A supporter runs a birthday fundraiser on Facebook, forty friends chip in, and a few weeks later a single deposit lands in your bank account with a report attached. Finance wants it posted. Development wants every donor thanked. The person who organized the fundraiser wants to know you noticed. Altru can handle all three, but only if you decide up front how social media gifts will be entered, because none of it arrives in a shape Altru expects.
This guide covers the decisions to make before the first entry, a workable way to post the gifts, and the places where it’s easy to get receipting or credit wrong.
Understand what you actually receive
Facebook and Instagram donations aren’t paid to you directly by each donor. Meta collects them and sends the money through a payout partner, and that partner has changed over the years. What you get is a lump-sum deposit plus a downloadable report listing the individual donations, the fundraiser each one came from, and any fees.
Two things about that report shape everything else:
- Donor detail is limited. You’ll usually see a name for each gift. An email address appears only if the donor chose to share it. Mailing addresses are rare. Some donors appear as anonymous.
- The money may not legally be a gift to you. When a payout partner acts as an intermediary (often a donor-advised fund), that partner is typically the one that issues the donor’s tax receipt. Confirm the current arrangement with your finance office or auditor before you send anything that looks like a receipt.
Decide these four things first
1. Who gets hard credit
A common approach is to give hard credit to the individual donor when they can identify them, and use a single placeholder constituent (something like “Facebook Donors – Unidentified”) for anonymous or unmatched gifts. Some prefer to hard-credit the payout partner as an organization constituent, since that’s who technically paid. Either approach is defensible. Pick one and document it so revenue reports stay comparable year to year.
2. How fundraiser organizers are recognized
The friend who ran the birthday fundraiser didn’t give the money, but they raised it, and they’re often the most valuable relationship in the whole batch. If your Altru setup uses recognition or soft credits on revenue, credit the organizer that way on each gift from their fundraiser. If you’re not sure how recognition credits are configured in your database, test on a sandbox or a single record first. At minimum, add a constituent note or attribute on the organizer so the relationship isn’t lost.
3. How you’ll code the revenue
Create a dedicated appeal (or appeal plus effort, if that’s how your team tracks campaigns) for social media giving, and a consistent payment method or reference convention for payouts. That one choice makes these gifts easy to pull with a query later, separate from your own online giving form, and keeps them out of your direct-mail appeal results.
4. Gross or net
Decide whether you’ll record the full donation amount and book fees separately, or record only what arrived in the bank. Finance usually has an opinion here, and it needs to match how the deposit is reconciled. Ask before you post the first batch, not after the fiftieth.
A workable posting routine
- Download the payout report for each deposit and keep it with the deposit record. The report is your audit trail.
- Match donors to existing constituents. Search by name, and by email where one was shared. Social media donors often already exist in Altru as members or ticket buyers, sometimes under a slightly different name. Resist creating a new record when you aren’t sure; a duplicate is harder to fix later than a careful search is now.
- Create new constituents only when you have enough to identify the person, ideally a name plus an email. Name-only, unmatched donors go to the placeholder constituent, with the donor’s name recorded in the gift’s notes or reference field so you can reassign it if they turn up later.
- Enter the gifts in a batch tied to that payout, so the batch total matches the deposit (gross or net, per your decision above).
- Add the organizer’s recognition credit to every gift from their fundraiser.
- Reconcile against the bank deposit before committing the batch.
For organizations getting a handful of Facebook gifts a month, manual entry is fine. If volume grows, look at whether a revenue import fits your process; Altru’s import capabilities vary by configuration, so check with your Blackbaud contact or test it in a sandbox before relying on it.
Thanking donors without over-promising
Because the payout partner usually issues the tax receipt, your acknowledgment should be a thank-you letter or email, not an official receipt. Say plainly that the gift came through a Facebook fundraiser and that the donor’s tax receipt comes from the platform’s payout partner. That heads off “where’s my receipt?” calls.
You can only thank people you can reach. Donors who shared an email can get a proper thank-you; the rest can be thanked collectively through the organizer. A short note to the organizer listing the total raised and the number of gifts, plus an invitation to visit, goes a long way. Many organizers are happy to pass your thanks along to their friends.
Check how your acknowledgment process picks letters for this appeal. If your routine acknowledgment run would send your standard tax-receipt letter, set up a separate thank-you letter for social media gifts or exclude them from that run, and test it on a few records before the next mailing.
Reporting on social giving
With a dedicated appeal and consistent recognition credits, a simple revenue query answers the questions leadership will ask: how much came in through social fundraisers this year, how many distinct donors gave, how many were new to the database, and which organizers raised the most. That last list is worth sharing with whoever handles major gifts and membership. Someone who rallied their friends for you once is a strong prospect for a membership upgrade, a volunteer role, or their own fundraiser next year.
Quick answers
Should we send Facebook donors an Altru tax receipt?
Usually not, since the payout partner generally issues it. Confirm with your finance office, then send a thank-you instead.
What if the same person shows up in several payouts with no email?
Keep posting to the placeholder with their name in the notes. If they later appear with contact details, reassign those gifts to a real constituent record.
