Someone in development asks, “How many group sales inquiries did we get last quarter, and how many turned into bookings?” It sounds like a one-report question. In Altru it usually isn’t, because the answer depends almost entirely on where your organization records an inquiry in the first place.
This guide covers how to pin that down, how to build a query that answers the common questions, and where the limits are.
Step one: decide what “inquiry” means in your database
Altru doesn’t force a single way to log an inquiry, so organizations end up using whatever was convenient when the process was set up. Before you build anything, find out which of these your staff actually use:
- Interactions on constituent records. A phone call or email logged as an interaction, often with a category or subcategory like “Inquiry” or “Group sales lead.”
- Group sales records. Some teams start a group reservation as soon as someone asks about a date, then confirm or cancel it later. The early status is effectively the inquiry.
- Constituent attributes or codes. A flag such as “Rental inquiry” or “School visit lead” added to the person or organization.
- Web form submissions. If inquiries come in online, they may land as new constituents, as interactions, or outside Altru entirely in an inbox or form tool.
Ask two or three of the people who take these calls how they record them. It’s common to find that the group sales team uses one method and the rentals or education team uses another. If that’s the case, your report has to pull from more than one place, or you need to agree on a single method going forward.
If you’re not sure whether your Altru version has a dedicated inquiry record type or field, don’t assume. Look at the available query sources in a test query, or ask Blackbaud support what your instance supports.
Step two: build the query
Once you know where inquiries live, an ad-hoc query is the most flexible tool. Standard reports rarely match a homegrown inquiry process, but queries can be shaped to it.
If inquiries are interactions
Start from the interactions source (or constituents, then drill into their interactions). Filter on the category or subcategory your team uses, and on the interaction date range. Useful output fields:
- Constituent name and lookup ID
- Interaction date, category, subcategory, and status
- The staff member who owns the interaction
- The comment or summary field, so you can read what was actually asked
If inquiries are early-stage group sales records
Start from group sales or reservations. Filter on the status your team uses for “not yet confirmed” and on the date the record was created, not the visit date. Mixing those two dates is the most common reason inquiry counts look wrong: a reservation created in January for a May visit should count as a January inquiry.
If inquiries are attributes
Query constituents where the attribute exists, and output the attribute’s date if you record one. If you don’t record a date on the attribute, you’ll only be able to say who is flagged, not when they asked. That’s worth fixing before the next reporting cycle.
Step three: answer the conversion question
The number leadership usually cares about isn’t the inquiry count. It’s how many inquiries became revenue. Two approaches work:
- Same-record conversion. If inquiries are group sales records that later become confirmed, filter by creation date and group results by current status. Confirmed versus canceled versus still pending gives you a conversion rate directly.
- Cross-record conversion. If inquiries are interactions, build a selection of constituents who had an inquiry in the period, then use that selection in a second query against revenue or group sales to see who later paid. Keep the date logic explicit, such as revenue within 90 days of the inquiry, so the number means the same thing every time someone runs it.
Save both the selection and the query with clear names and a description of the logic. Six months from now, someone will ask why the number changed, and the description is what answers them.
Practical cleanup that makes reporting easier
- Lock down the categories. If staff can type free text or choose from a long list, you’ll get “Inquiry,” “inquiry – group,” and “Grp lead” for the same thing. Trim the code table to a few clear choices.
- Record the source. Phone, email, web form, walk-in. Without it, you can’t tell whether a marketing push actually produced leads.
- Close the loop. Have staff mark an inquiry completed or lost when it resolves. Open inquiries from two years ago make any pipeline report useless.
Getting the results out of Altru
Many teams end up exporting the query to a spreadsheet every week so they can chart it or share it with people who don’t log in to Altru. That works, but it’s manual and the copy goes stale quickly. Social Good’s Data Bridge can sync an Altru query to Google Sheets, so an inquiry query you’ve already built can feed a shared sheet or dashboard without someone re-exporting it.
Quick answers
Is there a standard inquiry report in Altru?
Not one that fits every process, since inquiries can be recorded several ways. A query built around your own method is usually the reliable route. Check your report list and query sources, or ask Blackbaud support, if you want to confirm what your instance includes.
Why don’t my inquiry counts match the group sales calendar?
Usually because one is filtered by visit date and the other by creation date. Count inquiries by when the record was created.
