A grandmother buys a family membership as a birthday surprise. She wants the cards mailed to her so she can wrap them. Three weeks later the recipients find a welcome packet in their own mailbox, the surprise is gone, and your membership office gets the call. Choosing where a gift membership is delivered sounds like a small detail until it goes wrong.
This guide covers what “delivery” actually means for a gift membership in Altru, why the choice is easy to miss during the sale, and how to make sure the right person gets the card, the letter, and later the renewal notice.
Two people, one membership
Every gift membership has a giver (the person paying) and a recipient (the person who holds the membership). Altru records both on the membership, and the delivery choice decides which of them receives the fulfillment materials: the card, the welcome letter, and anything else your team sends when a new membership is processed.
Neither answer is always right:
- Deliver to the giver when the gift is a surprise, a holiday present, or something the giver wants to hand over personally.
- Deliver to the recipient when the giver just wants the membership active and doesn’t want to be the go-between, or lives in another state.
The trouble is that the delivery choice tends to be set once and then forgotten. If staff don’t ask, or the sales screen they use doesn’t show the option, the membership falls back to whatever default your program uses, and nobody finds out until the card arrives in the wrong place.
Find out where your team can actually set it
Whether the delivery choice is visible depends on how the gift is sold and on your Altru configuration. In our experience, it isn’t equally easy to set in every sales path, and back-office edits after the sale can behave differently from the original transaction. Rather than trust anyone’s memory, including ours, test it:
- In a sandbox or test environment, sell a gift membership the way your front desk does it, and note whether the delivery option appears.
- Repeat for each other path you use: phone sales, back-office membership entry, and your online gift form.
- Open the resulting membership records and check what delivery value was saved and whether it can be changed afterward.
- If any path doesn’t expose the option or doesn’t save it, ask Blackbaud support whether that’s expected for your version and configuration.
Write down the results as a short table: sales path, can staff choose delivery (yes or no), and what the default is. That table becomes the basis for your desk script.
When the sales screen doesn’t let you choose
If a path you rely on doesn’t let staff pick delivery at the point of sale, you still need to capture the giver’s wishes somewhere your fulfillment process will see. A few approaches that work without changing Altru itself:
Capture it as structured data, not a note
A free-text comment saying “send to giver” is easy to write and easy to miss. If your organization uses constituent or membership attributes, a simple “Gift delivery: giver / recipient” attribute is far easier to query and report on. Agree on one place to record it and train everyone to use only that place.
Correct it in the back office the same day
Some teams let the desk complete the sale as quickly as possible and have a membership staff member review every gift membership created that day. A query of new gift memberships, filtered to the day’s sales, gives that person a short worklist: confirm the delivery choice, fix it if needed, and only then release the card for printing.
Drive fulfillment from a query, not from habit
However you print cards and letters, build the mailing list from a query that includes the delivery choice and pulls the address from the correct constituent. Then spot-check a few gift memberships each batch. If cards are pulled from a list that always uses the recipient’s address, no amount of careful data entry will fix the outcome.
Don’t forget what happens after delivery
The card is only the first thing that goes out. Before you settle on a process, decide who should receive:
- The gift acknowledgment or tax receipt. This almost always belongs to the giver, regardless of where the card goes.
- Member communications and event invitations. Usually the recipient, since they hold the benefits.
- The renewal notice. This is a policy decision. Some organizations ask the giver first, since they may want to give it again; others go straight to the recipient. Check how your renewal letters and queries handle gift memberships so the answer matches your policy.
Mixing these up creates its own problems: a giver who keeps getting member newsletters for a membership they don’t hold, or a recipient who receives a thank-you for a gift they didn’t make.
A short script for the desk and phones
Whatever the system allows, the most reliable fix is a question staff ask every time someone says “this is a gift”:
- “Who is the membership for?” Find or create the recipient’s record, with a mailing address.
- “Should we mail the cards to you or directly to them?” Record the answer in your agreed place.
- “When renewal time comes, should we contact you or them?” Record that too, if your process uses it.
Three questions add less than a minute to the sale and prevent most of the follow-up calls.
Quick answers
Can I change delivery after the membership is sold?
Often, yes, from the membership record in the back office, but confirm in a test environment that the change is saved and picked up by your card and letter process.
Should the default be giver or recipient?
Pick the one that matches most of your gift sales. If most gifts are holiday purchases, the giver is usually the safer default, since a misdirected surprise is harder to undo than a forwarded envelope.
