Altru holds the data your museum, zoo, or garden runs on: who your members are, who visited, who gave, and when. The trouble starts when that data needs to be somewhere else. The marketing coordinator wants an up-to-date list of lapsed members in Mailchimp. The finance lead wants yesterday’s admissions in a spreadsheet. The education team wants school group bookings in a shared sheet they can filter. In most shops, every one of those needs starts with someone running a query, exporting a file, cleaning it up, and uploading it.
Data Bridge is our answer to that loop. It takes Altru queries you already have (or build) and syncs the results to the tools your staff actually work in, such as Google Sheets, Mailchimp, and ActiveCampaign. Altru stays where the data lives and gets edited. Data Bridge just keeps copies of the right slices where people need them.
Who this is for
Data Bridge tends to make sense when one or more of these sound familiar:
- Someone owns “the export.” A staff member spends part of every week running the same queries and moving files around, and things stall when they’re on vacation.
- Your email lists are always a little stale. New members, renewals, and lapses in Altru don’t show up in your email platform until the next manual upload, so segments drift.
- Colleagues outside Altru need numbers. Leadership, the board treasurer, or a department head wants a sheet they can open, not an Altru login and a report request.
- Exports carry risk. CSV files with names, emails, and addresses end up on desktops and in inboxes. Fewer manual exports means fewer stray files.
How it works, in plain terms
The building block is the Altru query. If you can describe the records you want as a query (members expiring in the next 60 days, donors from this fiscal year, ticket buyers for a specific event), that query becomes the source for a sync. Data Bridge sends the results to a destination: a Google Sheet, a Mailchimp audience, an ActiveCampaign list, or another supported tool.
Because the query drives everything, you control exactly which fields leave Altru. If a column shouldn’t be in a shared spreadsheet, leave it out of the query’s output. That’s a habit worth keeping regardless of tooling: build purpose-specific queries for each destination rather than one giant query with every field.
The exact list of supported destinations and how often syncs run are best confirmed with us directly, since they depend on your setup. We’d rather tell you precisely on a call than overpromise here.
Video walkthrough
For a look at Data Bridge in action, watch this overview.
Common setups
Membership marketing in Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign
A query of active members with their level and expiration date, synced to your email platform, lets you build renewal reminders and member-only announcements from current data instead of last month’s upload. Pair it with a separate lapsed-member query for win-back campaigns.
Operations sheets for staff without Altru access
Group sales, education, and visitor services often just need a list: who’s booked, how many, which day. A Google Sheet fed by a query gives them that without needing to log in to Altru or learn its query tools.
Lightweight reporting for leadership
Daily or weekly totals pulled from a query into a sheet can feed a simple dashboard or a formula-driven summary tab. It isn’t a replacement for Altru’s own reports, but it puts the headline numbers where executives already look.
Before you set it up
A sync is only as good as the query behind it. A few things we’d suggest checking first:
- Clean up duplicates. If the same person exists twice in Altru, they’ll exist twice in your email list too, and may get two renewal notices. Deal with duplicate constituents and emails before you start syncing.
- Respect communication preferences. Make sure your marketing queries filter out constituents who have opted out or have no valid email. Your email platform will enforce its own unsubscribes, but Altru should be the first line.
- Name queries for their purpose. “Mailchimp – Active Members” is easier to maintain a year from now than “Members query v3,” especially for whoever inherits it.
- Decide who owns each sync. When a field changes or a program is retired, someone should know which destinations depend on that query.
What it doesn’t do
Data Bridge moves Altru query results out to other tools. It isn’t a way to edit Altru records from a spreadsheet, and it doesn’t replace Altru’s own reporting, batches, or revenue processing. If your goal is to get data into Altru from an outside system, that’s a different conversation, and we’d want to understand the details before suggesting anything.
Next step
If you have a weekly export someone dreads, that’s usually the best first sync to try. You can read more about how it connects Altru to your other tools on the Data Bridge feature page, and bring a query or two to a conversation with us so we can talk through how it would fit your setup.
