A visitor walks up to the admissions desk holding your spring renewal letter and says, “I’d like to renew.” The cashier rings up the membership in Daily Sales, the member leaves happy, and the renewal letter that brought them in gets no credit. When you pull appeal results a month later, the mailing looks weaker than it really was.
Attaching an appeal to a membership sold at the point of sale is a common gap in Altru. This article covers what you can usually do about it, what to confirm in your own database, and how to keep appeal reporting honest when a lot of renewals happen in person.
The short version
Daily Sales is built for speed: tickets, memberships, and merchandise in one transaction. In most Altru setups, the membership line in a Daily Sales order doesn’t offer an appeal field the way a donation entered through revenue or a batch does. Configurations and releases differ, so check your own system before you build a workaround. Open a test sale in a sandbox (or ask Blackbaud support) and see whether an appeal can be captured on the membership at checkout.
If it can’t, you have three practical choices:
- Sell the membership in Daily Sales, then add the appeal to the revenue record afterward.
- Send appeal-driven renewals somewhere other than Daily Sales.
- Leave the transactions alone and credit the appeal in reporting by matching on who was solicited.
Most organizations end up combining two of these.
Option 1: Add the appeal after the sale
The membership payment from a Daily Sales order creates a revenue record on the constituent. Depending on your security rights and how your revenue is set up, staff may be able to edit that payment and assign the appeal there. Test this in a sandbox first. Confirm that the appeal sticks, that it shows up in your appeal reports and queries, and that the edit doesn’t cause trouble with a deposit or a batch that’s already been posted.
To make it workable at the desk:
- Capture the code at the counter. Ask cashiers to write down the appeal or source code from the letter or reply card, along with the order number, on a simple log or in an order note.
- Have one person do the edits. A membership or development staffer updates the revenue records daily or weekly. Cashiers move on to the next guest.
- Close the loop with a query. Build a revenue query for membership payments from Daily Sales with no appeal, filtered to the date range of the campaign. Anything on that list that’s also on your log still needs to be fixed.
This takes some labor, but it gives you clean appeal attribution on the actual revenue, and that’s what most appeal reports read.
Option 2: Route appeal renewals away from the register
If a mailing brings in a lot of renewals, the cleanest data comes from processing them where an appeal can be entered at the start. For mailed-in reply cards, that’s usually a membership or revenue batch with the appeal set on each row, or set as a batch default. For online renewals, check whether your Altru membership web form can be tied to an appeal, or give each campaign its own form so the source is clear.
At the desk, a few organizations ask walk-in renewers with a letter to use a membership services window or a back-office process instead of general admissions. That only works if the volume justifies it and the guest doesn’t end up waiting longer. Don’t send people to a second line just to protect your reporting.
Option 3: Credit the appeal through match-back reporting
Sometimes editing transactions isn’t realistic, for example during a big renewal push staffed by seasonal cashiers. In that case, attribute the appeal in reporting instead of on the record:
- Pull the list of constituents who received the appeal (your mailing or marketing effort output).
- Query membership transactions during the response window for those same constituents, regardless of sales channel.
- Report those as “influenced by” the appeal, kept separate from revenue directly coded to it.
This overcounts slightly, since some of those members would have renewed anyway. Still, it’s much closer to the truth than giving the mailing zero credit for every in-person renewal. Use the same window and rules every campaign so the numbers can be compared year over year.
Choosing between them
Use Option 1 when appeal revenue drives real decisions, like board reports or grant reporting, and the volume of desk renewals is manageable. Use Option 2 when one campaign produces a predictable wave of mail or web responses. Use Option 3 as a backstop, or when you mostly want a fair read on whether a mailing worked.
Whatever you pick, write it down. Describe how desk staff record an appeal code, who updates records and when, and how the appeal report is built. Appeal numbers stop being trustworthy when each person on the team handles it differently.
Quick answers
Can I just use a discount or a separate membership level to track the appeal?
You can, but it mixes campaign tracking into pricing and program structure, and it makes membership reporting harder to read later. An appeal on the revenue, or a match-back report, is usually the cleaner choice.
Does adding an appeal later change the member’s dates or benefits?
It shouldn’t, since the appeal describes where the revenue came from, not the membership itself. Still, confirm it in a sandbox before editing records in bulk.
