How-to
How to Take Donations During an Event in Altru (Paddle Raises and Live Giving)
The auctioneer calls for $1,000 paddles, forty hands go up in ninety seconds, and someone at a back table is trying to write down bidder numbers on a legal pad. Live giving moments raise a lot of money fast. They also produce the messiest data your development team will touch all year, unless you decide
How to Show a Fundraising Thermometer or Leaderboard with Altru
A thermometer on the homepage, a “we’re 72% of the way there” slide at the gala, a board report showing which trustees have closed their asks. These are all versions of the same request: take the gift totals already sitting in Altru and turn them into a picture people can read in two seconds. Altru
How to Use Items to Support Fundraising in Altru
A plush otter with a “proceeds support our rescue program” tag. A $50 symbolic animal adoption that comes with a certificate and a photo. An engraved paver on the garden path. None of these is quite a donation and none is quite a purchase, and that’s exactly why they get messy in Altru. Selling things
How to Track Donor Interests in Altru So Appeals Actually Use Them
A longtime donor mentions at a member event that she cares most about the conservation program and her grandkids’ summer camp. Your development officer nods, remembers it for a week, and then it’s gone. Next spring she gets a generic annual fund appeal. That’s the gap donor interest tracking is meant to close: getting what
How to Update Model Ratings in Altru and Raiser’s Edge NXT
A prospect who was rated “low likelihood” three years ago has since joined at the patron level, given to the spring appeal, and bought a table at the gala. Their constituent record still says low likelihood. Nobody changed it because nothing in the database ever told anyone to. Stale scores like this are the usual
How to Import Wealth Screening Results into Altru Without Making a Mess
A wealth screening vendor sends back a spreadsheet with dozens of columns per person: capacity ratings, estimated giving ranges, real estate totals, philanthropic affinity scores, board affiliations, and a confidence flag on every match. The hard part of getting that into Altru isn’t the import itself. It’s deciding which handful of those columns deserve a
How to Track Principal Gift Prospects in Altru
A principal gift prospect is the board chair’s neighbor who has quietly been a top-level member for fifteen years, or the family foundation that funded your last exhibit renovation. There are usually only a dozen or two of them, and each one has a long, careful relationship behind it. The hard part is not storing
How to Do Prospect Research on Members in Altru
Your membership file is probably the best list of future donors you have. These are people who already pay you every year, visit, bring their families, and open your emails. The hard part is finding the handful who could give a lot more, and doing it with the data Altru already holds before you spend
Why You Can’t Edit Opportunity Status Codes in Altru Prospect Plans
You open code tables in Altru to add a status like “Verbal yes” or “On hold” for your major gift opportunities, and the opportunity status list isn’t there. Or you find something close, edit it, and nothing changes on the opportunity form. That usually isn’t a permissions problem. The status on a prospect plan opportunity
How to Add Prospect Managers in Altru (and Keep Portfolios Accurate)
A new major gifts officer starts on Monday. By Wednesday someone asks why they can’t be picked as the manager on the donors they inherited. In Altru, a prospect manager isn’t a free-text name you type in. It points to a record, and that record has to be set up correctly before Altru will offer
