How-to
Should You Use Honorifics in Altru? Titles, Salutations, and Policy
Short answer: keep the title field, stop requiring it, and stop letting it drive your default greetings. That’s where a lot of museums, gardens, and zoos end up after a few years of mismatched letters and awkward phone calls. The longer answer depends on who you write to, how your records get created, and how
How to Handle International Addresses on Altru Web Forms
A visitor from Toronto buys a family membership online. The form insists on a five-digit ZIP code and a U.S. state, so she types “00000,” picks Alabama, and puts “M5V 2T6 Canada” at the end of the street line. The sale goes through. Six weeks later her welcome packet comes back as undeliverable, and the
How to Uncheck a Primary Address in Altru (and What to Do Instead)
The short answer: you usually can’t. Altru expects a constituent who has any addresses on file to have one of them marked primary, so the primary checkbox behaves more like a radio button than a toggle. You don’t turn it off. You move it to a different address, or you deal with the current address
How to Pull Seasonal Addresses in an Altru Query
Your renewal mailing goes out in January. A good share of your longtime members spend the winter in Arizona or Florida, and their renewal notices land in a mailbox nobody will check until April. The seasonal address is sitting right there on their constituent records, yet the query you built for the mailing only returns
How to Import Program Event Registrants into Altru: Options That Work
Registrations for a summer camp, a lecture series, or a school program often start life outside Altru: a partner’s signup form, a spreadsheet from a teacher, a list from a third-party registration tool. Sooner or later someone asks the obvious question: can we just import these people into the scheduled program so they show up
How to Import Volunteers into Altru Without Creating Duplicates
Volunteer lists tend to live everywhere except Altru: a sign-up spreadsheet from the docent coordinator, an export from a scheduling app, a stack of paper applications from last summer’s teen program. Getting those people into Altru is mostly a constituent import with a few volunteer-specific decisions layered on top. The decisions matter more than the
How to Import Notes into Altru Constituent Records
Notes tend to pile up outside Altru: a development officer’s spreadsheet of donor conversations, comments from an old ticketing or membership system, volunteer coordinator files, a legacy database you’re retiring. Sooner or later someone asks whether all of that can be attached to the right constituent records in one go instead of pasted in by
Why Your Altru Import Isn’t Working (and How to Fix It)
An import in Altru rarely fails for no reason. When it says it finished but nothing changed, or it stops with a pile of exceptions, or it won’t start at all, the cause almost always falls into one of a few groups: the file, the mapping, the data inside the file, permissions, or the background
How to Handle Inactive Constituents in Altru Without Losing History
Every Altru database builds up people nobody expects to hear from again: the visitor who bought one ticket in 2017, the member who moved across the country, the donor who passed away, the record someone created twice at the front desk. Leave them alone and they clutter your queries, skew your counts, and occasionally get
How to Merge Duplicate Vendor Records in Altru
Duplicate vendors creep in quietly. Someone in the gift shop adds “Acme Printing” while someone in finance adds “Acme Printing Co.”, and a year later you have purchase orders, products, and payment history split across two records that are really the same supplier. Cleaning that up in Altru is less obvious than merging two duplicate
