How to Import Appeals and Efforts into Altru (and What to Load First)

“Import our appeals” usually means one of three different things, and Altru handles each one differently. Before you build a spreadsheet, work out which of these you need, because the answer changes how much work you’re in for.

• The appeal and effort definitions themselves: the names, dates, goals, and codes for each campaign.
• Who received each appeal: the list of constituents tied to a mailing, email, or solicitation.
• What came in: gifts and other revenue credited back to the right appeal.

Teams moving off another donor database usually need all three. Teams adding a new year’s campaign plan usually need only the first. Here’s how to think about each.

1. The appeal records

This is the part people most often expect to bulk-load, and it’s the part where you should check before you plan around it. Altru has an import area for loading records from files, but the list of available import types depends on your version and what Blackbaud has enabled. Whether there is a process for creating appeal or effort records directly from a file is something to confirm in your own database rather than assume.

Two quick ways to find out:

1. Open the import area in a sandbox or training environment and look at which record types you can create a new import process for. If appeals or efforts aren’t listed, that’s your answer for now.
2. Ask Blackbaud support directly whether an appeal or effort import exists for your setup, and whether it’s something they can help with as a service.

If it isn’t available, don’t panic. Most organizations have far fewer appeals than they think. A year of fundraising might be a spring appeal, a year-end appeal, a gala, a membership drive, and a handful of email pushes. Creating twenty or thirty records by hand in Altru’s marketing and communications area is an afternoon, not a project. Do that first, before any other import, because every later file needs those appeals to already exist so it can point at them.

Decide on your structure before you type anything

Whether you create them by hand or by file, settle these questions up front:

• Naming: pick a pattern and stick to it, such as fiscal year, then season, then channel (“FY27 Year-End Mail”). Reports sort alphabetically, and a consistent prefix keeps a decade of appeals readable.
• Appeal versus effort: decide what level each thing lives at. A common approach is one appeal per campaign and separate efforts (or mailings) for each channel or drop, so you can compare the letter against the email against the follow-up.
• Historical appeals: for a migration, you don’t have to recreate every appeal from fifteen years ago at full detail. Many teams roll very old campaigns into a few “legacy” appeals by year. Talk to whoever runs reports before you decide, because collapsing history can’t easily be undone.

2. Who received the appeal

Altru can track which constituents were part of an appeal on their constituent records. Getting that history in from a file is generally a constituent-level import that references an existing appeal, which is why step one matters. Again, confirm in your sandbox which import type fits, and run a small test file before the full one.

Questions worth answering before you load solicitation history:

• Do you need it? If nobody will ever query “who got the 2019 spring letter,” skip it. Recipient history is the bulkiest part of any appeal migration and often the least used.
• How will you match people? Your file needs a reliable way to find the right constituent: ideally the Altru lookup ID or another unique ID you carried over. Matching on name and address alone produces duplicates and missed records.
• Households: if a mailing went to a household, decide whether the history belongs on the household or on each member, and be consistent.

3. Revenue credited to the appeal

For most teams this is the piece that actually matters, because it drives “how much did year-end raise” reports. When you import gifts or other revenue, each row can carry the appeal (and, where your setup uses them, the effort or mailing) that should get credit. The appeal has to exist first, and the value in your file has to match it exactly. A trailing space or a slightly different name is enough to make rows fail or land without attribution.

Practical habits that save rework:

• Build a lookup sheet that maps every appeal name in your old system to the exact Altru appeal name, and use it to clean the revenue file before import.
• Import a small batch of revenue, then pull it up in a query or report grouped by appeal. Confirm totals match your old system before loading the rest.
• Keep the old system’s appeal code in a notes field or attribute if you have room. When numbers don’t reconcile later, it’s the fastest way to trace a gift.

A sensible order of operations

1. Confirm which import types your Altru database offers, using a sandbox and Blackbaud support.
2. Agree on naming and the appeal/effort structure with fundraising and finance.
3. Create the appeals and efforts, by file if available, by hand if not.
4. Load constituents, if they aren’t already in Altru, and resolve duplicates.
5. Load recipient history, only if someone will use it.
6. Load revenue with appeal attribution, test batch first, then reconcile totals.

Quick answers

Can I attach an appeal to gifts after they’re already in Altru?
You can edit appeal attribution on individual revenue records. For large numbers of existing gifts, ask Blackbaud support whether there’s a supported way to update them in bulk in your environment before doing it one at a time.

Should I create appeals for every email blast?
Only if you’ll report on them separately. Many teams treat individual sends as efforts under one campaign appeal so the appeal list stays manageable.