A board member asks, “What has the Riverside Bank Foundation given us over the last five years?” You open the foundation’s organization record in Altru, and the summary tells you its address, its contacts, and maybe a relationship or two. It doesn’t give you a quick read on its giving. With an individual donor you’d have a rough picture in seconds. With an organization you go looking for it.
This gap catches development staff all the time, because corporate sponsors, foundations, and matching-gift employers are often among an institution’s largest funders. Below is what the organization record shows, where the giving data actually lives, and a few ways to put a giving snapshot in front of staff without rebuilding anything.
What the organization summary is (and isn’t) built to show
Organization records in Altru are constituent records, just like individuals, so the revenue is there. Gifts, pledges, and payments where the organization is the constituent are attached to the record and show up on its revenue history. What the summary view doesn’t do well is roll that history up into a glance: lifetime giving, last gift, largest gift, and giving by year.
Exactly what appears on the summary can vary with your Altru setup, security roles, and any page customizations your organization has made. Before you build a workaround, open a well-known corporate donor’s record next to a major individual donor’s and compare them side by side. If you can’t tell whether something is missing or just hidden by your role, ask your Altru administrator or Blackbaud support. Configuring the summary page itself isn’t something most organizations can do in-house.
Where an organization’s giving actually lives
Before you try to surface “giving history,” decide what it should include. For an organization, that usually means some mix of:
- Direct revenue: gifts and pledge payments where the organization is the paying constituent.
- Sponsorships and event revenue: often recorded as the organization, but sometimes entered under an individual contact who handled the paperwork.
- Matching gifts: the employer’s match tied to an employee’s original gift.
- Gifts from related individuals: an owner or executive giving personally, which some teams want to see next to the company and some explicitly don’t.
- Memberships: corporate memberships, if you sell them.
That list matters because the summary page will only ever reflect revenue attached to the organization itself. If your staff have been entering sponsorship checks under the contact person, no display change will fix the number. Cleaning that up is a data-entry policy question first.
Practical ways to get a giving snapshot
1. Smart fields for the headline numbers
Smart fields are Altru’s built-in way to precalculate values like total giving, first and last gift date, and largest gift for each constituent. Organizations are constituents, so smart fields built on revenue should calculate for them too. Once a smart field exists, it can be used in queries and, depending on your configuration, displayed in places where staff look up records. Make sure each smart field’s filters match your definition of giving (for example, whether it includes pledges or only payments), and confirm when it’s scheduled to refresh so nobody quotes a stale total.
2. A saved organization giving query
For anything beyond a single number, a constituent query limited to organizations is the dependable answer. Include the organization name, lookup ID, revenue date, amount, designation or campaign, and revenue type. Save it with clear output fields so a development officer can filter to one organization and export it for a board packet or a renewal proposal. You can also build a version that groups giving by fiscal year, which is usually the view leadership asks for.
3. Use relationships deliberately
If you want to see an executive’s personal giving alongside their company’s, link them with a relationship rather than entering their gifts on the organization. Then a query can pull both sets of revenue and label each one, so you report combined influence without inflating the organization’s own totals. Recognition credits, if you use them, can serve a similar purpose. Test how they flow into your queries before relying on them.
4. Put the answer where staff will see it
Even without changing the summary page, you can cut down on the hunting. Add a short note or attribute to top corporate records pointing to the saved query, or keep a shared list of key funders with their current smart field values. It’s low-tech, and it keeps the front office from telling a sponsor “we’ll have to get back to you.”
Clean data before nicer displays
Whatever you build will only be as accurate as the records behind it. Two habits make the biggest difference:
- One record per organization. Duplicate company records (“Riverside Bank,” “Riverside Bank Foundation,” “Riverside Bank N.A.”) split giving history in ways no summary can reassemble. Decide whether a corporation and its foundation are one constituent or two related ones, and document that decision.
- A clear entry rule for who the payer is. If the check or card belongs to the company, the revenue goes on the organization record. Spell it out in your gift-entry procedures and review a sample of recent batches every quarter.
Quick answers
Do smart fields work on organization records?
Revenue-based smart fields are calculated for constituents, and organizations are constituents, so they generally should. Check one or two organizations you know well against their actual revenue to confirm the values match.
Can we change what the organization summary page displays?
That’s a platform-level change, not a normal admin setting for most Altru customers. Ask Blackbaud support what’s possible for your environment rather than assuming either way.
