A family buys a household membership online. Two adults, two kids, one payment. When the record lands in Altru, you get a constituent for the person who paid and, depending on the form, a list of names on the membership. What you usually don’t get is the part your development team cares about: that the second adult is a spouse, that the kids belong to this household, or that the buyer works for a company with a matching gift program.
That gap is the real question behind adding relationships to Altru web forms. The short answer is that the web form is not where relationships get built well, and you will save time by deciding where they do get built.
Three things that get called “relationships”
Before changing anything, be clear about which one you need. They live in different parts of Altru and have different fixes.
- Members on a membership. The extra adults and children attached to a household or dual membership. Membership web forms are designed to collect these names, so this is the piece most likely to already work.
- Constituent relationships. The typed links between two constituent records: spouse, parent and child, employer and employee, and so on. These drive mailings, recognition, and prospect research.
- Households. The grouping that lets you mail one piece to one address and roll up giving. Households depend on relationships being right underneath them.
If your real problem is the first one, check your membership form settings and level setup before anything else. If it’s the second or third, keep reading.
What to expect from the native forms
Altru’s web forms are built to complete a sale or a gift and create or match a constituent. In our experience they do not give buyers a way to say “this person is my spouse” and have Altru create a typed relationship record. Form options change between releases, though, so don’t take our word as final. Open your membership and donation forms in a test environment, submit a household purchase, and look at what was actually created on each constituent record. If you’re still unsure, ask Blackbaud support directly whether relationship types can be captured on the form you use.
Even when a form collects additional names, those people may arrive as new constituents with very little data, which is also how duplicates start. Plan for that either way.
Practical ways to get relationships into Altru
1. Add them on the back end, on a schedule
This is the most dependable option because it doesn’t rely on what the form can collect. Build a query of constituents created or updated through web transactions in the past week, filtered to household and dual membership levels. Someone on the membership or data team works that list weekly: match the extra names to existing records, add the relationship type, and confirm the household. A short weekly pass is far easier than a year-end cleanup project.
2. Ask for the information after the purchase
The checkout is the worst moment to ask someone to classify their family. A welcome email a few days later, with a short “tell us who’s on your membership” link, gets better answers. Responses still need staff to enter them, but you’re entering accurate data instead of guessing from a list of first names.
3. Capture employer information where it matters
If matching gifts are the reason you want relationships, focus there. Add an employer question to donation forms if your form setup allows a custom field or note, then route those answers to whoever manages corporate records. Even as free text, it gives you something to act on.
4. Check duplicates before linking
Linking a spouse to the wrong “Jordan Smith” is worse than no link. Run duplicate checks on new web constituents before relationship work, not after. Merging two records that each carry relationships is much harder than merging two clean ones.
Set a rule staff can follow
Whichever method you choose, write down three things: who owns the weekly review, which relationship types you actually use (fewer is better), and what happens when a name can’t be matched confidently. A short, consistent list of relationship types makes queries and mailings far more reliable than a long one that each person applies differently.
If you’re replacing the web forms anyway
Some organizations look at this problem while rethinking their online checkout as a whole. Social Good’s Checkouts replaces Altru web forms for tickets, memberships, and donations with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that writes data back to Altru. If relationship data is one of your requirements, ask specifically which fields write back to Altru and test a household purchase end to end before you commit, the same way you would test any form.
Quick answers
Will household members entered online show up in Altru?
On membership forms built for multiple members, names are typically collected and attached to the membership. Whether they become fully linked constituent relationships is the part to verify in testing.
Can we import relationships in bulk?
If you’re working through a large backlog, ask Blackbaud support about import options for relationship records rather than entering them one at a time. Clean duplicates first.
