A donor sits down to give $250 in memory of her father. She wants to tell you why: he volunteered in your greenhouse for eleven years. She types three sentences into the comment box on your donation form, and the box stops accepting text halfway through the second one. She trims it, or gives up and sends the gift without the note. Either way, the most useful thing she was about to tell you never reaches your development team.
The short version: there is no setting we know of that lets an Altru administrator raise the character limit on the comment field of a standard Altru donation web form. The length is set by the form and by the field the comment is stored in, not by a configuration option on your side. That said, you have more options than “live with it,” and a few of them are better than a longer box anyway.
Confirm what you’re actually dealing with
Before you plan around the limit, find out exactly what it is and where the text ends up. Two separate things can cut a donor’s comment short:
- The form field itself. The input on the web form may stop accepting characters past a certain length. The donor sees this happen.
- The field in Altru where the comment is saved. Even if the form allowed more text, the database field holding it may have its own maximum. If text were cut at this stage, nobody would see it happen.
To check, submit a test gift on your form (in a sandbox or test environment if you have one, or with a test constituent you delete afterward) using a comment you’ve written to a known length, say 500 characters with numbers marking every 50. Then open the resulting revenue record and see how much arrived. That tells you the practical limit for your setup. If you’re still unsure, ask Blackbaud support to confirm the field length and whether anything about it can change; we’d rather you hear it from them than take our word on internals.
Ask what the comments are really for
When you look back through a year of donation comments, they tend to fall into a handful of buckets:
- Tribute and memorial details (“in honor of,” “in memory of,” who to notify)
- Designation instructions (“please use this for the butterfly house”)
- Employer match information
- Anonymity or recognition preferences (“please list us as The Rivera Family”)
- Personal stories and messages to staff
Only the last bucket truly needs free text. The rest are data your team will want to report on, and a comment box is the worst possible place for reportable data. Nobody can query “in memory of” reliably when it’s buried mid-sentence in a note.
Move structured answers into structured fields
If your donation form supports tribute information, designations, or recognition name options, turn those on and label them clearly. Each one you add takes a whole category of text out of the comment box, which leaves the character limit for the thing it’s meant for. It also means your acknowledgment letters and recognition lists can pull those values directly instead of someone retyping them from a note.
Check which of these your current form version actually offers before promising anything to your development director. Form options in Altru have changed over time, and what’s available can depend on how the form was built.
Tell donors the limit up front
This sounds minor, but it changes the experience. A line of helper text under the box, something like “Short notes only (up to X characters). Want to share more? Email us at giving@yourorg.org,” turns a frustrating cutoff into a clear instruction. Donors who have a longer story will usually send it if you ask.
Ask for the story after the gift
Your gift acknowledgment is a natural place to invite more. A sentence in the thank-you email or letter (“If you’d like to tell us more about why you gave, just reply to this message”) often gets better, more thoughtful responses than a form field does, because the donor isn’t in the middle of entering a card number.
When those replies come in, record them as a note on the constituent record rather than trying to stuff them back into the revenue comment. Notes are easier to find later, and the person who reads it before a stewardship call will thank you.
Keep the staff side clean
Whatever the limit is, decide how your team handles comments once they arrive:
- Build a query of recent online gifts that have a comment, and have one person review it on a regular schedule.
- Move anything actionable (a tribute notification, a designation change, a match form) into the proper place in Altru, and note that it was handled.
- If a comment looks cut off mid-sentence, reach out to the donor. It’s a good reason for a personal thank-you anyway.
That review step matters more than the box size. A long comment nobody reads is no better than a short one.
If you want control over the form itself
Much of this limit comes from using the standard Altru donation form as-is. Our Checkouts replace Altru webforms with a branded, mobile-friendly donation checkout, and the gift data is written back to Altru, so the form layout and the fields donors see are no longer fixed by the webform. Where a longer comment lands in Altru still depends on the field it’s written to, so if comment length matters to you, bring it up when you talk with us and we’ll go over exactly what would be stored.
Quick answers
Can I just edit the form’s HTML to remove the limit?
Even if you could change the input on the page, the field in Altru that stores the comment may still cut it off without anyone noticing. Test end to end before relying on any workaround like this.
Will donors get an error if they go over?
Don’t count on a clear message. Run your own test so you know what donors actually see, and add helper text stating the limit either way.
