A regional bank sponsors your summer concert series out of its marketing budget. Six months later, the bank’s charitable foundation sends a grant for your school field trip program. Same logo, same family of contacts, same address on the letterhead. In Altru, the question is whether those two checks belong on one constituent record or two.
The short answer: in most cases, two organization records, linked to each other. A company and its foundation are usually separate legal entities with different decision-makers, different giving calendars, and different tax treatment of what they give. Collapsing them into one record makes your revenue look simpler today and much harder to explain later.
Why one record usually causes trouble
It is tempting to keep one “Acme” record and add a note. Here is what tends to go wrong:
- Reporting blends two different kinds of money. A corporate sponsorship often comes with benefits (logo placement, event tickets, signage). A foundation grant usually does not, and often comes with restrictions and reporting obligations. When both sit on one record, totals by constituent stop telling you anything useful.
- Acknowledgments go to the wrong place. The foundation may want letters addressed to its program officer and referencing a grant number. The company’s sponsorship contact may be in marketing. One record means one primary address and one set of default contacts.
- Prospect research gets muddy. Corporate giving and foundation giving rise and fall for different reasons. You want to see each trend on its own.
- Audits and grant reports get harder. Finance will eventually ask which dollars came from the foundation. If the only clue is a memo field, someone is reading through gifts one at a time.
A setup that holds up
1. Create a separate organization record for each entity
Name each record exactly as the entity names itself: “Acme Bank” and “Acme Bank Foundation.” Use the address and contacts each one actually uses. If the foundation is administered by a bank trust department or a community foundation, record that address rather than the corporate headquarters.
2. Link the two with a relationship
Add an organization-to-organization relationship between the records so anyone opening either one sees the other. Check which relationship types your Altru configuration already has; if there isn’t a clear pair for a company and its affiliated foundation, an administrator can usually add one in the relationship type code table. Pick wording that reads correctly from both sides, and use it every time.
3. Attach people to the right side
The CEO might sit on the foundation board, while the community relations manager handles sponsorships. Relate each individual to the organization they actually act for, and add a second relationship when someone genuinely represents both. This is what lets you pull the right contact for a thank-you letter without guessing.
4. Use constituencies to flag the type
Assign constituencies such as “Corporation” and “Foundation” (or whatever your organization already uses) so queries and reports can filter cleanly. If your constituency list has drifted over the years, settle on the values before you start tagging.
5. Code the revenue consistently
Record each payment on the record of the entity that actually wrote the check. Then use your existing revenue coding (designations, categories, appeals, or whatever fields your organization relies on) to distinguish sponsorship from grant income. If a corporate sponsorship includes goods or services in return, make sure your finance team agrees on how the benefit value is handled before staff start entering it.
What about crediting the company for its foundation’s gift?
Development staff often want the company to “get credit” for its foundation’s grant, for donor walls, sponsor lists, or giving-level recognition. Keep the hard credit with the foundation, since it is the legal donor. For recognition, Altru has ways to give credit to a constituent other than the payer, but how much of that applies to organization records, and how it rolls into your recognition reports, depends on your configuration. Test it in a sandbox or confirm with Blackbaud support before relying on it for a public donor list.
If recognition credit doesn’t fit, a simple fallback works: a query that pulls revenue from both records using the relationship, so you can report “Acme family of giving” on demand without altering who gave what.
When one record is fine
Not every case needs splitting. Keep a single record when:
- The “foundation” is really a corporate giving program run out of the company’s own budget, with no separate legal entity.
- A donor-advised fund is involved. In that case the sponsoring fund (the community foundation or financial firm) is typically the payer, and the advising individual or business is better handled through relationships and recognition rather than its own foundation record.
- A family foundation is small and run entirely by one household. Some organizations still split it for clean grant tracking; others keep it simple. Decide once and document it.
Cleaning up gifts already on one record
If years of mixed giving already sit on a single record, don’t rush to move everything. Start with a query of all revenue on that record, export it, and sort out which payments came from which entity using check images, grant letters, or batch notes. Then create the second record and decide with finance whether to move historical revenue or only code new gifts correctly going forward. Moving posted revenue can affect closed periods, so get that conversation done first.
Whatever you choose, write the rule into your gift entry guide with a real example from your own donor list. Gift processors will see a company and its foundation again, and a written rule beats tribal knowledge every time.
