Why Removed Prospects Still Show Under the Old Manager in Altru

A major gifts officer leaves, or a portfolio gets rebalanced. You reassign their prospects, maybe end their prospect manager role, and move on. A week later the old fundraiser’s list still shows names that are supposed to belong to someone else, and the new fundraiser’s list looks short. Nobody did anything wrong. The record just has more than one place where “who owns this prospect” is stored.

Below is how to think about where those leftover connections usually live, how to track them down, and how to make the next handoff cleaner.

Ownership is stored in more than one place

In Altru, a prospect’s relationship to a fundraiser can show up in several layers, and changing one doesn’t always change the others:

• The prospect manager on the constituent’s prospect record. This is the assignment most people think of first. It often carries dates, so ending an assignment can leave a historical entry rather than wiping it.
• Prospect plans. A plan usually has its own primary manager (and sometimes secondary managers or a team). If you change the prospect manager but leave an open plan untouched, the old fundraiser can still be the plan owner.
• Plan steps and interactions. Future steps, tasks, or interactions may be assigned to the old fundraiser individually. Those can keep a prospect on that person’s activity view even after the plan changes hands.
• Queries, smart fields, and reports. Saved queries and dashboards filter on whatever field the author picked when they built them. A “my prospects” query that looks at plan manager will disagree with one that looks at prospect manager.

So when a “removed” prospect keeps appearing under the previous manager, the first question isn’t “is Altru broken?” It’s “which of these layers is that list reading from?”

Find out what the list is actually showing

Start with one stubborn record rather than the whole portfolio.

1. Open the constituent and look at their prospect information. Check whether the old manager is still listed as current, or whether their entry has an end date. A missing end date, or an end date in the future, means the assignment is still active as far as Altru is concerned.
2. Open every prospect plan on that record, including older ones. Look at the primary manager and any secondary managers. An open plan with the old fundraiser as owner is one of the likeliest reasons they keep “seeing” the prospect.
3. Check upcoming steps and interactions. Anything still scheduled for the old fundraiser will keep surfacing on their task or activity lists.
4. Find the source of the list that’s wrong. If it’s a query, open it and see which manager field it filters on and whether it limits to current or active assignments. If it’s a report or dashboard, ask whoever built it which query feeds it.

Once you know which layer is stale for that one record, you’ll usually find the same pattern across the rest of the portfolio.

Cleaning up a whole portfolio

For a handful of prospects, fixing records by hand is fine. For a departed fundraiser with dozens or hundreds, build a query first so you’re working from a list instead of memory:

• Constituents where the old fundraiser is still a current prospect manager.
• Prospect plans that are open (not completed or inactive) with the old fundraiser as primary or secondary manager.
• Future-dated plan steps or interactions assigned to the old fundraiser.

Then decide for each group what “done” means. Some organizations end the old assignment and add the new manager, keeping the history. Others close out old plans and start fresh ones under the new owner, so plan history stays tied to the person who did the work. Either approach is reasonable; mixing them record by record is what creates confusion later.

Whether Altru can reassign plan managers or steps in bulk depends on your version and setup, and we’d rather not guess. Before doing anything at scale, test the change on a few records (or in a sandbox if you have one) and confirm the results show up the way you expect in the views your fundraisers actually use. If you’re unsure whether a bulk option exists, Blackbaud support can tell you what’s available on your site.

Don’t forget the fundraiser record itself

If the old fundraiser has left the organization, also look at their own constituent and fundraiser setup. Ending their fundraiser role or marking them inactive can keep them out of pick lists going forward, but it doesn’t automatically move the prospects, plans, or steps already attached to them. Treat that as the last step, after the reassignment is finished, so you don’t hide records you still need to find.

A handoff checklist for next time

The cleanup is much easier when it happens in one sitting at the time of the change. A short checklist your development team agrees on helps:

1. Run the three queries above for the outgoing fundraiser.
2. Reassign or end prospect manager assignments with today’s date.
3. Reassign open plans, or close them and open new ones, per your policy.
4. Move or cancel future steps and interactions.
5. Rerun the queries and confirm they return zero rows.
6. Update any saved queries or dashboards that were hardcoded to the old fundraiser.
7. Only then end the fundraiser’s role or mark them inactive.

Step five is the one that gets skipped. A rerun takes a minute and catches the stragglers before a board report or a portfolio review does.

Quick answers

Why does the old manager still appear in the prospect’s history?
Ended assignments are often kept as history on purpose, so you can see who worked a prospect and when. That’s different from the assignment still being current. Check the end date.

The new manager is assigned, so why is their list missing people?
Their list is probably based on plan ownership or on a query that filters differently. If the plans still belong to the old fundraiser, the new one won’t see those prospects there.