A donor gives $50 in honor of her sister’s birthday and wants the sister to get a note that says so. That’s a donor e-card: a short, branded email that goes to someone other than the donor, announcing a gift made in their name. Donors love them around holidays, birthdays, and memorials, and they quietly introduce your organization to a new person who now has a reason to like you.
Altru handles the gift side of this well. The card side takes some assembly. Below is how to think about it, what to set up, and where the rough edges are.
What Altru does and doesn’t cover
Altru can record a donation, tie it to a constituent, and support tribute-style giving, where a gift is made in honor or memory of someone. Depending on how your organization has configured tributes and donation forms, you may already be capturing an honoree’s name on gifts.
What we have not seen in Altru is a built-in “e-card” feature: a picker where the donor chooses a card design, types a message, enters the recipient’s email, and the system sends it at a chosen time. If you aren’t sure whether your version or configuration offers something close, ask Blackbaud support or test a donation form in a sandbox before you build around it. Don’t assume either way.
In practice, an e-card program in Altru comes down to three pieces you control:
- Capturing the right details at the time of the gift.
- Finding those gifts afterward with a query.
- Sending the card to the recipient, not the donor.
1. Capture what the card needs
An e-card needs more than a typical donation form asks for. At minimum:
- Honoree or recipient name
- Recipient email address
- Occasion (in honor of, in memory of, birthday, holiday, thank-you)
- A short personal message from the donor
- How the donor wants their name to appear (“from the Garcia family”)
- Optionally, a send date, so a December gift can arrive on the 25th
Decide where each of those lands in Altru. Tribute information, if you use it, may hold the honoree name. The rest usually ends up in custom fields, attributes, or notes on the revenue record, depending on what your web form can map to. Test this carefully: a field that looks fine on the form is useless if it doesn’t save somewhere a query can reach.
One privacy point: you are collecting a third party’s email address. Don’t add the recipient to your marketing lists by default. Use the address for the card, and only invite them to hear more from you if your policy and local rules allow it.
2. Build a query that finds card-eligible gifts
Create a revenue query filtered to gifts where the recipient email is not blank and the card hasn’t been sent yet. Output the donor name, recipient name and email, occasion, message, gift date, and the send date if you collect one. Leave out the gift amount unless the donor explicitly wants it shared. Most don’t.
The “not sent yet” part matters. Without a way to mark a card as sent (an attribute you update, or a date field), you’ll either miss cards or send duplicates. Settle that before the first holiday rush.
3. Send the card
This is where most teams get stuck. Options, roughly from most manual to least:
Manual from a mail client
Someone runs the query each morning and sends each card by hand. Fine for a handful a month. It breaks down in December and whenever that person is out.
Export to an email platform
Export the query to a CSV and import it into your email tool, using merge fields for the names and message. It works, but every export is a copy of donor data sitting outside Altru, and someone has to remember to mark the cards as sent back in Altru afterward.
Automated from the query
Point an email tool directly at the Altru query and have it send to each new row on a schedule. This is the cleanest setup because the card goes out without anyone exporting anything, and the timing is consistent.
Design the card itself
Keep it simple and readable on a phone:
- A subject line that names the donor: “Maria made a gift in your honor.”
- One strong image of your site or collection.
- The donor’s personal message, set apart so it reads as theirs, not yours.
- One sentence about what the gift supports.
- No donation ask aimed at the recipient. A soft “learn more” link is enough.
Have a separate, quieter version for memorial gifts. Bright birthday art next to “in memory of” is the kind of mistake people remember.
Close the loop with the donor
Donors want to know the card arrived. Add a line to the donor’s acknowledgment (“We’ve sent your card to Ana”) or send a short confirmation once the card goes out. It saves a lot of “did she get it?” phone calls.
Where Social Good fits
The capture and query steps are Altru setup work and don’t need anything extra. For the sending step, Email Designer sends automated, branded emails from Altru queries without manual exports, so a card-eligible gift query can drive the e-card send and donor confirmations on a schedule.
Quick answers
Can donors pick from several card designs?
Only if your donation form captures a design choice somewhere a query can read it. Then you can send a different template based on that value.
Should the recipient become a constituent record?
That’s a policy decision. Some organizations create a record for honorees; others keep the details on the gift only. Whichever you choose, review for duplicates periodically so honorees who later become donors don’t end up as two records.
