A monthly giving program is mostly a set of decisions, and Altru only records the results. Before anyone opens a recurring gift record, settle what the program is called, what a sustainer gets, how you’ll charge cards, and what happens when a card fails. Get those answers on paper and the Altru setup goes quickly. Skip them and two years from now you’ll have a pile of recurring gifts nobody can report on cleanly.
The order below is the one we’d use if we were starting from scratch at a museum, zoo, or garden running Altru.
1. Decide what “monthly giving” means at your organization
Settle these before you configure anything:
- Is it a donation or a membership? A monthly donor who gets no admission benefits belongs in recurring revenue. If you want people to pay for a membership monthly, that’s a different problem. Altru’s membership programs are built around term-based dues, and paying dues in monthly installments works differently from a recurring gift. Test any monthly membership payment plan in a sandbox, or ask Blackbaud support, before you promise it publicly.
- Program name and recognition. “Sustainers,” “Keepers,” “Monthly Circle.” The name goes on your web form, acknowledgments, and donor wall, so pick it once.
- Suggested amounts. Three or four monthly levels are plenty. Write down whether any of them come with a benefit (a thank-you gift, an event invitation), because benefits affect the tax-deductible amount you print on receipts.
- Charge date. Will every gift charge on the same day of the month, or on the anniversary of the first gift? A single date makes reconciliation easier. Anniversary dates spread out the failed-payment follow-up.
2. Set up the coding before the first gift arrives
Your reports will only be as useful as the coding on the gifts, so do this part carefully.
- Designation. Decide whether sustainer gifts go to unrestricted operating support or to a specific fund. Most organizations use one designation for the whole program.
- Appeal and source. Create a dedicated appeal (or use whatever source coding you already rely on) for monthly giving, so you can tell new sustainers apart from one-time donors in a query.
- A constituent attribute or similar flag if you want “active sustainer” to show up quickly on a constituent record and in lists. Some teams prefer to derive this from the recurring gift status in a query instead, which never goes stale. Pick one approach. Running both means the flag and the actual status will eventually disagree.
3. Confirm how cards are stored and charged
Recurring gifts depend on stored payment details and on your payment processor. In Altru that usually means the Blackbaud payment processing your organization already uses for credit cards. Before launch, confirm with your Altru admin or Blackbaud support:
- That your merchant account is set up to store cards for recurring charges.
- How recurring installments are processed in your setup: who runs it, how often, and whether it posts as a batch your finance team reviews.
- What a declined card looks like in Altru afterward, and where staff will see it.
Run a couple of test gifts through a sandbox or a test account with a real card at a small amount. Watch each one from the moment it’s entered to the posted revenue. Finance will want to see that path before you announce anything.
4. Build the sign-up path
Most sustainers sign up online. Check whether your Altru donation web form can offer a monthly option and how it presents it. If it can, set the monthly choice clearly, show the suggested amounts, and make sure the confirmation tells the donor when they’ll be charged and how to change or cancel.
Also plan for sign-ups that don’t come through the web: phone calls, a card at an event, a conversion from a one-time donor. Write a short procedure so whoever enters those gifts uses the same designation, appeal, and frequency every time.
5. Plan acknowledgments and the annual summary
Sending a full thank-you letter every month gets annoying fast. A common pattern:
- A warm welcome acknowledgment on the first gift.
- No letter for routine monthly installments (or a short email receipt, if your donors expect one).
- A year-end giving summary listing every installment, for tax purposes.
Build the queries behind these now: new recurring gifts in the last week, and all installments by constituent for the calendar year. Test the year-end summary in October, not the last week of January.
6. Handle failed payments on purpose
Expired and declined cards are where monthly programs quietly lose people. Decide:
- Who reviews declines, and how often (weekly is reasonable).
- How many retries or contact attempts happen before a recurring gift is marked lapsed or canceled.
- What the outreach says. A short, friendly “your card didn’t go through” email or call recovers a lot of gifts.
A query of recurring gifts with missed installments, or cards expiring next month, gives staff a working list instead of relying on someone to notice.
7. Report on it like a program
Once gifts start flowing, keep a small set of numbers in a monthly report: active sustainers, new sign-ups, cancellations and lapses, average monthly amount, and total projected annual value. Each of these should come from a saved query using the coding from step 2. If a number can only be produced by hand, fix the coding now rather than later.
Quick answers
Can a donor change their monthly amount?
Staff can typically edit the recurring gift amount or stored card on the record. Whether donors can do it themselves online depends on your setup, so test it before you tell donors they can.
Should I convert existing one-time donors?
Yes, and they’re your best prospects. A query of donors who gave two or more times in the past year makes a strong first ask list.
