A donor calls to ask whether their gift went to the education fund or general operations. Or the development director wants to know how many people ticked “make this gift in honor of someone” last quarter. Either way, you need to see what the donor actually chose on the online form, and Altru doesn’t keep a single “form answers” screen you can open.
The short version: each choice on a donation form lands in a different part of Altru, depending on what kind of field it is and how the form was set up. Once you know where each field is supposed to go, finding a donor’s selections takes about a minute. If a field was never mapped anywhere, it may not be stored in a place you can report on, and the fix is to change the form going forward.
Where common selections usually end up
Start from the donor’s constituent record and open the revenue record for the gift in question. Most of what a donor chose shows up on, or is linked to, that revenue record.
- Gift amount and payment method. On the revenue record itself. This is the easy one.
- Designation or fund. If the form let the donor pick where the money goes, the chosen designation should be on the revenue record. If every gift shows the same default designation no matter what donors picked, the form’s choices may not be tied to designations, which is worth checking with whoever built it.
- Tribute (in honor of / in memory of). Tribute details are typically attached to the gift, with the honoree linked or recorded alongside it. Look at the tribute information on the revenue record, and check whether an acknowledgee was recorded.
- Recurring gift choice. A donor who chose monthly or annual giving should have a recurring gift record rather than a single one-time payment. If you only see a one-time gift, the recurring option may not have been active on that form.
- Appeal or source. Usually set by the form itself rather than chosen by the donor. Useful for knowing which form they used.
- Contact details and opt-ins. Address, email, phone, and communication preferences update the constituent record, not the gift. Check the constituent’s contact information and solicit codes or communication preferences.
Custom questions are the tricky part
Questions you add yourself, such as “How did you hear about us?”, “Is this gift from a company match?”, or “May we list your name in the annual report?”, are where answers tend to go missing. Depending on how the form was configured, a custom answer might be saved as a constituent or revenue attribute, written into a note, or not stored anywhere useful at all.
We’re not going to guess at exactly how your version of Altru handles every custom field type, because it varies with form configuration. The honest way to find out is to test it:
- Make a small gift through the live form (or a copy of it) using a test constituent, and answer every question with something distinctive, like “TESTANSWER1”.
- Open that test constituent and the resulting revenue record. Check attributes on both, notes, and the tribute and designation areas.
- Write down where each answer appeared. Any answer you can’t find is a field that isn’t being captured in a reportable way.
- Void or delete the test gift according to your normal finance procedures.
If an answer doesn’t show up anywhere, ask Blackbaud support whether that field type can be mapped to an attribute. That’s a better outcome than finding out a year later that nobody saved the matching-gift question.
Seeing selections for many donors at once
Looking up one donor is fine on the record. For anything bigger, build a revenue query. Filter on the date range and the appeal or source tied to your online form, then add output fields for the designation, tribute details, recurring status, and any revenue or constituent attributes your custom questions map to. Save it so you can rerun it monthly.
A few habits keep that query trustworthy:
- Give each form its own appeal or source. Otherwise you can’t tell online gifts from mailed checks.
- Use attribute categories with fixed choices for questions that have set answers (yes/no, a dropdown). Free text is hard to count.
- Keep a one-page field map listing every form question and where in Altru its answer is stored. Update it whenever someone edits the form.
When the answer just isn’t there
For older gifts where a selection was never stored, you can’t recover it from Altru. Your payment processor’s transaction detail or the confirmation email the donor received may show some of it, such as amount and date, but rarely custom answers. Correct the form setup, note the date you made the change, and treat reporting on that question as starting from that date.
Quick answers
Is there one screen that shows everything a donor entered on a form?
Not that we’d count on. Selections are spread across the revenue record, the constituent record, and any attributes the form writes to.
Why does every online gift show the same designation?
Usually the form uses a single default designation, or donor choices aren’t linked to designations. Review the form setup and run a test gift.
