Say you add a question to an Altru form, something like “Recipient’s email address” on a gift membership or “Teacher’s email” on a school group booking. People fill it in and the answers get saved. Then you need to email those people, and you find out the answers aren’t on any constituent record. They sit in survey responses, often with typos, and nothing in Altru treats them as email addresses.
This article covers why that happens, how to collect email through a survey question so the data is still usable, and when you should skip the survey and collect it some other way.
Why a survey answer is not an email address
As far as Altru is concerned, a survey question is a question with an answer. It doesn’t know the answer is meant to be an email. That causes three problems:
- No format checking. A free-text answer accepts “jane@gmail,com” or “same as above” just as easily as a real address. As far as we know, Altru has no answer type that validates email format the way the constituent email field does. Answer types and settings can vary by version and configuration, so check in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you assume either way.
- No link to a constituent. The answer is tied to the person who filled in the form. It doesn’t create or update a record for the person whose email it is.
- No communication preferences. An address stored as a survey answer has no opt-in status attached, so you can’t tell from the record whether you’re allowed to market to it.
Before you build anything, decide whose email you’re collecting. That decides the right approach.
Whose email is it?
The buyer’s own email
Don’t use a survey question for this. Altru’s standard web forms already collect the purchaser’s email and write it to the constituent record. If you’re tempted to add a survey question here, it’s usually because a form isn’t asking for email at all or treats it as optional. Fix that on the form itself. A second copy in a survey answer will only drift out of sync with the real field.
Someone else’s email (gift recipient, chaperone, attendee)
A survey question is a reasonable place for this, as long as you plan from the start how the answer will get onto a constituent record. Leaving the answers to pile up is how organizations end up with hundreds of unreachable gift recipients.
An optional “send me updates” email
If you’re really asking for marketing consent, set up the consent and the address together on the constituent record. Don’t split them across a survey answer and a separate checkbox, or you’ll have trouble showing later who agreed to what.
Setting up the question so the data stays usable
- Use a short free-text answer and a precise label. “Gift recipient’s email address (we’ll send their membership card here)” gets better answers than “Email.” When people know why you’re asking, they’re more careful.
- Add a confirmation or help line. If your form allows help text, add “Please double-check spelling.” It sounds minor, but it’s the only check you get.
- Collect the name too. An email with no name is hard to match later. Ask for the recipient’s first and last name in their own questions next to the email question.
- Decide whether it’s required. Making it required raises completion, but people with no answer will type junk to get through. Only make it required if missing data will stop you from delivering something.
- Test it end to end. Submit a few test entries, including a bad address, and confirm where the answer lands and how it shows up in a query.
Getting the answers onto constituent records
This is the step most teams skip. A simple routine works:
- Build a query of survey responses for the question, with the response date, the person who submitted it, and the related transaction. Save it with a name your team will recognize.
- Review on a set schedule. Weekly works for most volumes. Scan the list for obviously broken addresses and fix what you can, or contact the buyer.
- Search before you create. Look up each recipient in Altru by name and email before adding a new constituent. Otherwise you’ll create duplicate records.
- Write the address to the constituent’s email field and set communication preferences based on what the person actually agreed to. A gift recipient never agreed to anything, so treat them as transactional-only until they opt in.
- Mark responses as processed. Use a selection, a note, or a date filter on the query so nobody works the same rows twice.
If you get more than a handful a week, ask whether import or batch tools can handle the record updates in your setup instead of typing them in one at a time. Test in a sandbox first, because a bad import of email addresses is tedious to undo.
When to stop using a survey for this
A survey question is a workaround. It’s fine for low volume and occasional use. If recipient emails are central to a program, like gift memberships that depend on delivering a card, the manual step eventually turns into a backlog, and addresses entered wrong mean recipients never get what was bought for them. At that point, talk with Blackbaud about whether a different form setup supports it natively, or look at a checkout process that collects the recipient as a person rather than as a question.
Quick answers
Will a survey answer update the constituent’s email field?
We haven’t seen it do that on its own. Treat survey answers as separate data and plan a step to copy them over. Confirm the behavior in your own environment.
Can I send email to survey answers directly from Altru?
Not reliably. Email tools generally work from constituent email addresses, so get the address onto a record first.
Is it worth asking for the email twice to catch typos?
It helps, but only if someone actually compares the two answers during the review step. Altru won’t flag a mismatch between two survey questions for you, and many people copy and paste the first answer into the second box anyway.
