A guest buys tickets online, never gets the confirmation, and calls the next morning. A donor says they never got a thank-you. A member swears the renewal reminder never arrived. When you check Altru, nothing looks wrong. There’s no red flag on the record and no error message waiting for you.
That’s the hardest part of email trouble in Altru: failures are usually quiet. The message either never left, left and bounced, or arrived and got filtered, and Altru doesn’t always make it obvious which one happened. This guide covers the usual causes in roughly the order worth checking, and how to set up your own early warning so you hear about problems before guests do.
First, figure out which kind of failure it is
“The email didn’t send” can mean three different things, and each one has a different fix:
- It was never sent. Altru didn’t attempt it, often because there was no usable address or the email wasn’t set up to go out for that transaction type.
- It was sent and rejected. The receiving server bounced it: a typo in the address, a closed mailbox, or the recipient’s provider refusing mail from your sending domain.
- It was delivered and hidden. It reached the inbox provider but landed in spam, promotions, or a corporate quarantine.
Start by asking whether the problem is one person, one type of email, or everything. One person points to their record or their mail provider. One email type points to setup. Everything at once points to sending configuration or a change on Blackbaud’s side.
Causes on the constituent record
These account for a large share of one-off complaints and are the quickest to check.
- Missing or malformed address. Look for typos like “gmial.com,” trailing spaces, or two addresses jammed into one field. Front-desk entry and web forms both produce these.
- The wrong address is primary. A constituent can have several email addresses. If an old work address is marked primary, that’s where mail goes.
- Communication preferences or solicit codes. A “do not email” preference may block marketing messages, and depending on how your organization set things up, it may affect other mail too. Check what the record says before assuming a technical fault.
- Duplicate records. The guest may have bought under a newer record with a different address than the one you’re looking at. Search by name and phone before concluding the email went nowhere.
- Suppressed addresses. Email services typically stop sending to addresses that hard-bounced, unsubscribed, or reported spam. If an address is suppressed, fixing the record may not be enough on its own. Ask Blackbaud support how to review and clear suppressions for your database.
Causes in setup
If a whole category of email stops (say, every web form acknowledgment, or all eTickets), look at configuration rather than records.
- Check that the email is actually attached to the process. Web form acknowledgments and confirmations each need their template assigned. After someone edits or copies a form, confirm the email setting came along with it.
- Look for recent changes. A new template, a renamed form, a changed sender address, or a new security role can all break sending. Ask your team what changed in the past week or two.
- Review scheduled and draft communications. For marketing and communications sends, confirm the message was actually sent and not left in a draft or failed state. If your Altru shows send status or results for a communication, read them closely. If you aren’t sure where Altru reports per-recipient results, ask Blackbaud support to walk you through it.
- Test in a sandbox or with your own address. Make a test purchase or donation using a staff address on Gmail and another on Outlook. If neither arrives, the problem is upstream of the recipient.
Causes in sending authentication
This one catches a lot of organizations. Since early 2024, Gmail and Yahoo have required bulk senders to authenticate their mail with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records on the sending domain, and other providers have tightened their filtering too. If Altru sends “from” an address on your domain, your domain’s DNS needs to authorize that sending. If it doesn’t, messages may be rejected or sent straight to spam, sometimes only at certain providers.
Signs this is your problem: complaints cluster around one provider, deliverability got worse without any change in Altru, or messages arrive for staff on your own domain but not for guests. Bring in whoever manages your DNS, and ask Blackbaud support what records their email service needs for your sending domain. Don’t guess at the values; a wrong SPF record can make things worse.
Making failures visible
Altru won’t necessarily tell you when emails stop going out, so build your own checks. None of these need extra software.
- A seed address on every send. Put a monitored staff inbox on test transactions and marketing sends. If the seed inbox stops getting confirmations, you know right away.
- A weekly “no email” query. Query recent ticket, membership, and donation transactions where the constituent has no primary email or the address looks malformed. Fix them in batches, and share the list with the front desk so they see which entry mistakes keep coming up.
- Watch the reply-to inbox. Bounce notices and “I didn’t get my tickets” replies often land there. Make sure a person actually reads it, not just a shared mailbox nobody owns.
- A daily test purchase during heavy sales periods. Before a big event or membership drive, run one real test transaction a day and confirm the email arrives at more than one provider.
- A desk script. Give staff a short checklist for “I didn’t get my email” calls: confirm the address on file, check spam, check for a duplicate record, resend, and log the case so patterns show up.
When to escalate to Blackbaud
Open a support case when everything stops at once, when test messages fail to multiple providers, or when you suspect suppression or authentication issues you can’t see from your side. Include the time window, a few affected addresses, the email type, and the results of your own tests. That gets you to an answer much faster than “emails aren’t working.”
A related option
Some organizations move transactional and follow-up emails out of manual processes so there are fewer moving parts to break. Social Good’s Email Designer sends automated, branded emails such as eTickets, acknowledgments, renewals, and post-visit messages from Altru queries, without manual exports. The record checks and domain authentication above still apply to any sender, so start there either way.
