Someone buys a membership for their sister’s birthday. A few minutes later they get an email that says “Welcome to the museum, your membership is now active,” addressed to them, listing benefits they will never use. Meanwhile the sister, the actual member, hears nothing until a card shows up, if it shows up at all.
Gift memberships involve two people with completely different needs, and a standard membership acknowledgement only knows how to talk to one of them. Here’s how to think about the problem and the options you have for sending the right message to each person from Altru.
Two people, two messages
Before touching any templates, decide what each person should receive. A workable split looks like this:
- The purchaser needs a receipt and a thank-you. They want confirmation of what they paid, who the gift is for, when it starts, and what happens next (Will the recipient be notified? Will a card be mailed? Can they print something to put in a birthday card?). They do not need a benefits welcome.
- The recipient needs a welcome. Who it’s from, their membership level, expiration date, how to get in the door, and how to update their contact details. They should not see the price.
Many organizations also want control over timing for the recipient. A holiday gift bought on December 3 often shouldn’t announce itself until December 25. Write that down as a requirement now, because it affects which approach will work.
Why the default acknowledgement gets this wrong
In Altru, the payment (revenue) and the membership are related but not the same thing. On a gift, the purchaser is typically the constituent tied to the payment, and the recipient is the member on the membership record. A single acknowledgement attached to the sale has no reason to know those are two different people, so it usually goes to whoever paid, using whatever wording you wrote for regular new members.
How much Altru can distinguish gift sales natively, and whether its built-in acknowledgement tools can pick a different template based on that, depends on your configuration and how the sale was entered. We’d rather not guess at specifics here. The safest way to find out is to process a test gift membership in a sandbox (or a test constituent you delete afterward) through each channel you sell gifts in, then see which acknowledgement fires and to whom. If the answer still isn’t clear, Blackbaud support can confirm what your version supports.
Step one: make gift sales identifiable
Every workable approach depends on being able to pull “gift memberships sold yesterday” out of Altru reliably. A few ways to make that possible:
- Compare purchaser and member. Build a membership query where the constituent on the payment is different from the primary member. This catches gifts no matter how they were sold, but test it carefully against households, where a spouse paying for a joint membership can look like a gift.
- Use a dedicated online path. A separate gift membership web form or checkout makes online gifts easy to separate, and it’s also where you can collect the recipient’s email and a gift message.
- Tag desk and phone sales consistently. Pick one marker your staff will actually use (a source code, appeal, or constituent attribute) and put it on the cheat sheet next to the register. If staff tag gifts only some of the time, the query will miss gifts, and those recipients never get a welcome.
Once the query returns the right records, save it. Everything below runs from it.
Step two: choose how the emails go out
Option A: suppress, then send separately
Exclude gift memberships from your standard new-member acknowledgement (if your setup allows filtering it), then send two separate emails from your gift query: a thank-you to the purchaser and a welcome to the recipient. This gives you full control over wording and timing. It’s the cleanest result, but someone has to own the process.
Option B: a manual weekly batch
Export the gift query on a set schedule and send both messages through your email tool. This works fine at low volume. It breaks down in November and December, which is exactly when gift volume spikes and staff time is shortest. If you go this way, put a named person and a day of the week on it.
Option C: rewrite the shared template
If separating the messages isn’t possible right now, at least make the standard acknowledgement work for both cases. Neutral language like “Thank you for your membership purchase” plus a line such as “If this was a gift, we’ll send a welcome to the recipient” is better than a benefits welcome landing in the wrong inbox. Treat it as a stopgap, since the recipient still gets nothing.
Details that are easy to miss
- Recipient email addresses. If you don’t capture the recipient’s email at purchase, you can’t welcome them by email. Make it a field on every gift sales channel.
- Scheduled start dates. If you allow a future start date, the recipient welcome should key off that date, not the sale date.
- Tax language. Whether any part of a gift membership is deductible depends on your benefits and how you account for them. Have your finance team approve the purchaser receipt wording.
- Renewal notices. Next year, decide whether the renewal goes to the recipient, the original purchaser, or both. A gift recipient who never knew the expiration date is an easy lapse.
Automating it with Email Designer
The manual batch is what usually gets dropped. Email Designer sends automated, branded emails from Altru queries without manual exports, so the gift query you built above can drive a purchaser thank-you and a separate recipient welcome, each with its own design and wording.
Quick answers
Do I need a separate membership level for gifts?
Usually not, and it tends to complicate reporting and renewals. A consistent marker on the sale is enough to drive different emails.
Should the recipient’s email show the price?
No. Keep amounts on the purchaser’s receipt only.
