A visitor from Toronto buys a family membership online. The form insists on a five-digit ZIP code and a U.S. state, so she types “00000,” picks Alabama, and puts “M5V 2T6 Canada” at the end of the street line. The sale goes through. Six weeks later her welcome packet comes back as undeliverable, and the constituent record now says she lives in Alabama.
International addresses are a small share of most Altru organizations’ online sales, but they create an outsized amount of cleanup. This guide covers how to find out what your Altru web forms actually do with non-U.S. addresses, how to reduce the damage, and how to clean up the records that are already wrong.
Start by testing, not assuming
How well an Altru web form handles a foreign address depends on how that form and your address settings are configured, and the behavior is not always obvious from the setup screens. Before changing anything, run real tests. If you have a sandbox or test environment, use it; if not, run a test transaction on a low-cost item and refund it.
Try at least three addresses:
- Canada (alphanumeric postal code, provinces instead of states)
- United Kingdom (postcode with a space, no state or province at all)
- A country with long or multi-line addresses, such as Japan or Germany
For each test, write down:
- Whether a country field appears, and whether choosing a country changes the other fields.
- Whether state/province is required, and what the list contains.
- Whether the postal code field rejects letters, spaces, or anything that isn’t five or nine digits.
- Whether the payment step accepts the card when the billing address is outside the U.S.
- What actually lands on the constituent record afterward: country, state, postal code, and address lines.
That last step matters most. A form can look fine to the buyer and still write a messy record. If any result surprises you and you can’t find a setting that explains it, ask Blackbaud support whether the behavior is configurable for your version rather than building workarounds around a guess.
Common failure points and what to do about each
Required state and U.S.-format ZIP
This is the one that forces people to invent data. If you can make state optional when the country isn’t the United States, do it. If the form can’t be made conditional, a fake value is worse than an honest one, so add short help text near the address fields telling international buyers exactly what to enter (for example, the closest valid option plus their real postal code in a specific field). A consistent workaround is much easier to clean up than whatever each buyer improvises.
Country missing or defaulting to the United States
If the country field defaults to the U.S. and buyers don’t notice it, every international address gets stored as domestic. Check that the country list is visible and placed above the state and postal fields so people see it before they fill in the rest.
Card declines on foreign billing addresses
Address verification on the card is handled by your payment processor, not by Altru’s address fields. If international cards decline at a higher rate than you’d expect, talk to your processor about how address verification is set for non-U.S. cards before blaming the form.
Addresses that don’t fit the line structure
Some addresses need extra lines, and some put the postal code before the city. Buyers will squeeze that information wherever it fits. The record may not be pretty, but it’s mailable, which is the goal.
Finding the records that are already wrong
Build a constituent query to surface likely problems. Useful filters include:
- Postal codes that contain letters but the country is the United States
- Postal codes like “00000,” “99999,” or blank where the country is the United States
- Address lines that contain a country name such as “Canada,” “UK,” or “Australia”
- Records created through online sales with an email domain ending in a country code like .ca, .uk, or .au (a hint, not proof)
Run it monthly. Correct the country, state, and postal code on each record, and add a note if the fix was a judgment call. Watch for duplicates while you’re there: a guest who bought online with a mangled address and later visited in person may now have two constituent records.
Give the front desk a rule too
Staff entering international addresses at the desk or over the phone run into the same questions. Write one short standard: always set the country first, leave state blank (or use your agreed placeholder) when there isn’t one, and enter postal codes exactly as the guest gives them. Put it in your training notes so every new seasonal hire handles it the same way.
If you’re evaluating a different checkout
Some organizations replace Altru’s public-facing forms with a separate checkout while keeping Altru as the database. Social Good’s Checkouts is one option: a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations that writes data back to Altru. Whatever you evaluate, run the same three-country test above before you switch, and check the resulting constituent record in Altru, not only the confirmation screen.
Quick answers
Should we just hide the address fields for ticket buyers?
If you never mail anything to ticket-only buyers, collecting less address data is reasonable and removes the problem entirely for those forms. Keep full addresses on membership and donation forms, where you mail cards, acknowledgments, and tax receipts.
Is it worth fixing old records nobody mails to?
Fix the ones on active mailing lists first, such as current members and recent donors. Older one-time buyers can wait until they show up again.
