Two staff members talk to the same donor in the same week. One logs a phone call. The other sends a renewal letter. A month later, someone pulls up the constituent record and can’t tell what was said, what was mailed, or whether anyone followed up. Usually the problem isn’t missing data. Each person put their piece in a different place in Altru, and nobody agreed on which place was for what.
Altru gives you two ways to record contact with a constituent: interactions and communications. They overlap enough to confuse people and differ enough that picking the wrong one makes your reporting unreliable. Depending on your setup, both may even appear in the same area of the constituent record, which adds to the confusion. Here’s how we think about the split, and a simple rule your staff can follow.
The short version
- Interactions are one-to-one contacts with a specific person: a call, a meeting, a tour, a personal email, a thank-you visit, a follow-up task. Someone on your staff did something with this constituent, or plans to.
- Communications are outbound pieces your organization sends to many people at once: appeal mailings, acknowledgment letters, renewal notices, and other marketing or stewardship pieces generated from a list or query.
A useful test: could you swap this constituent’s name for another one and the content would stay essentially the same? If yes, it’s a communication. If the contact only makes sense for this one person, it’s an interaction.
What interactions are good at
Interactions are built for relationship work. Typically each one carries a date, a contact method, a category, a status (such as planned or completed), an owner on your staff, and a free-text summary. That structure is what makes them useful:
- Planning ahead. A planned interaction works as a lightweight task. “Call after the gala” with an owner and a date becomes something you can query and review in a weekly meeting.
- Accountability. Because each interaction has an owner, you can see who is actually cultivating your major donors and who has gone quiet.
- Context for the next person. A two-line summary of a conversation is often the most valuable thing on a donor record when someone new takes over the portfolio.
Where interactions are a poor fit: anything sent in bulk. Logging hundreds of identical interactions for a mass email clutters every record it touches, and it buries the personal contacts that matter.
What communications are good at
Communications belong to the marketing and acknowledgment side of Altru. They’re tied to the pieces your organization produces, such as an appeal, a mailing, or an acknowledgment letter, rather than to a staff member’s conversation. That makes them the right place to answer questions like:
- Which members received the spring renewal mailing?
- Has this donor’s gift been acknowledged yet?
- How many people got the year-end appeal, and how many gave afterward?
Communications also connect to the preference side of a constituent record: solicit codes, mailing preferences, and opt-outs. When you’re deciding who should receive something, that’s the area you’re working in, not interactions.
The limit to know: email sent from outside Altru (from a separate email platform, for example) won’t show up as Altru communication history unless something brings it back in. Many organizations live with that gap. If you need it closed, decide on a consistent way to record major sends, even if it’s just a note on the appeal or mailing itself.
The gray areas
A few situations come up often enough to settle in advance:
A personal note added to a form letter
The letter is a communication. If the handwritten note matters for the relationship (a board member thanked the donor personally, say), log a short interaction too. Two records, two different jobs.
A personal email to one donor
Interaction. It’s one person, written for them, by a named staff member.
A complaint or service issue from a member
Interaction, with a category your team uses for service contacts. That way you can query for open issues and see patterns, like a run of card or renewal problems after a policy change.
Event invitations
The invitation list is a communication. A personal follow-up call to key invitees is an interaction.
Setting it up so it stays clean
- Keep interaction categories short. Five to eight categories that staff actually understand beat thirty that nobody picks correctly. Review the list once a year and retire the unused ones.
- Write the rule on one page. Put the swap test and the gray-area decisions above into a one-page guide for anyone with constituent access, including front-desk and membership staff.
- Use planned interactions on purpose. If you use them as tasks, build a query of planned interactions past their date, grouped by owner, and look at it regularly. Otherwise they pile up and nobody trusts them.
- Audit a sample. Every few months, pull a handful of recent interactions and check whether any were really bulk sends. That’s the most common drift, and it’s easy to correct early.
- Confirm the details in your own database. Field names, which tab each item appears on, and what’s available can vary with your Altru configuration and security roles. If you’re unsure whether something works the way you need, test it on a sample record or ask Blackbaud support before rolling it out.
Quick answers
Can I report on interactions and communications together?
Yes, but expect to build separate queries and combine the results, since they’re stored and organized differently. Decide what question you’re answering first; often only one of the two is relevant.
Should front-desk staff log interactions?
For meaningful contacts, yes: a member complaint, a donor who stopped to talk about a gift, a request to update preferences. Not for routine ticket sales. Give them one or two categories so it stays simple.
