A board member sends a personal email to twenty friends asking them to join at the patron level. Twelve of them do, all through your website. A month later the development director runs a solicitor report to thank the board member, and the report shows zero. The money is in Altru. The credit isn’t.
That gap shows up wherever solicitors matter: board giving campaigns, staff-driven membership drives, group sales reps who send people to the website to finish their purchase. Here’s how solicitor credit works in Altru, why online transactions tend to come in without it, and the practical ways organizations get the credit attached anyway.
Why online transactions arrive without a solicitor
In Altru, a solicitor is something staff assign to revenue: you open the transaction or revenue record and add the constituent who should get credit. That works fine when a person is entering or reviewing the transaction. A web form is different. The buyer fills it out, Altru records the payment, and nobody on your side touches it unless you go looking.
We’re not aware of a standard way for an Altru web form to assign a solicitor automatically based on how the buyer arrived. Configuration options change over time, so before you build a workaround, confirm it for your own database: open a test form in a sandbox or with a test card, check the resulting revenue record, and ask Blackbaud support whether there is a supported setting for your version. If there is, use it. If not, the options below are what organizations generally fall back on.
Option 1: Ask the buyer, then add the solicitor by hand
The simplest approach is to let the buyer tell you. Add an optional question to the web form, something like “Did someone invite you to give or join? Tell us who.” Keep it free text or a short dropdown of the people running the current campaign.
Then build a short routine around it:
- Query for answers. Build a query of online transactions in a date range where that question has a response. If your form question saves to an attribute or similar field, it can be pulled into the query output.
- Review weekly. Someone in development checks the list, matches each answer to the right constituent, and adds that person as solicitor on the revenue record.
- Mark it done. Add a note or attribute so the next weekly review doesn’t pick up the same record again.
This is manual, but it’s honest data: the buyer named the person. It works well when volume is modest, such as a board campaign that brings in dozens of gifts rather than thousands.
Option 2: One form or link per solicitor
If each solicitor sends their own audience to the website, give each one a distinct entry point. That could be a separate copy of the web form, or a link that carries a different appeal or source code if your forms record one.
The appeal or form then becomes your proxy for the solicitor. You still need to turn that into real solicitor credit, but the matching step gets easier: a query filtered to “revenue from the Jane Smith form” can be reviewed in one pass, and the solicitor added to every record on the list.
Two cautions here. First, separate forms multiply maintenance; if prices or memberships change, every copy needs updating. Second, links get forwarded. A buyer who received Jane’s link from a friend of a friend will still be credited to Jane. For most stewardship purposes that’s acceptable, but decide in advance whether it is for yours.
Option 3: Report on appeal or source instead of solicitor
Sometimes the real goal is a report, not the solicitor field itself. If leadership wants to know how much each board member’s outreach produced, a revenue report grouped by appeal or source code may answer that question without touching solicitor credit at all.
The trade-off is that solicitor fields feed other places in Altru, like constituent records and solicitor-based reports your team may already rely on. If those matter, use options 1 or 2 so the credit ends up where people expect to find it.
Decide what credit means before you start
Whatever method you pick, write down a few rules first. They save arguments later:
- What counts. Donations only, or memberships and tickets too? Group sales reps may care about tickets; board campaigns usually don’t.
- Who decides ties. If a buyer names two people, do both get credit, and at what split?
- How long a link stays live. A solicitor link from last year’s campaign probably shouldn’t keep crediting someone forever. Retire old forms or appeals when a campaign ends.
- Who owns the cleanup. One named person running the weekly query will be more consistent than “whoever has time.”
Check that it’s actually working
After the first couple of weeks, compare two numbers: online revenue tagged to the campaign (by appeal, form, or form answer) and online revenue that now has a solicitor assigned. If the second number is much lower, either the review routine is slipping or buyers aren’t answering the question. A gentle prompt in the solicitor’s outreach email (“mention my name when you join”) tends to help with the second problem.
Quick answers
Can I add a solicitor to an online transaction after it’s processed?
Generally yes. Staff can add solicitor credit to revenue after the fact, which is why the review-and-update routine above works. Test it on one record first to confirm your security role allows the edit.
Will adding a solicitor change the payment or the buyer’s record?
Solicitor credit is attribution, not a change to the payment amount. Still, check a test record afterward so you know exactly what changed before doing it at volume.
