A board member asks, “How much has this family given to the education fund since they started supporting us?” Altru will show you that family’s total giving in a few clicks. Breaking that total out by fund, and keeping it running over years, takes more setup. This guide covers how to build that number yourself, what tends to throw it off, and how to keep it current without rebuilding it every quarter.
Start by defining “cumulative” and “fund”
Before you build anything, settle three definitions with your development lead. Most mismatched totals come from people answering slightly different questions.
- What counts as giving? Donations only, or also membership revenue, event sponsorships, and pledge payments? Many organizations exclude membership dues from philanthropic totals. Others count the portion above the benefit value.
- Which fund field? Depending on how your Altru database was configured, gifts may be tied to funds, designations, or campaigns, sometimes all three. Choose the one your finance team reconciles against, and stick with it.
- Cumulative since when? Lifetime, since a campaign launched, or within a fiscal year? “Lifetime” in a database that was migrated from an older system may only go back as far as the migration.
Write the answers down. They become the filters in your query and the footnote on every report you hand out.
Build the base query
The most dependable route is a revenue query, not a constituent query. Revenue queries return one row per gift (or per gift split), which is what you need to total by fund.
- Create an ad-hoc query on revenue. Add the constituent’s name and lookup ID, the revenue date, the amount, the revenue type, and the fund or designation field you chose above.
- Use the split-level amount, not the transaction total. A single gift can be divided across two funds. If you pull the transaction amount alongside the fund, a $1,000 gift split 50/50 shows up as $1,000 on both rows and your totals double. Look for the amount that belongs to the split or application row.
- Filter by revenue type and date. Apply the definitions you agreed on: for example, payments and gifts, excluding membership, dated on or after your chosen start date.
- Turn on summarization if you only need totals. Grouping by constituent and fund and summing the amount gives you one row per donor per fund. Keep a detail version of the query too, since you will need it when someone questions a number.
Test the query against a handful of donors you know well. Pull up their constituent records and confirm that the per-fund totals add up to the giving total Altru shows on the record, after accounting for anything you deliberately excluded.
Things that quietly skew fund totals
Pledges versus payments
If you include both the pledge and the payments against it, you count the money twice. Decide whether you report on commitments (pledges) or cash received (payments), and filter for one.
Refunds and adjustments
Reversed or adjusted gifts can sit in the database in ways that are not obvious from the revenue type alone. Check how your organization records refunds and make sure the query either nets them out or excludes the original gift.
Households and soft credits
A gift entered on one spouse’s record will not appear under the other spouse’s name. If your board thinks in terms of households, you may need to group by household rather than individual. Soft credits (for example, a gift from a family foundation credited to a board member) are a separate question. Whether and how your revenue query can pull soft credits depends on your configuration, so test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before relying on it.
Duplicate constituent records
If the same donor exists twice, their giving is split across two records and neither total is correct. Running a duplicate check before a major report, especially for top donors, saves an awkward correction later.
Fund names that changed
Funds get renamed, merged, or retired. A donor who gave to “Animal Care” in one year and “Animal Welfare Fund” the next will show as two lines. Keep a simple mapping of old fund names to current ones and apply it when you summarize.
Can a smart field do this?
Smart fields can store calculated revenue values on constituent records, and some revenue smart fields let you filter by criteria such as date range or revenue type. Whether you can filter a smart field to a specific fund or designation in your Altru setup is worth confirming before you plan around it. If it works, one smart field per major fund lets you add “lifetime giving to education” as a column in any constituent query or list. If it does not, the summarized revenue query above remains the reliable approach.
Turning the query into a report people read
Altru’s query results export to a spreadsheet, and that is where most teams finish the job. A pivot table with donors as rows, funds as columns, and summed amounts in the cells gives you a cumulative giving matrix you can sort, filter, and hand to the board. Add a grand total column and a note stating the date range and what was excluded.
The weak spot is freshness. A spreadsheet exported in January is stale by February, and re-exporting by hand each time a stewardship officer asks is the part that eventually stops happening.
Keeping it current automatically
If you would rather not re-export, Data Bridge syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets and other tools. Point it at your summarized revenue query, build the pivot table once in the sheet, and the cumulative-by-fund view stays current as the query data updates. The query logic and definitions above still do the real work; this just removes the manual export step.
Quick answers
Why don’t my fund totals match the giving total on the constituent record?
Usually one of three things: split gifts being double-counted, pledges counted alongside payments, or revenue types (like membership) that the record total includes but your query excludes.
Should I report by individual or by household?
Match how your gift officers and board talk about donors. If recognition is given to couples or families, report by household and note it on the report.
