Someone on the board asks how the spring membership email did. You know it went out, you know roughly how many people it went to, and then you go looking for opens and clicks in Altru and come up short. Before you spend an afternoon digging, it helps to sort out two things: which system actually sent that email, and what “how did it do” really means to the person asking.
Start with the sender, not the report
Email engagement data lives wherever the message was sent from. At many Altru organizations, that’s more than one place:
- Transactional email such as order confirmations and eTickets, often sent through Altru itself or through a checkout tool sitting in front of it.
- Marketing email such as newsletters, event announcements, and renewal campaigns, frequently sent from a separate email service provider using a list exported from an Altru query.
- One-off messages sent by staff from a shared inbox or a personal account, which have no tracking at all.
If a campaign went out through Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or a similar service, the open and click numbers are in that service, not in Altru. Altru only knows what was written back to it. So the first step is a simple inventory: list every type of email your organization sends and note which tool sends it. That list usually explains why the numbers feel scattered.
What you can expect from Altru itself
Altru’s strengths are constituent records, transactions, memberships, and queries. Its email and communications features are built around getting messages out to the right people. How much engagement reporting you get back depends on how your organization’s email features are configured and which version you’re on, and that’s worth confirming rather than assuming. Two practical ways to check:
- Send a test campaign to staff. Have a few colleagues open it and click a link, then look at what, if anything, shows up in Altru the next day. That tells you more than any documentation will.
- Ask Blackbaud support directly. Ask specifically whether opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes are recorded, where they’re stored, and whether they’re available in queries. If they are queryable, you can report on them like any other data.
If the answer is that Altru records delivery but not detailed engagement, that’s not a dead end. It just means engagement reporting needs to live somewhere else.
Opens are a weaker number than they used to be
Before you build a report around open rates, know their limits. Several major email clients now preload images or block tracking pixels for privacy reasons, which can make an email look opened when nobody read it, or hide real opens entirely. Open rates are still useful for spotting big changes (a subject line that clearly flopped, a list that stopped engaging), but they’re a poor basis for comparing one campaign to another by a few points.
Clicks are more reliable because a person had to act. And for most museums, gardens, and zoos, the number that actually matters is downstream of the click: did anyone buy a ticket, renew, or give?
Measure the outcome in Altru
This is where Altru does help, because the purchase or gift lands in Altru regardless of which tool sent the email. A few habits make the connection visible:
- Use a unique link or code per campaign. A dedicated landing page, a campaign-specific promo code, or tracking parameters on the link let you tie revenue back to a specific send.
- Record the source consistently. Whatever field your organization uses to mark where revenue came from (appeals, source codes, or a similar convention), set it up before the email goes out, not after.
- Build a comparison query. Pull the people who received the email, then look at memberships, ticket orders, or gifts from that group in the following two to four weeks. Compare against a similar group that didn’t get it if you can.
That answer (how many renewals or orders followed a given email, and what they were worth) is usually what the board was really asking for, and it’s a number your email tool can’t produce on its own.
Keeping engagement and outcomes side by side
If you want opens, clicks, and Altru revenue in one view, you’ll be combining data from two systems. The low-tech version is a shared spreadsheet: export campaign stats from your email service, export the outcome query from Altru, and line them up by campaign. It’s manual, but done monthly it’s manageable and gives you a consistent record over time.
The other piece is list hygiene. Duplicate constituent records and stale email addresses distort every engagement number, inflating send counts and dragging down rates. Cleaning those up in Altru before a big campaign improves your reporting as much as any new tool.
Where Social Good fits
A lot of manual exporting happens because the emails that matter most (eTickets, acknowledgments, renewal reminders) are assembled by hand from Altru queries. Email Designer sends those as automated, branded emails directly from Altru queries, so the audience and the timing are tied to the same data you’ll use to measure results. The outcome side of the picture, renewals and orders that followed a send, still comes from the Altru queries described above.
Quick answers
Why don’t my Mailchimp opens show up in Altru?
The two systems don’t share engagement data unless something is set up to move it. Altru will see the resulting purchases and gifts, but not the open or click itself.
What’s a good metric to report to leadership?
Revenue or renewals traced to a campaign, with clicks as supporting context. Open rates alone are too noisy to carry the story.
