A member renews online on a Friday night. The payment goes through, but the transaction lands in the pile of online sales waiting for staff to match the buyer to a constituent record and finish processing. Nobody looks at that pile until Tuesday. By then the member has tried to use their card at the gate, the desk can’t find the renewal, and someone is apologizing.
Unresolved online sales are rarely a technical failure. They’re a visibility problem: the items are sitting in Altru, but nothing tells anyone they’re there. This article covers what “unresolved” usually means, whether Altru can notify you on its own, and how to build a routine that keeps the queue from going stale.
What usually ends up unresolved
Online transactions that come in through your web forms generally need a staff decision before they’re fully posted. The most common reasons:
- Constituent matching. The buyer’s name or email is close to an existing record but not an exact match, so Altru waits for someone to decide whether to link it or create a new constituent.
- Membership questions. A renewal that can’t be tied cleanly to the right household or existing membership.
- Payment or posting questions. Something about the payment, or how it should post to revenue, needs a person to look at it.
The exact categories and screens depend on your Altru configuration and which web forms you use, so walk through your own queue with whoever set up your online sales before you design an alert around it.
Can Altru email you when something is unresolved?
We’re not aware of a built-in setting in Altru that sends an email or push notification when an online transaction is waiting to be resolved. Altru shows these items when you go look at them; it doesn’t go looking for you. Because Blackbaud updates the product over time, it’s worth confirming with Blackbaud support or checking current release notes before you rule it out entirely.
In practice, that means the alert has to come from somewhere else: a query, a scheduled habit, or an outside tool.
Option 1: A query that counts what’s waiting
Start by finding out whether you can see unresolved online transactions through a query view in your database. If you can, build a simple query that returns each item with its date, the buyer’s name and email, the amount, and what it was for (ticket, membership, donation). Sort oldest first.
Once that query exists, you have options:
- Save it where the person who owns the queue can run it in one step each morning, so checking the count takes seconds.
- Use it to measure how long items sit. If the oldest item is regularly more than a day old, the problem is ownership, not tooling.
- Use it as the source for an automated summary email (see Option 3).
If the transactions you care about aren’t exposed in any query view, that’s worth knowing early. Test in a sandbox if you have one, or ask Blackbaud support which views cover web transactions.
Option 2: Make it someone’s job, on a schedule
The cheapest fix is assigning the queue to a named person with a backup. A few things that make it stick:
- Set a check time. First thing each morning works for most sites. Add a midday check during membership drives, holiday sales, or any event with timed tickets.
- Cover weekends. Online sales don’t stop on Saturday. If no one in the office works weekends, decide whether the front desk lead handles urgent items or whether Monday is acceptable.
- Write down the matching rules. When should staff link to an existing constituent versus create a new one? Inconsistent decisions here are how duplicates pile up.
- Put a calendar reminder on it. It’s low-tech, but a recurring reminder is a real alert, and it works today.
Option 3: Send the summary to an inbox
If you already have a query that returns the unresolved items, the next step is getting its results delivered rather than opened. Some teams export the query on a schedule and email it internally; others use a reporting or automation tool connected to Altru. Whatever you choose, keep the message short: a count, the oldest item’s date, and a link or instruction for where to go resolve them. An email that says “0 items waiting” on a good day is fine; it tells you the alert is still running.
Reduce how many need resolving
Alerts help, but fewer unresolved items help more. Clean up duplicate constituent and email records so incoming web buyers match more often. Make sure your web forms ask for the fields your matching depends on, especially email. And review the queue’s contents once a month: if the same kind of transaction keeps landing there, there’s probably a form or configuration fix upstream.
Where Social Good fits
Our Email Designer sends automated emails from Altru queries without manual exports. If you can build a query that returns your unresolved online sales, ask us whether a daily summary to a staff address fits your setup.
