Your board treasurer asks a simple question: how much of last year’s contributed revenue came from individuals, and how much from foundations, corporations, and government? Then someone runs a report and the numbers don’t add up. A donor-advised fund gift shows up under organizations, a family foundation got counted as a person, and a matching gift is split between two places. The total is right, but nobody trusts the split.
The fix isn’t a report. It’s a rule your team agrees on, applied the same way to every gift, and stored on the record so a query can find it. Here’s how to set that up in Altru.
Start with the rule: whose money is it?
The cleanest test is who legally made the payment. If a person wrote the check or charged their own card, it’s individual giving. If an entity with its own tax ID paid (a private foundation, a company, a government agency, a community foundation’s discretionary grant), it’s institutional.
That test handles most gifts. The trouble is the handful of gift types where the legal payer and the real decision-maker are different. Decide these up front and write them down:
- Donor-advised funds. The check comes from a sponsoring organization, but an individual recommended the grant. Many development offices report these as individual giving because the relationship is with the person. Others follow the legal payer. Either is defensible; mixing both is not.
- Family foundations. Legally institutional. Some organizations still group them with individual giving for prospect management because the same family drives the decision. If you do that, keep a way to break them out, because grant reports and audits will want the legal view.
- Matching gifts. The employee’s gift is individual; the company’s match is institutional. Record them as two separate gifts from two separate constituents, not one combined amount.
- Small businesses and LLCs. A gift paid from a sole proprietor’s business account is technically from the business. Decide whether you count small local businesses as corporate giving or roll them up under the owner.
- Corporate sponsorships. These are often not gifts at all in the accounting sense, since the company receives benefits. Confirm with your finance team whether sponsorships belong in contributed revenue or somewhere else before you classify them.
- Government grants. Institutional, but most organizations report them as their own bucket rather than lumping them with foundations.
Once the policy exists, get finance to sign off on it. Your development numbers and the audited financials don’t have to match line for line, but you should be able to explain every difference.
Make the classification visible in Altru
Altru gives you a few places to carry this information. Which one you lean on depends on how your database is already set up.
Constituent type: individual or organization
The most basic signal is whether the gift is recorded on an individual constituent record or an organization record. If your data entry is disciplined, that alone gets you most of the way: gifts from individual records are individual giving, gifts from organization records are institutional.
It breaks down when people take shortcuts. Common examples: a foundation grant entered on the board member’s individual record because “that’s who we talked to,” or a DAF gift entered on the donor’s record with the fund name typed in a note. Fix the entry habit first, or no report will be reliable.
Constituencies or codes on the organization record
“Organization” is too broad on its own. You want to know whether an organization is a private foundation, a community foundation, a corporation, a government agency, or a DAF sponsor. Tag organization records with a consistent constituency or code for that type. Keep the list short. Five or six categories that everyone understands beat twenty that nobody applies consistently.
If you treat DAF gifts as individual giving, tagging the sponsor organization as “DAF sponsor” is what lets you move those dollars into the individual column at reporting time.
Recognition credit for the person behind the gift
For DAFs, family foundations, and gifts an individual arranged through their employer, record the gift on the organization that paid and give recognition (soft) credit to the individual. That way the legal view and the relationship view both exist, and you choose which to report. How recognition credits are configured varies by Altru setup, so test the exact steps in a sandbox or with Blackbaud support before rolling it out to the whole team.
Revenue designations and categories
Some organizations try to solve this by creating separate designations for “individual” and “institutional” giving. Be careful. Designations usually describe what the money is for (annual fund, education programs, a capital project), and finance often depends on them for coding. Overloading them with who gave it tends to create a long, confusing designation list. Keep source on the constituent and purpose on the designation.
Building the report
With the data in place, the report is a revenue query with the paying constituent’s type and its constituency or code as output fields. Group the results into your agreed buckets, for example:
- Individuals (individual constituent records)
- Donor-advised funds (organization records tagged as DAF sponsors, if you report them separately or roll them into individuals)
- Private and family foundations
- Corporations, including matching gifts
- Government
- Other organizations (churches, civic groups, schools)
Before you send the first version to anyone, run the query for a recent fiscal year and look for anything unclassified: organization records with no type code, or individual records with a business-sounding name. That cleanup list is usually short, and fixing it once makes every future report better.
If you need the split by month or campaign, add the gift date and the appeal or campaign as columns and pivot in a spreadsheet. Whether you can build that grouping directly inside Altru’s reporting depends on your setup, so confirm before promising a particular format.
Keep it from drifting
- Add the rules to your gift entry guide, with the edge cases spelled out by name.
- Require a type code whenever someone creates a new organization record.
- Run the “unclassified” check quarterly, not just at year-end.
- When a new gift type shows up that doesn’t fit, decide once and add it to the guide instead of letting each person guess.
Quick answers
Is a DAF gift individual or institutional?
Legally, it comes from the sponsoring organization. For relationship reporting, many organizations count it as individual. Pick one, document it, and record the gift so you can report it either way.
Can I reclassify gifts that were entered on the wrong record?
Usually yes, but moving revenue between constituents can affect receipts, acknowledgments, and recognition history. Check with finance before correcting gifts in a closed fiscal year.
