The “add a gift” checkbox on a ticket or membership form is one of the easiest fundraising wins an Altru organization has. It’s also one of the hardest to measure. Development asks how much those small add-on gifts brought in last quarter, and the honest answer is often “somewhere in the donation totals.” The money is in Altru. Pulling it out as a clean number takes a bit of setup.
This guide covers why those gifts are hard to isolate, how to tag them so they can be found, and how to build a query that reports on them reliably.
Why add-on gifts disappear into general donations
When a guest adds a donation while buying tickets or a membership online, Altru records it as donation revenue. Usually it’s attached to the same order as the ticket or membership. Once it lands, it can look a lot like any other donation: same revenue type, often the same designation, and nothing obvious on the record that says “this came from the checkout add-on.”
Whether Altru ships a standard report built specifically for web form add-on donations depends on your version and configuration, and I wouldn’t count on one. Check your report list and ask Blackbaud support before building your own. In practice, most admins end up with a revenue query, because it’s flexible and can be reused for exports, dashboards, and year-end comparisons.
Step one: make the gifts identifiable going forward
A report can only separate what the data separates. Before you build anything, decide what will mark an add-on gift as different from other gifts. Common choices:
- A dedicated designation. Something like “Annual Fund – Online Add-on.” This is the cleanest option if your finance team is fine with an extra designation. It also shows up in gift-level reports without any special filtering.
- A dedicated appeal or source code. Keeps your designation structure intact while still letting you filter. This works well when finance wants all unrestricted gifts on a single designation.
- A different marker for each form. If you run several web forms (general admission, membership, an event), giving each one its own appeal or source tells you which form produces the most add-on giving.
How much of this you can set on the form itself varies. Open the donation settings on each web form and see which fields you can default. If you can’t set a value there, test a transaction in a sandbox or on a low-traffic form and look at what actually lands on the revenue record. That tells you what you have to filter on.
Step two: build the revenue query
Start from a revenue query, not a constituent query, so each row is a gift and not a person. A useful starting set:
Filters
- Transaction date within your reporting period.
- Revenue application is a donation, so ticket and membership lines are excluded.
- The marker from step one: designation, appeal, or source equal to your add-on value.
- If your data records how the payment came in, limit it to online or web transactions. That keeps donations added at the front desk out of the count.
Output columns
- Transaction date and amount
- Designation and appeal
- Constituent name and lookup ID
- The web form or order it came from, if that’s available
- Whether the constituent is a current member (a smart field works well here)
Run it against a week you already know well and compare the total with your deposit or batch for those days. If the numbers don’t match, a filter is either dropping gifts or catching ones that don’t belong. Fix that before anyone starts quoting the figure in meetings.
What about gifts that were never tagged?
Historical add-on gifts are the hard part. If they went in on your general designation with no special appeal or source, there may be no field that reliably separates them. Some admins get close by filtering for donations that share an order or transaction with a ticket or membership sale on the same date. That can work, but treat the result as an estimate, spot-check a sample by hand, and label it that way in your report.
Pick a clear “tagged from” date. Reporting before that date is approximate. Reporting after it is exact.
Making the report useful to development
A total is fine, but these cuts usually start better conversations:
- Add-on gifts per form. Shows which purchase moment makes people most generous.
- Average add-on amount by month. Useful when you change the suggested amounts on the form.
- First-time donors. Add-on givers who have never made a standalone gift are a natural cultivation list.
- Members vs. non-members. Tells you whether the ask works better on the ticket form or the membership form.
Save the query and share it with the people who ask for the number. Then you’re not the only one who can produce it.
Getting the numbers out of Altru
Once the query exists, the usual routine is to export it to a spreadsheet each month for the development team. If that export is turning into a chore, Data Bridge from Social Good can sync an Altru query to Google Sheets, so the add-on giving numbers stay current there without manual exports. Altru still holds the gift records. The sheet is just a live view for the people who need it.
Quick answers
Do I need a new designation to track add-on gifts?
No. An appeal or source code works just as well for filtering and leaves your designation structure alone. Use whichever your finance team prefers.
Can I report on add-on gifts from before I started tagging them?
Only approximately, usually by matching donations to ticket or membership sales on the same order. Spot-check a sample and present those numbers as estimates.
