Blackbaud Altru
How to Build a Donor Profile in Altru for Briefings and Meetings
The director of development has a lunch with a longtime supporter on Thursday and asks for “the donor profile.” In some fundraising systems that’s a single printable report. In Altru it usually isn’t. The information is all there, but it lives across the constituent record, revenue history, memberships, and relationships, and nobody has packaged it
How to Re-Engage Lapsed Donors with Crowdfunding in Altru
A donor who gave $50 three years ago and then went silent hasn’t necessarily stopped caring about your zoo or museum. Usually nobody gave them a reason to come back. A crowdfunding campaign can be that reason: a single, concrete project, a visible goal, and a deadline. Done well, it asks for something smaller and
How to Keep Household Members Off Your Altru LYBUNT List
Picture a married couple who share a household in Altru. One spouse writes the check every year; the other has never given under their own name. Last year the gift came from the first spouse’s record. This year it came from the second spouse’s record, maybe because the card on file changed. Run a LYBUNT
How to Build a Lapsed Donor (LYBUNT/SYBUNT) Query in Altru
“Lapsed donor” sounds like one filter. In practice it’s a comparison between two time periods: people who gave in an earlier window and have not given in a later one. Altru’s query tools can answer that, but not with a single date filter. A single query with a date range tells you who gave in
How to Find First-Time and Single-Gift Donors in Altru
“Who gave to us for the first time this year?” sounds like a one-filter question. In Altru it usually takes two or three, because a constituent’s giving history lives on many revenue records, and a simple revenue filter answers a different question: “who gave this year?” Those lists are not the same, and mailing the
How to Calculate First-Time Donor Retention in Altru
First-time donor retention answers one question: of the people who gave to you for the very first time last year, how many gave again this year? It’s the number that tells you whether your acquisition work is building a donor base or just refilling a leaky bucket. Altru holds every gift you need to answer
How to Report Donor Retention in Altru, Including Deceased Donors
Donor retention sounds like one number: of the people who gave last year, how many gave again this year? In practice the number shifts depending on what you count as a gift, which year you compare, and whether donors who have died since last year are still in the denominator. Before you build anything in
What Altru’s First, Last, Largest, and Cumulative Giving Fields Mean
A board member asks for “everyone whose largest gift was over $1,000.” You pull up a constituent in Altru, see a neat little summary of first, last, largest, and cumulative giving, and think the answer is already sitting there. Then you open a second record and the numbers don’t match what the development director remembers.
How to Build Prior-Year Giving Smart Fields in Altru
“How much did this donor give in 2023? And 2022?” Your development director asks it at every appeal planning meeting. Altru can answer it, but not with one smart field that rolls forward. The approach that holds up is a small set of fixed-year smart fields, built once and added to each January. Below is
How to Report Cumulative Giving by Fund in Blackbaud Altru
A board member asks, “How much has this family given to the education fund since they started supporting us?” Altru will show you that family’s total giving in a few clicks. Breaking that total out by fund, and keeping it running over years, takes more setup. This guide covers how to build that number yourself,
