked for.
Start by finding out what your alerts can actually show
Before you build a workaround, confirm the limit in your own database. Altru online sales email alerts are configurable to a degree, but which fields can be added to the message, and whether comments or tribute details are among them, is something to verify rather than assume. Two quick ways to check:
- Test it. In a sandbox or test environment, place an online donation with a tribute and a comment, then look at exactly what arrives in the alert email.
- Ask Blackbaud support whether those fields can be included in your alert, and if not, whether there’s a supported alternative for your version.
If the answer is that the alert can carry the fields, great: add them and you’re done. If not, the fix is to stop treating the alert as the place where follow-up work starts.
Make a query the to-do list, not the alert
The information the donor typed doesn’t disappear. In most setups it’s saved with the transaction, whether on the revenue record, a tribute attached to the gift, or a note, depending on how your web form maps its fields. Open a few recent online gifts to see where yours land before you build anything. That means you can find it with a query, and a query is a better trigger for follow-up than an email anyway, because it doesn’t depend on someone reading every alert.
Build an ad-hoc query along these lines:
- Source: revenue, filtered to online transactions (by web form, channel, or whatever your organization uses to separate online from in-person).
- Date: transactions since the last time someone worked the list, or simply the last seven days.
- Condition: a tribute exists or the comment/note field is not blank.
- Output: donor name, date, amount, designation, tribute type and tributee, acknowledgee if you capture one, and the full comment text.
Whoever runs acknowledgments opens that query first. Every row is a gift where the donor asked for something. When it’s empty, there’s nothing extra to do.
Do the same for memberships if your forms collect additional member names or gift-recipient details. A short query of online membership transactions where those fields are filled in catches the orders where a card needs to go to someone other than the buyer.
Close the loop so nothing gets done twice
A list is only useful if you can tell what’s already handled. Pick one simple marker and use it consistently: an attribute, a note type, or a status on the acknowledgment. Then add “not yet marked” to the query criteria. The list shrinks as work gets done, and anyone covering for a colleague sees exactly what’s left.
Tighten the form so comments are easier to act on
Free-text comments are where instructions hide. If donors keep using the comment box for the same few things, give those things their own place on the form:
- Use the tribute fields for honorary and memorial gifts instead of letting donors explain it in a comment.
- Collect the name and mailing address of the person to notify as separate fields when your form allows it.
- Keep a general comment box, but label it so donors know what it’s for.
Structured fields are easier to query, easier to merge into a letter, and much harder to miss.
A few habits that keep tribute gifts from slipping
- Name one owner for the daily or weekly review, plus a backup. Shared inboxes are where alerts go unread.
- Check the list before every acknowledgment run, not after. Fixing a letter that already went out is the expensive version.
- Spot-check monthly. Compare a handful of online tribute gifts against what was actually sent, to confirm the query is catching everything your forms collect.
Where Email Designer can help
Once the query exists, you can put it to work beyond a manual review. Email Designer sends automated, branded emails from Altru queries without manual exports, so a query of online gifts with tribute details can drive acknowledgment emails that include what the donor asked for.
Quick answers
Are the comments lost if they aren’t in the alert?
Generally, no. What the donor types is stored with the online transaction in Altru; if your alert doesn’t show it, a query or a look at the record will. Test one gift end to end to confirm where your forms put it.
Should we turn off the alerts?
Not necessarily. They’re still a useful heads-up that a sale came in. Just don’t rely on them as the only cue to follow up on tributes or special instructions.
