Auction night is the easy part. The hard part comes the following Tuesday, when someone has to turn a list of bidder paddles, every winning bid, and a stack of card payments into clean constituent records and correctly coded revenue in Altru. When you’re picking silent or virtual auction software, that cleanup is what you should be judging, more than how polished the bidding screen looks.
This guide covers what “works with Altru” usually means in practice, what to ask vendors, and how to set up the post-event import so your gala doesn’t leave a mess in your database.
Start with an honest baseline
Altru is built around admissions, memberships, donations, and events. It isn’t generally thought of as an auction platform, and we wouldn’t plan on running mobile bidding, item catalogs, or outbid notifications inside it. If you aren’t sure what your version supports, ask Blackbaud support or test in a sandbox before you commit. Either way, most organizations end up running the auction in a dedicated tool and bringing the results back into Altru.
That means the real question isn’t “which auction tool is best?” It’s “which auction tool produces data I can get into Altru accurately, with the least hand work?”
What “works with Altru” can mean
Vendors use the phrase loosely. In our experience it usually falls into one of three levels:
- Export only. The tool gives you spreadsheets of bidders, items, and payments. You reformat them and import into Altru yourself. This is the most common setup, and it works fine if the export is detailed enough.
- Altru-shaped export. The vendor offers a file layout already mapped to Altru’s import fields. That saves time, but confirm it matches how your organization codes revenue, not a generic default.
- Direct connection. The tool claims to write records into Altru automatically. Ask exactly what it creates (constituents? revenue? both?), how it matches existing people, and what happens when it can’t find a match. Ask to see it working against a test database, not just a slide.
None of these is wrong. A clean export you control can beat a sync that quietly creates duplicates.
Questions to ask before you sign
About people
- Can bidders register in advance, and what fields are required? You want first name, last name, email, phone, and mailing address at minimum, because those are what you’ll match on in Altru.
- Can you pre-load your guest list (with Altru lookup IDs) so known attendees are matched rather than re-created?
- How does the tool handle couples or households sharing one paddle?
About money
- Does each sale record the item’s fair market value alongside the winning bid? You need both to issue accurate acknowledgments, since generally only the amount paid above fair market value is tax-deductible.
- How are fund-a-need or paddle-raise gifts separated from item purchases in the export?
- Who processes the cards, what are the fees, and can bidders opt to cover them?
- Does the payout report break down by transaction so finance can reconcile deposits to Altru batches?
About the event itself
- Does it support silent, live, and fully virtual bidding, or only some of these? Hybrid events are common now.
- Can guests bid from their own phones without downloading an app?
- What happens to checkout if the venue Wi-Fi fails?
Plan the import before the event
The organizations that have the easiest time afterward decide their Altru coding weeks in advance. Before the auction:
- Agree on revenue coding. Decide which designations, appeals, or event records auction purchases and fund-a-need gifts will post to. Write it down and share it with finance.
- Do a dry run. Export a handful of test bids from the auction tool and import them into an Altru sandbox. Fix the column mapping now, not the morning after.
- Prepare matching. Pull a query of invited guests with their lookup IDs so you can match bidders to existing constituents instead of creating new records.
- Decide on acknowledgments. Will thank-you letters come from Altru after import, or from the auction tool on the night? Pick one so donors don’t get two different receipts with two different deductible amounts.
After the event
Import people first, then revenue. Review any bidders that didn’t match an existing record before you create them, because auction registrations are a common source of duplicates (a nickname here, a work email there). Then import the revenue in batches you can tie back to the processor’s payout report. Finally, run a quick query comparing total auction revenue in Altru to the vendor’s totals. If they match, you’re done. If they don’t, you’ll find the gap far faster in week one than at year-end.
Quick answers
Can we just use our Altru donation form for a paddle raise?
Often, yes, for straightforward gifts. It won’t handle item bidding, but a fund-a-need ask is really just a donation, so a form that posts directly to Altru can keep that portion simple.
Is a direct integration worth paying more for?
Only if you’ve seen how it matches existing constituents. If it can’t, a well-structured export plus a disciplined import process is usually just as good.
Should auction items purchased count as donations?
Only the amount above fair market value is generally treated as a gift. Talk with your finance team or tax advisor about how to record the rest, and make sure the auction tool captures fair market value per item.
