Two people share a home, share a membership card, and come to every member night together. They aren’t married. Your year-end appeal goes out, and they get two envelopes at the same address, or one envelope addressed to only one of them. Neither result is what you wanted, and both cost something: postage in the first case, goodwill in the second.
This happens because joint addressing in most donor databases, Altru included, was designed around married couples. The good news is that the household and relationship tools you already have can usually get you to one well-addressed piece of mail. It just takes a deliberate setup and a test before your next big mailing.
Why unmarried partners fall through the cracks
Altru groups people into households and links individuals to each other with relationships. In many configurations, the logic that builds a joint name (“Pat Lee and Sam Ortiz”) or a joint salutation leans on a spouse-type relationship. When two people are linked as partners, or only share a household with no relationship at all, the joint formats may not fire, and each person is treated as a separate recipient.
Exactly how your database behaves depends on your relationship types, your name format settings, and how your mailing queries are written. Rather than assume, confirm it: pick one married couple and one unmarried couple in your sandbox (or a test record pair in production you can clean up afterward) and run them through the same mailing query. The difference in output tells you where the gap is.
Options, from least to most effort
1. Mail to the household, not the individuals
If both people belong to the same household record, build your mailing query on households instead of individual constituents. You get one row per address by design. The work then shifts to the household’s name and addressee: make sure it reads the way the couple wants (“Pat Lee and Sam Ortiz” or “The Lee-Ortiz Household”) rather than a default generated from one member’s last name.
This is often the cleanest fix, but check two things first: that both partners are actually in the same household (data entry at the front desk frequently creates a second household), and that your other mailings don’t depend on individual-level fields the household query won’t return.
2. Use a partner relationship and test the name formats
If your relationship types include something like partner or domestic partner, link the two records with it. Then check whether your joint addressee and salutation formats recognize that relationship type or only spouse. If only spouse is recognized, ask Blackbaud support whether your name format configuration can be extended to other relationship types before you start reworking queries. We’d rather you hear it from them than guess.
A word of caution: don’t record unmarried partners as spouses just to make the mail merge work. It’s inaccurate, it can leak into acknowledgments and reports in ways that embarrass you later, and it’s the kind of thing a constituent notices.
3. Set the addressee and salutation by hand on the record
Where Altru lets you override the generated addressee or salutation, type the joint version directly on the primary partner’s record. This is reliable and quick for a small group of major donors or long-time members. It doesn’t scale, and it needs a note so the next person knows the override is intentional.
4. Combine rows during export
As a fallback, export individuals with their household ID and address, then combine rows that share a household or address before sending the file to your mail house. Many mail houses will do this “householding” step for you if you ask. It works, but it’s a manual step that has to happen every single time, and it’s easy to forget under deadline.
Keep one partner from being dropped
Whatever route you choose, decide which partner is the primary contact for the household and apply that consistently. Then watch for these common problems:
- Split households. A partner added through a ticket purchase or a web form may land in a new household of one. A query of constituents who share an address but not a household will surface them.
- Do-not-mail on one person only. If one partner has opted out of mail and the other hasn’t, decide whether the household still gets mail. Write the rule down.
- Duplicate records. A partner who exists twice will get mail twice no matter how good your household setup is. Clean duplicates before a big appeal.
- Gift credit. Joint mailings are about addressing. Soft credit and recognition for gifts from either partner are a separate decision; settle that policy with your development team so acknowledgments match the envelope.
Ask, don’t assume
The simplest step is often missed: ask how people want to be addressed. A line on your membership form or a quick question at renewal (“How should we address mail to your household?”) gives you the exact wording and spares you from guessing at relationships. It also tells you when a couple wants separate mail, which some do.
Relationships also end. When a household splits, update the household membership, the relationship, and any hand-entered addressee at the same time, or the next appeal will go to a couple who are no longer together.
Quick answers
Does Altru support joint mailings for people who aren’t married?
You can get there with households, relationships, and addressee settings, but whether the automatic joint name formats recognize non-spouse relationships depends on your configuration. Test it in a sandbox or confirm with Blackbaud support.
Is it OK to mark partners as spouses to get one envelope?
We don’t recommend it. Mailing to the household or setting the addressee by hand gets the same result without putting inaccurate data on the record.
