The bank statement shows the same small amount arriving every month. The reference is a surname and maybe an initial. Nobody on staff remembers signing this person up, there’s no address, no email, and finance wants to know why the revenue hasn’t been posted. You still have to put the money into Altru, and you want to do it in a way that doesn’t make a mess later if the donor ever turns up.
Altru doesn’t have a dedicated “unknown donor” workflow, so this comes down to a few deliberate choices. Here’s how to make them.
First, find out whether the donor is really unknown
Before you create anything, spend ten minutes looking. Recurring bank payments with thin references usually come from one of two places:
- A payment you set up. If your organization (or a payment processor working for you) collects the payment, someone signed an authorization form, online or on paper. That record has contact details. Check your processor’s dashboard, old paper forms, and any shared inbox where sign-ups were forwarded.
- A payment the donor set up. Some donors schedule a recurring transfer from their own online banking. In that case you only ever see what they typed into the reference field, and your bank generally won’t hand over their contact details.
Also search Altru itself. Look up the surname from the bank reference, and check households and past donors with similar names. A recurring gift that “started from nowhere” is sometimes a long-time member who switched payment methods.
Two ways to record it
Option 1: A constituent record with only what you know
Create an individual constituent using the name from the bank reference. Altru requires a last name for individuals; address, phone, and email are not required to save the record. Then record the gift against that constituent the way you normally record recurring or EFT revenue at your organization.
This is the better choice when the reference gives you a real name. It keeps a clean giving history for one person, and if they ever call, write, or show up at an event, you can add contact details to the record they already have.
A few habits make these records easier to manage:
- Add a note or attribute that says how the record was created, for example “Created from bank reference, no contact info on file,” with the date.
- Use a consistent constituency code or attribute so you can pull every record like this with one query.
- Don’t guess at details. A made-up address or a placeholder email like “none@none.com” will end up in mailing lists and duplicate checks.
Option 2: One shared “unidentified donor” record
Some organizations keep a single constituent, named something like “Unidentified Donor,” and post every untraceable gift there. This works when the reference is meaningless (a number, or nothing at all) and you have no way to tell one donor from another.
The downside is that the giving history on that record means nothing. If the donor is later identified, you have to move or re-record their gifts on a proper constituent, and how cleanly that can be done depends on how the revenue was posted and whether batches are already committed. If you go this route, test moving a gift in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support how your setup handles it before you rely on it.
Keep acknowledgments and mailings from breaking
A constituent with no address or email can still land in acknowledgment and appeal processes. Check how your acknowledgment letters and receipts handle records with no contact information. Depending on your setup, they may be skipped quietly, or they may show up as errors or blank letters. Either way, you want to know before your next run.
It’s also worth building a saved query for constituents with revenue in the last year and no address, email, or phone. That gives you one list to review each month instead of finding these records by accident.
Try to reach them anyway
You can’t contact someone with no contact details, but you can make it easy for them to identify themselves:
- Ask your bank whether it can pass a message to the payer. Some banks can, some can’t, and policies differ.
- If your website or newsletter has a “giving monthly by bank transfer?” note asking people to confirm their details, unknown donors sometimes respond.
- Keep the reference text in the constituent note exactly as it appears on the statement, so whoever answers the phone can match it when the donor calls.
Write the rule down
The worst outcome is three staff members handling the same situation three different ways: one creates a named record, one posts to a general account, one leaves it in a spreadsheet. Agree on a short rule, such as “a usable name gets its own constituent record; no usable name goes to the unidentified donor record; every one gets the same attribute and a note,” and put it wherever your gift processing steps live.
Quick answers
Can I save a constituent in Altru without an address?
Yes. A last name is required for an individual, but contact fields can be left blank.
Should I mark these gifts anonymous?
Not by default. Anonymous usually means the donor asked not to be publicly recognized, which is different from “we don’t know who they are.” Keep the two separate so your donor recognition lists stay accurate.
