Someone gives $50 on your website at 11 p.m. By the next morning there should be a revenue record in Altru, tied to a constituent, credited to the right fund, and headed toward a deposit your finance office can match. Nobody on staff touched it. Understanding each step in that chain makes it much easier to figure out why a gift went missing, landed on the wrong record, or doesn’t tie out at month end.
This guide follows a single online donation from the donor’s click to the general ledger, and points out where things usually go sideways.
Step 1: The donor fills out a web form
Online giving in Altru starts with a donation web form. You build it in Altru’s web forms area, then place it on your website with a link or an embed. The form controls what the donor sees: suggested amounts, whether they can enter their own amount, which funds or designations they can pick, tribute options, and the confirmation message and email they get afterward.
Two settings on the form matter more than anything cosmetic:
- The default designation, campaign, or appeal. Whatever the form is set to is what every gift through it gets credited to, unless the donor is allowed to choose. A form copied from last year’s campaign and never updated will keep crediting last year’s campaign.
- Which fields are required. Name, email, and address quality drive how well the gift matches to an existing constituent later. Optional address fields mean thinner records.
Step 2: The card is processed
Altru’s web forms process cards through Blackbaud Merchant Services. The charge is authorized while the donor waits, and the money settles to your bank on BBMS’s schedule, minus processing fees. That timing gap matters: a gift made on the 31st can show up in Altru that day but reach your bank days later, and the deposit amount will be net of fees, not the gross gift amount you see on the revenue record.
Step 3: Altru matches or creates a constituent
When the transaction comes in, Altru tries to match the donor to an existing constituent record using the information on the form. If it finds a confident match, the gift lands on that record. If not, it creates a new constituent.
This is where most online-giving cleanup comes from. A member who gives with a work email, a nickname, or a new address can easily end up as a second record. Their giving history splits in two, your major gifts officer sees half the picture, and the duplicate starts getting its own mailings. Exactly how matching behaves in your database depends on your configuration, so if you’re unsure, run a test gift in a sandbox using a slight variation of an existing constituent’s details and see what happens.
Step 4: Revenue is recorded
The gift becomes a revenue record with the amount, date, payment method, and the designation or campaign from the form. Tribute information and any notes the donor typed are stored with the transaction if the form collected them.
Recurring gifts work differently from one-time gifts and depend on how your organization has set up recurring giving and BBMS. If monthly giving is important to you, confirm with Blackbaud support how recurring installments are created and charged in your environment rather than assuming they behave like one-time web gifts.
Step 5: Acknowledgment
The donor gets two separate things, and staff often mix them up:
- The immediate confirmation from the web form, shown on screen and usually sent by email. It proves the transaction went through.
- The formal acknowledgment, the thank-you letter or tax receipt your development team sends. In Altru that typically runs through your acknowledgment process and letters, not the web form. If nobody is running that process on a schedule, online donors get a receipt-style email and nothing else.
Step 6: Reconciliation and posting
Finance needs the revenue in Altru to match what BBMS deposited. In practice that means comparing Altru’s online revenue for a period against the BBMS settlement reports, accounting for fees and timing, and then posting revenue to the general ledger through your normal deposit and GL export process. Build a revenue query filtered to web-form gifts by date so you can pull the Altru side quickly every month.
A short troubleshooting list
- “The donor says they gave, but I can’t find it.” Search by email and by last name separately; it may be on a new duplicate record. Then check BBMS to see whether the charge was actually approved.
- “Gifts are going to the wrong fund.” Open the web form and check its default designation. Also check whether old forms are still linked from your website.
- “Altru and the bank don’t agree.” Look for fees, refunds, and gifts made near the end of the period that settled in the next one.
- “We have a lot of duplicates from online giving.” Review new constituents created by web forms on a regular schedule and merge them before they collect more history.
When the standard form isn’t enough
Altru’s built-in donation forms do the job, but some organizations want a giving page that matches their website more closely, works better on phones, or offers wallet payments. Social Good’s Checkouts provides a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for donations (as well as tickets and memberships) with Apple Pay and Google Pay, and the gift data writes back to Altru. Donors can also choose to cover the credit card fee. Everything else in this guide, from matching to acknowledgments to reconciliation, still applies.
Quick answers
Do online donations need to be entered manually in Altru?
No. Gifts made through an Altru donation web form create the constituent and revenue records automatically. Staff work goes into reviewing matches, sending acknowledgments, and reconciling.
Why is my BBMS deposit smaller than the gifts in Altru?
Deposits are usually net of processing fees, and timing differences can shift gifts between periods. Compare against the settlement detail, not just the deposit total.
