Altru was built around the front gate: admissions, memberships, events, and the donations that come in alongside them. That makes it very good at seeing the 4,000 people who gave $50 and a little awkward at managing the 40 people who could give $5,000. Plenty of museums, gardens, and zoos still run solid major gift and mid-level programs out of Altru. They just set it up on purpose instead of hoping the defaults will do it.
What follows is how to structure those programs inside Altru, where the gaps usually are, and how to tell when you have outgrown it.
Start by defining the tiers in writing
Before touching configuration, agree on numbers. A typical split looks something like this, though your thresholds should come from your own giving history, not a blog post:
- Annual / membership level: members and small donors, handled by mail, email, and renewal cycles.
- Mid-level: donors whose cumulative giving in a rolling 12 months falls between two thresholds you pick (often somewhere in the low four figures). They get more personal attention, but not a dedicated relationship manager.
- Major gift: donors above the top threshold, or prospects with capacity to reach it, each with a named staff owner.
Two decisions matter more than the dollar amounts. First, does membership revenue count toward the tier? Upper-level members (patron or director’s circle tiers) are often your best mid-level prospects, so many organizations include membership dues but report them separately. Second, do you measure by constituent or by household? If a couple gives from two separate records, a constituent-level query will split them into two smaller donors. Decide once and build every query the same way.
Build the tiers as queries, not lists
The most useful thing you can do in Altru is make tier membership self-updating. Build a revenue query that totals giving per constituent (or household) over a rolling date window and filters by your thresholds. Save one query per tier, and use those as the source for everything else: mailings, reports, and staff portfolios.
A few things to get right in those queries:
- Exclude what should not count. Ticket sales, event registrations that are mostly benefit to the donor, and refunds can inflate a total. Filter by revenue type and designation so the number reflects giving.
- Handle pledges deliberately. Decide whether a multi-year pledge counts toward the tier at the commitment amount or only as payments arrive, and document it.
- Add movement queries. A query for donors who were mid-level last year but are below threshold this year is your lapse-risk list. One for donors whose giving jumped into a higher tier is your upgrade list. These two lists are often more valuable than the tier lists themselves.
If you use smart fields for lifetime or rolling totals, check when they last refreshed before trusting them in a meeting. Stale smart field values are a common reason a donor looks like they lapsed when they did not.
Assign ownership and record every touch
A major gift program lives or dies on knowing who owns each relationship and what happened last. In Altru, the practical approach is to mark portfolio assignments on the constituent record (many organizations use constituent codes or attributes for this, with the staff member as the value) and log every meaningful contact as a note or interaction on that record.
How much formal prospect management your Altru setup supports, such as stages, planned asks, or fundraiser assignments with their own reporting, varies by configuration and what your organization has licensed. If you are not sure what you have, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before designing a process around a feature you may not have.
Whatever tools you end up with, set a few house rules:
- Every major gift prospect has exactly one owner.
- Every visit, call, tour, or ask gets logged within a few days, with a short summary and a next step.
- Development staff review their portfolio query monthly and flag anyone with no logged contact in the last quarter.
Give mid-level donors a real program
Mid-level is where Altru organizations tend to underinvest. These donors give too much to be treated like a $60 member and too little to justify a gift officer each. A workable stewardship plan for them might include:
- A prompt, personalized acknowledgment that names the gift and what it supports, not a generic receipt.
- One or two invitations a year to something donors at the annual level do not get: a behind-the-scenes tour, a curator talk, an early look at a new exhibit or habitat.
- A thank-you call from a board member or senior staffer once a year, with no ask attached.
- A clear, specific upgrade ask timed to their giving anniversary rather than your fiscal year-end.
Use your mid-level query to drive each of these, and record attendance and calls on the constituent record so the upgrade conversation has context.
Keep the data clean enough to trust
Major gift reporting is unforgiving about data quality. A donor split across two constituent records will look like two mid-level donors instead of one major donor. Before any annual review, check for duplicates among your top donors, confirm household relationships are linked, and make sure soft credits are applied consistently for gifts made through family foundations or donor-advised funds. Agree on whether soft credits count toward tiers, and apply it the same way every time.
Report the right things to leadership
Board and executive reports should show more than total dollars. Useful measures include donor counts and retention by tier, the number of donors who moved up or down a tier year over year, how many major gift prospects had a logged contact this quarter, and open pledge balances. All of these can come from the queries above, which keeps the numbers consistent from one report to the next.
When Altru alone is not enough
Some organizations reach a point where the major gift side needs more than Altru comfortably provides: detailed moves management, wealth screening workflows, or a larger team of gift officers each running their own pipeline. At that stage some institutions add a dedicated fundraising tool and keep Altru for admissions, membership, and transactional giving. If you go that route, decide up front which system is authoritative for donor contact history and revenue, and how data moves between them, so you do not end up reconciling two versions of the same donor.
For many museums, gardens, and zoos, though, a disciplined set of queries, clear ownership, and a consistent logging habit gets a major and mid-level program a long way inside Altru.
