Designation lists tend to grow sideways. A capital campaign adds “Education Center Building Fund,” a later appeal adds “Education Center Construction,” someone builds a third path for a matching grant, and five years later your finance team is asking why one project shows up in three places on every report. The natural next thought is: can we just merge these?
The short, honest answer is that you should not count on Altru having a one-click merge for designations the way it does for duplicate constituents. We have not seen a native designation merge in Altru, but configuration and permissions vary, so check your own environment before planning around it (test in a sandbox if you have one, or ask Blackbaud support directly). What you can reliably do is consolidate: pick one designation to keep, stop new money from landing on the others, decide what to do with the history, and make reporting treat them as one.
Before you touch anything: decide what “merged” means to you
People say “merge” and mean different things. Get agreement on which of these you actually need, because the effort is very different:
- Clean forward: all new gifts go to one designation. Old gifts stay where they are. This is the easiest and covers most situations.
- Clean reports: old and new gifts appear together as one line in reports and queries, even though the records still point to different designations.
- Clean history: every past gift is physically moved to the surviving designation. This is the hardest, touches posted revenue, and needs your finance team in the room.
Most organizations that think they need clean history really need clean reports. Ask the people who read the reports what they are trying to see before anyone starts editing revenue.
Step 1: Inventory the designations involved
Build a designation query (or a revenue query grouped by designation) that shows, for each candidate path: its full place in the hierarchy, whether it is active, its GL or accounting information, total revenue, date of first and last gift, and anything else that references it. Things that commonly point at a designation include web forms, appeals or campaign setups, recurring gifts and pledges with future installments, and any default designation on a membership program or donation form.
That last group matters most. If you retire a designation that an active recurring gift or a live web form still uses, you will either get errors or money landing somewhere nobody is watching.
Step 2: Choose the survivor
Pick the designation that sits in the right place in your hierarchy and has the correct GL mapping. Do not automatically keep the one with the most revenue; keep the one that is set up correctly. If none of them is quite right, it is often cleaner to fix the survivor’s name, description, and position than to create yet another new path.
Agree on the GL side with finance before moving on. If the duplicates map to different accounts, consolidating them is an accounting decision, not just a data cleanup.
Step 3: Redirect everything that creates new revenue
- Update web forms and donation pages to use the surviving designation.
- Check recurring gifts and open pledges. Future installments may need to be edited so they post to the survivor. Test how your Altru handles this on one record first.
- Update any defaults on membership programs, appeals, or other setups that pre-fill a designation.
- Tell front-line and gift-entry staff which designation to use, and remove the old names from any cheat sheets.
Step 4: Retire the duplicates
Once nothing new points at them, mark the extra designations inactive rather than deleting them. Inactive designations generally stay attached to historical gifts but stop appearing as choices for new entries. Deleting is usually blocked once revenue exists, and even where it is allowed, it removes context you may want later. Consider renaming retired paths with a clear prefix (for example, “ZZ Retired – Education Center Construction”) so they sort to the bottom and nobody picks one by mistake.
Step 5: Handle the history
For clean reports, you usually do not need to move anything. Options include grouping the designations in your queries, adding a reporting field or attribute that tags all of them with one common label, or placing them under a shared parent in the hierarchy if that fits your structure. Reports that roll up by the parent will then show one combined total.
For clean history, past gifts would need their designation changed one by one or through whatever batch editing your system supports. Be careful here:
- Changing the designation on posted revenue may create GL adjustments, or may not be allowed without reversing and re-posting. Confirm with finance and in a sandbox before doing it on live records.
- Tax receipts and acknowledgments already sent will still name the old designation. That is usually fine, but someone should know it.
- Restricted or donor-directed gifts should not be moved to a designation with a different purpose, even if the names look similar.
Run the audit query again afterward and compare totals. The combined total across the old and surviving designations should not change; only the distribution should.
Keeping it from happening again
Duplicate designations almost always come from people creating new ones on the fly because they could not find the right existing one. A few habits help:
- Limit who can add designations to one or two people.
- Use a naming convention that starts with the program or fund, so related designations sort together and duplicates are visible.
- Review the active designation list once a year with finance and inactivate anything that has not received revenue recently and is not tied to an open commitment.
Quick answers
Is there a merge tool for designations in Altru?
We are not aware of a native one, and you should confirm with Blackbaud support for your environment. Plan on consolidating (redirect, inactivate, group in reporting) rather than merging.
Will inactivating a designation hide its past gifts?
It should not remove the gifts; they remain on the constituent and revenue records. Test one in a sandbox or on a low-stakes designation to see how your reports treat inactive designations.
