A board member mentions a neighbor who loves the museum and might fund the new education wing. Someone jots it down. Six months later, nobody remembers who was supposed to call, whether the tour happened, or what was said at lunch. Prospect plans in Altru exist to stop that kind of drift: they turn “we should talk to this person” into a named owner, a goal, and a sequence of dated steps you can actually report on.
This guide covers how the pieces fit together, the order to set them up in, and the decisions worth making before anyone starts typing.
The three pieces you’re working with
Before building anything, it helps to know what each part is for.
- The prospect itself. A constituent becomes a prospect when you start managing them toward a gift. Once that happens, prospect information shows up on their constituent record (commonly on a Prospect tab), which is where gift officers will spend most of their time.
- The prospect plan. One plan per cultivation effort: the goal, the people responsible (typically a primary manager and sometimes a secondary manager or solicitor), target amount, and the steps planned and completed. A single donor can have more than one plan over time, such as an annual major gift plan and a separate capital campaign plan.
- Plan outlines. Reusable templates of steps. Instead of re-entering “intro meeting, site tour, proposal, ask, thank-you” for every prospect, you build that sequence once and apply it when you create a plan, then adjust dates and owners.
The exact field names and screens depend on your Altru configuration and your security role, so if something below doesn’t match what you see, check with your Altru administrator or Blackbaud support before assuming the feature is missing.
Set things up in this order
1. Clean up the code tables first
Plans lean on lists your organization controls: plan types, stages, step types or contact methods, and statuses. If those lists are vague or cluttered (“Meeting,” “Mtg,” “In-person mtg”), every report you run later will be vague too. Agree on a short set of values with your development team and tidy the tables before the first plan is entered. It’s far easier now than after two hundred plans use the messy versions.
2. Make sure your fundraisers exist as constituents
Plan managers and solicitors are usually selected from constituent records, often flagged as fundraisers or staff. Confirm every gift officer, your executive director, and any board members who will make asks are set up so they can be assigned. If a fundraiser isn’t set up this way, you may not be able to assign them to a plan the way you intended.
3. Build a small number of plan outlines
Resist the urge to create an outline for every possible situation. Two or three usually cover a museum or zoo development shop:
- Major gift cultivation: discovery call, behind-the-scenes visit, follow-up meeting with leadership, proposal, ask, acknowledgment.
- Upgrade from membership: thank-you call from staff, invitation to a donor event, conversation about a higher giving level, ask.
- Stewardship: impact report, site visit, recognition touch, renewal conversation.
Keep step names action-oriented so a calendar of upcoming steps reads like a to-do list. If you’re unsure whether an outline can set default offsets (for example, “follow-up two weeks after tour”) in your version, test it on a sample record first.
4. Create a plan on a real prospect
Pick one donor your team already knows well and build a plan from start to finish: choose the plan type, assign the manager, set the goal and target date, apply an outline, then adjust step dates and owners. Doing one together as a team settles questions (“Who logs the step when two people attend?”) before they become inconsistencies.
5. Record steps as they happen
A plan is only useful if completed steps get logged with a date, an outcome, and a short note. Planned steps that are never marked complete make your pipeline look busier than it is. Agree on a turnaround, such as logging within two business days of the contact.
Decisions to make before you roll it out
Who counts as a prospect? Define a threshold, whether by capacity rating, giving history, or a referral from leadership. Without one, the prospect list fills with every enthusiastic member and stops meaning anything.
One plan or many? Decide whether a donor can have overlapping active plans. Most small shops are better off with one active plan per prospect at a time, closing the old plan before opening a new one.
What happens when a plan ends? Gift made, declined, or paused all need a clear status so plans don’t sit open forever. Closed plans are valuable history; abandoned open plans just clutter reports.
How will leadership see progress? Decide which views or reports your director of development will actually review each month: upcoming steps by manager, overdue steps, and open plans by stage are a good starting set. Build or locate those reports, or a query of open plans and steps, early, so the data entry has an obvious payoff.
Common problems and what usually causes them
- A gift officer can’t see the Prospect tab or add a plan. This is usually a security role issue rather than a missing feature. Ask your administrator to compare their role with someone who can.
- Steps show up under the wrong person. The step owner and the plan manager are often separate fields. Check both when applying an outline.
- Revenue isn’t tied to the plan. Linking a gift to the plan it came from is what lets you measure whether cultivation worked. Make it part of the gift entry checklist for major gifts, and spot-check it monthly.
- Nobody uses it after the first month. Almost always a sign that the outlines are too long or the reporting isn’t being reviewed. Shorten the outlines and put the overdue-steps list on the agenda of your regular development meeting.
Quick answers
Do I need an outline to create a plan?
No. Outlines save time and keep plans consistent, but you can create a plan and add steps by hand. Outlines start paying off once you have more than a handful of active plans.
If I edit an outline, do existing plans change?
Generally, applying an outline copies its steps into the plan, so later edits to the outline affect new plans rather than ones already created. Confirm this on a test record before making large changes.
Where should I learn the exact screens?
Blackbaud’s Altru help documentation and training cover the step-by-step screens for your version. Use them alongside this guide, which focuses on the setup choices that make plans worth maintaining.
