Your development director wants giving totals for the education fund only. The board treasurer wants everything that went to the capital campaign last quarter. You open the standard revenue reports in Altru and find you can filter by date, by payment method, by campaign or appeal, but the designation you need isn’t always there as a filter. That gap is common, and there are dependable ways around it.
This guide covers why designation filtering is awkward in Altru’s reports, the query-based approach that works, and how to keep designation reporting from turning into a monthly copy-and-paste job.
Why designation is harder to filter than campaign or appeal
Designation lives on the revenue detail, not on the revenue transaction as a whole. A single gift can be split across two or three designations, and a single payment can cover a membership plus a donation with its own designation. Reports built around the transaction level don’t always expose a clean designation filter, because one transaction can map to several designations.
Which canned reports in your Altru environment include a designation parameter can vary, and Blackbaud adjusts reports over time. Before you build a workaround, open the parameter screen of each giving report your team actually uses and check. If you aren’t sure whether a report handles split gifts the way you expect, run it for a short date range where you know the answer, or ask Blackbaud support to confirm.
The approach that works: start from a query
When the report won’t filter the way you need, queries are the reliable path. The key choice is the source view.
Pick a source that sits at the designation level
Build the query from a revenue source where each row represents an application or split of the gift, rather than one row per payment. Look for designation fields available directly in that view (designation name, and the amount applied to it). If the only amount you can see is the full transaction amount, you’re at the wrong level, and split gifts will be overcounted.
Set your filters
- Designation equals (or is one of) the funds you need.
- Date range for the period you’re reporting.
- Optionally, revenue type or application type, so you include donations and exclude things like ticket sales that may carry a default designation.
Choose output fields that let you check your work
Include the constituent name, transaction date, the designation, the amount applied to that designation, and the total transaction amount. Having both amounts side by side makes split gifts obvious and lets you confirm the totals add up.
Reconcile once against finance
Run the query for a closed month and compare the designation totals to what your finance team booked. If the numbers match, save the query and share it with the people who need it. If they don’t, the usual causes are split gifts counted at the full amount, adjustments or reversals not filtered out, or a date field that differs from the one finance uses (transaction date versus deposit or post date).
Turning the query into something people can use
A saved query answers the question, but it isn’t a report your board will read. A few options, from simplest to most involved:
- Export and summarize. Export the query results and build a pivot in a spreadsheet by designation. Fine for an occasional request; tedious if you do it every month.
- Use the query as a selection. Some reports and processes accept a selection of constituents or records. If a report you like lacks a designation filter but accepts a selection, feeding it a designation-based selection can get you close. Test this, since a constituent selection filters people, not the gifts themselves, and can pull in their gifts to other designations.
- Smart fields for donor-level totals. If the real question is “how much has each donor given to the education fund,” a smart field that totals revenue for a specific designation can sit on constituent records and be used in other queries and lists.
- Custom reports. If designation reporting is central to your organization, a custom report built on the right data may be worth the effort. Weigh the cost of building and maintaining it against how often you need it.
Keep designations clean so filtering stays accurate
Filtering only works if gifts land on the right designation in the first place. Check your web forms and default designations for donation options, review a sample of front-desk donations each month, and retire designations nobody should be using so staff can’t pick them by mistake. A designation report is only as trustworthy as the data entry behind it.
Getting designation totals out of Altru automatically
Once you have a designation query you trust, the remaining work is usually getting it in front of people without exporting it every time. Social Good’s Data Bridge syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets and other tools, so a designation query can feed a shared sheet or dashboard your finance and development teams already use, instead of someone rerunning and emailing an export each month.
Quick answers
Why does my designation total come out higher than finance’s?
Most often the query is pulling the full transaction amount instead of the amount applied to the designation, so split gifts are counted more than once.
Can I filter a constituent list by designation?
Yes, through a query: filter on the designation, output the constituents, and save it as a selection. Just remember that a constituent who gave to several funds will appear once, while their other gifts are not part of the filter.
