“Thank you for your gift of $250.00 on 10/14/2026.” It’s accurate, but it reads like a receipt printer wrote it. Most development directors want “October 14, 2026” in a thank-you letter, and some want the weekday or no year at all. The good news is that the date format in an Altru acknowledgment is usually decided after the data leaves Altru, which means you have more control over it than it first appears.
Start by finding where the date gets its format
Before changing anything, figure out which path your acknowledgments actually take. Altru hands the gift date to some other piece of the process, and that piece decides how it looks. In practice there are three common setups:
- Letters merged in Microsoft Word. Altru exports the acknowledgment data and Word merges it into a letter template. Word controls the date format.
- Exports opened in Excel or another tool first. Someone exports the data, opens it in a spreadsheet, and then merges or uploads it. Excel may reformat the date on the way through, sometimes without anyone noticing.
- Email acknowledgments sent from inside Altru. The date is inserted by Altru’s own email merge fields, and your formatting options there are narrower.
Ask whoever runs acknowledgments to walk you through one batch end to end. More often than not, the fix lives in the template, not in Altru’s settings.
Word mail merge: use a date switch
This is the most common setup and the easiest to fix. Word merge fields accept a formatting switch that controls how a date is displayed, no matter how it arrived in the data file.
- Open your acknowledgment letter template in Word.
- Press Alt+F9 (Option+F9 on many Macs) to show field codes instead of results. The gift date field will look something like
{ MERGEFIELD Gift_Date }, with your field name in place of that example. - Add a date picture switch inside the braces:
{ MERGEFIELD Gift_Date @ "MMMM d, yyyy" } - Press Alt+F9 again to switch back, then preview a few records to confirm.
Useful patterns:
"MMMM d, yyyy"gives October 14, 2026"d MMMM yyyy"gives 14 October 2026"dddd, MMMM d"gives Wednesday, October 14"MMM. d, yyyy"gives Oct. 14, 2026
Use capital M for months. Lowercase m means minutes, and mixing them up is a common reason a merged date comes out looking wrong.
If you also print today’s date at the top of the letter, use a { DATE @ "MMMM d, yyyy" } field or plain typed text rather than a merged field, so the letter date and the gift date don’t get mixed up.
When the date arrives as text
The switch only works if Word recognizes the value as a date. If your export passes the date through Excel and someone saved it as text, or if the export includes a time stamp, Word may ignore the switch and print the raw value. Two ways to check:
- Open the export file in a plain text editor rather than Excel and look at how the date is actually written.
- Merge a single test record. If the switch has no effect, the value probably isn’t being read as a date.
The cleanest fix is to merge straight from the exported file without opening and re-saving it in Excel. If a spreadsheet step is unavoidable, format the column as a date before saving, or add a helper column with a TEXT() formula that produces exactly the wording you want and merge that column instead.
Email acknowledgments sent from Altru
This is where honest limits come in. Altru’s email templates insert merge fields, but we haven’t found a reliable, documented way to apply a custom date pattern to those fields the way Word does. The date tends to follow the format Altru outputs, which is typically tied to your system’s regional settings.
If the format in your emails matters, try these in order:
- Send a test email to yourself and see exactly what the field produces.
- Ask Blackbaud support whether date formatting is configurable for email merge fields in your version, and whether regional settings affect it.
- Rewrite the sentence so the format matters less. “Thank you for your recent gift of $250” reads naturally without any date at all. Keep the exact date in the receipt section, where a numeric format looks normal.
Use one format everywhere donors see a date
Whatever format you pick, use it everywhere a donor sees a gift date: the letter, the email, and any year-end summary. A donor comparing a letter that says “October 14” with a statement that says “10/14” may wonder whether they are looking at the same gift. Write the chosen pattern into your acknowledgment procedures so the next person who rebuilds the template doesn’t reintroduce the old one.
Quick answers
Is there one setting in Altru that changes the date format in every acknowledgment?
Not that we can confirm. Formatting is usually controlled by the template or tool that receives the data. If you need a system-wide change, ask Blackbaud support before adjusting regional settings, since those can affect far more than letters.
Will a date switch change the data stored in Altru?
No. It only changes how the date is printed in the merged letter. The gift record is untouched.
