Ask a development officer what they open first on Monday morning and the honest answer is usually a spreadsheet someone exported last Thursday. Altru holds the gifts, pledges, memberships, and interactions they care about, but it doesn’t hand each fundraiser a ready-made “my portfolio at a glance” screen. You can get close. It takes a clear list of questions, a handful of well-built queries, and a decision about where the numbers will actually be viewed.
Start with the questions, not the charts
A dashboard that tries to show everything gets ignored within a month. Sit down with one or two officers and write out the questions they ask every week. A typical list looks like this:
- Who in my portfolio gave in the last 30 days, and how much?
- How much have I raised this fiscal year against my goal?
- Which pledges have installments coming due or past due?
- Which of my donors gave last year but not yet this year?
- Which higher-level members are coming up for renewal in the next 60 days?
- Who haven’t I contacted in 90 days or more?
Every item on that list becomes one query. If a question can’t be answered from data you actually record in Altru, that’s a process gap to fix first, not a dashboard problem.
Decide how “my portfolio” is defined in your data
This is the step that sinks most attempts. A dashboard per officer only works if Altru knows which constituents belong to which officer. Organizations handle this differently: some use a constituent attribute or code for the assigned staff member, some use relationships to the staff member’s own constituent record, and some track it only through interactions. Pick one method, document it, and clean up the existing records before you build anything.
If you aren’t sure which fields your version of Altru exposes for staff assignment in the query designer, test it in your sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before committing. It’s much easier to change the approach now than after six queries depend on it.
Build the queries
Create one saved query per question, filtered to a single officer, and make copies for each officer once the first one is right. A few practical notes:
- Use relative date filters. “Last 30 days” or “this fiscal year” keeps the query current without anyone editing dates. Hard-coded dates are the most common reason a dashboard quietly goes stale.
- Lean on smart fields for totals. Lifetime giving, last gift date, and largest gift are much faster to report from smart fields than from summing revenue rows. Check when your smart fields last refreshed, because a nightly process that stopped running will make every number look wrong.
- Be explicit about revenue types. Decide whether pledges count when booked or when paid, and whether membership revenue counts toward a fundraiser’s total. Officers will compare numbers with finance, so the rules need to match whatever finance reports.
- Handle households deliberately. If a couple gives from two records, the “lapsed donor” query may flag one spouse who gave through the other. Decide whether to report at the household level and filter accordingly.
- Name queries consistently. Something like “DevDash – Smith – Lapsed LYBUNT” makes it obvious what each one is, and keeps them from getting deleted during a cleanup.
Choose where the dashboard lives
Once the queries exist, you have three realistic options.
Inside Altru
Officers can run their saved queries and use Altru’s built-in reports directly. This needs no extra tools and keeps everything in one place. The trade-off is that it’s a list of results rather than a single screen, and how much you can customize Altru’s own dashboard pages varies by version and security role. Check what your instance allows before promising officers a custom home page.
Scheduled exports to a spreadsheet
Export each query to Excel or CSV and assemble a workbook with totals and simple charts. It works, and most teams already know how. The weak point is that someone has to run the exports, and the moment they go on vacation the dashboard stops updating.
Automatic sync to Google Sheets
If query results land in Google Sheets on a schedule, you can build each officer’s tab once and let it refresh itself. Sheets handles goal-versus-actual charts well, and if you want something more polished, Google’s free reporting tools can read from those sheets. Sharing is easy to control per officer, and nothing has to be exported by hand.
Keep it trustworthy
A dashboard is only used as long as people believe it. A few habits help:
- Show the “data as of” date and time on every view.
- Reconcile the year-to-date total against finance’s numbers monthly, at least for the first quarter.
- Review duplicate constituent records periodically. Duplicates split giving history and make lapsed-donor lists noisy.
- Revisit the question list every six months. Retire metrics nobody looks at.
Where Social Good fits
The query work above is all native Altru, and the first two display options need nothing extra. If you want the third option without manual exports, Data Bridge syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets (and tools like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign), so each officer’s sheet stays current from the same saved queries.
Quick answers
Can each officer see only their own donors?
Yes, if portfolio assignment is recorded consistently in Altru and each query filters on it. In a shared spreadsheet, give each officer their own tab or file.
How often should the data refresh?
Daily is plenty for most development teams. Gift processing and batch posting usually lag a day or two anyway, so a near-real-time refresh won’t show much more.
