A grandparent buys a family membership for their daughter’s household in December. Eleven months later, the renewal notice lands in the grandparent’s mailbox, not the daughter’s. The grandparent assumes they’re being asked to pay again, the daughter never hears that the membership is ending, and the household lapses. Nobody did anything wrong at the desk. The notice simply went to whoever the record said it should go to.
Gift memberships are the one place where “the person who paid” and “the person who uses the card” are reliably different people. Getting renewal notices to the right one comes down to three things: deciding who should hear from you, making sure that choice is captured on every gift sale, and building your renewal mailings so a missed setting doesn’t quietly send the notice to the wrong household.
Decide who should get the notice before you touch Altru
Altru can record who a gift membership’s renewal notice goes to, but it can’t decide your policy for you. The usual options:
- Recipient by default. The gift was a one-time present; renewing is now the member’s decision. It keeps the relationship with the household that actually visits.
- Giver by default. Useful when gifts tend to repeat year after year (parents covering an adult child, a company gifting staff memberships). The giver expects to be asked.
- Ask at the point of sale. Staff or the web form asks the buyer, “Should we contact you or the recipient when it’s time to renew?” More accurate, slightly more work.
Whichever you pick, write it down in one sentence and give it to everyone who sells memberships: front desk, membership office, and whoever maintains your online forms. When channels answer the question differently, gift renewals go sideways.
Check how each sales channel sets it today
Gift memberships come into Altru through more than one door: daily sales at the admissions desk, back-office membership entry, and online forms. Each can end up with a different default for the renewal-notice recipient, and staff entering a quick payment rarely stop to look at it.
Before changing anything, find out what’s actually happening:
- Run a test sale through each channel in a sandbox or training database if you have one. Sell a gift membership at the desk, in the back office, and online, then open each membership record and see who is set to receive the renewal notice.
- Build a membership query of recent gift memberships that shows the giver, the primary member, the sale channel or user, and the renewal-notice recipient. Sort it by channel. Patterns show up quickly: one channel that always defaults to the giver, or one staff member who always changes it.
- Confirm what’s configurable. Whether you can change the default per channel or per membership program depends on your Altru setup, and it’s not something we’d want you to guess at. If the test sales don’t make it clear, ask Blackbaud support whether the default can be set where you need it, or whether it has to be chosen on each transaction.
When the default can’t be changed
If a channel keeps defaulting to the wrong person and there’s no setting to fix it, you have two practical options. Use them together.
Make it a step in the sale
Add the renewal-notice choice to your desk and back-office procedures for gift memberships, right next to “capture the recipient’s address.” A one-line checklist taped by the register does more than a training session in March. For online gifts, review your form’s wording so buyers understand what they’re choosing, if the form gives them a choice at all.
Don’t let the mailing depend on one field
The more reliable fix is in how you pull renewal lists. Instead of exporting everyone due to renew and mailing whatever contact the record points to, build your renewal query to flag gift memberships separately. Then route them on purpose:
- Gift memberships where your policy says “recipient”: send the renewal notice to the primary member’s household, regardless of what was entered at the sale.
- Gift memberships where the giver asked to be contacted: send to the giver, with copy that names the recipient (“Your gift membership for the Alvarez household expires March 31”).
- Optionally, a short courtesy note to givers when a gift is about to end, so they aren’t surprised if the recipient lets it lapse.
That way a wrong setting on one transaction becomes a data-quality item to clean up later, not a misdirected notice.
Clean up what’s already there
Use the audit query from above to find active gift memberships where the renewal-notice recipient doesn’t match your new policy. For a handful, edit the records directly and add a note. For a larger list, plan a batch update and spot-check a few records afterward. Pay special attention to gifts expiring in the next 60 to 90 days, since those notices are about to go out.
Also look for gift recipients with no usable mailing or email address. A recipient-first policy only works if you captured the recipient’s contact information at the sale, and many gift purchases arrive with just a name.
Automating the routing
Once your renewal query separates gift memberships and decides who should be contacted, the remaining work is sending the right message to the right person on schedule. Social Good’s Email Designer sends automated, branded emails, including renewal reminders, from Altru queries without manual exports, so a giver-facing version and a recipient-facing version can each run from their own query.
Quick answers
Should the giver ever stop getting notices?
Usually after the first gift term, unless they told you otherwise. Repeated notices to someone who gave a one-time present tend to read as a bill.
What if the recipient renews on their own?
Treat it as theirs going forward. Check the renewed membership to see who is now set as the renewal contact; if the giver is still listed, the next notice goes to the wrong person again.
