Every Altru shop sends the same handful of emails over and over: the ticket confirmation, the donation thank-you, the “your membership expires next month” reminder, the note after someone visits. The information for all of them already lives in Altru. The work is getting it out of Altru and into a well-designed email at the right moment, without someone running an export every Monday morning.
Email Designer is the tool we built for that job. This page covers what it does, how this kind of Altru email automation relates to what Altru already offers, and how to decide whether it fits your organization.
The problem it addresses
Altru has communication tools of its own, and plenty of organizations get good use out of them. What tends to wear people down is the routine, recurring email that depends on data changing every day. A typical pattern looks like this:
- Someone builds or refreshes a query (new members, upcoming expirations, yesterday’s visitors).
- They export it to a spreadsheet, clean it up, and upload it to an email platform.
- They paste the content into a template, check the merge fields, and send.
- Next week, they do it again. If they’re out sick, it doesn’t happen.
Each step is small. Added together, they turn a renewal reminder or a post-visit survey into a recurring chore that depends on one person’s calendar. The emails also tend to drift away from the organization’s look, because whatever template was handy gets reused.
What Email Designer does
Email Designer sends automated, branded emails driven by Altru queries. You define who should get a message using a query in Altru, design the email once, and the sends happen without manual exports. Altru stays the place where your constituent, ticket, and membership data lives; Email Designer reads from it to decide who gets what.
The common uses we see fall into four groups:
eTickets
A clear, branded ticket email that a guest can pull up on their phone at the entrance. If your confirmation emails currently look like a system notice, this is often the first one people want to change.
Acknowledgments
Thank-you emails for gifts and purchases that go out on a regular schedule and look like they came from your organization, not from a database.
Renewals
Reminders tied to actual expiration data. Because the audience comes from a query, the list is current each time instead of reflecting whatever was exported last.
Post-visit
Follow-ups after someone attends: a thank-you, a survey link, or a nudge toward membership for guests who bought general admission.
Video walkthrough
The video below gives an overview of Email Designer.
Getting the queries right
Since the queries decide who receives each email, they deserve more attention than the design. A beautiful renewal email sent to the wrong list is worse than a plain one sent to the right list. A few habits help:
- One query per email. Don’t reuse a general-purpose membership query for renewal reminders. Build one whose name says exactly what it selects, so nobody edits it for a different purpose later.
- Check the date logic by hand. Before turning on a renewal or post-visit email, run the query in Altru and spot-check a dozen records. Are lapsed members included when they shouldn’t be? Are today’s visitors showing up, or only yesterday’s?
- Exclude people who opted out. Make sure the query respects the communication preferences and solicit codes your organization already records in Altru.
- Watch for duplicates. If the same person has two constituent records, they may get two emails. Cleaning up duplicates before automating sends saves some awkward replies.
Is it a fit?
It’s worth a look if any of these sound familiar:
- Your ticket or acknowledgment emails don’t match your brand, and changing them has been harder than it should be.
- A staff member exports a query to send the same email on a schedule.
- Renewal reminders go out irregularly, or not at all during busy seasons.
- You’d like to follow up with visitors but haven’t had the time to run it manually.
It’s probably not what you need if your recurring emails are already automated and on-brand through Altru’s own tools, or if your main gap is one-off newsletters and campaigns rather than transactional and lifecycle messages. If you’re not sure how far Altru’s built-in options can take a specific email, test it in your Altru environment or ask Blackbaud support before adding anything.
Quick answers
Do we have to leave Altru?
No. Email Designer works alongside Altru and uses your Altru queries to decide who receives each email.
Who maintains the email lists?
Nobody, in the spreadsheet sense. The query in Altru defines the audience, so keeping the query accurate is the maintenance.
To see how it would work with your own queries and templates, visit the Email Designer page.
