How-to
Altru Prospect Status vs. Opportunity Stage: Which to Use and When
A development officer has lunch with a longtime member who hints at a gift toward the new education wing. Back at the office, she opens Altru to log it and stops: is this person a “prospect” now? What status? And if she creates an opportunity, which stage does it start in? Ask three fundraisers and
Using Fundraising Hierarchy Categories and Report Codes in Altru
Your fundraising hierarchy is the tree your gifts roll up into: the purposes and designations your development team picks every time a gift is entered. Two small fields on those records, category and report code, get filled in during implementation and then ignored. That’s a missed chance. Both are user-defined lists, so you can make
SMART Goals for Development Operations Teams Using Altru
Fundraisers get goals that are easy to write: raise this much, renew this many members, close these major gifts. The people who process the gifts, clean the records, and pull the reports usually get something vaguer, like “improve data quality” or “support the campaign.” Those aren’t goals. Nobody can tell in June whether they’re on
Running Major Gift and Mid-Level Giving Programs in Altru
Altru was built around the front gate: admissions, memberships, events, and the donations that come in alongside them. That makes it very good at seeing the 4,000 people who gave $50 and a little awkward at managing the 40 people who could give $5,000. Plenty of museums, gardens, and zoos still run solid major gift
How to Plan Annual Giving During a Crisis Using Your Altru Data
When the doors close or attendance drops off a cliff, admissions revenue disappears first. Annual giving rarely disappears with it, but it does change shape. Some donors give more and give sooner. Some go quiet because their own finances are shaky. And your usual calendar of mailings, gala asks, and point-of-sale donation prompts may no
How to Post Revenue to the General Ledger in Altru, Step by Step
Your finance office wants last month’s admissions, membership, and donation revenue in the general ledger, and they want it to tie to the bank deposits. Getting it out of Altru is not a single button. It’s a short cycle you repeat every period: clean up the revenue, preview what will post, run the post, then
Setting Up GL Codes and the Fundraising Hierarchy in Altru for QuickBooks
Before you open a single setup screen in Altru, sit down with whoever closes the books in QuickBooks and print out their chart of accounts. Almost every messy Altru-to-QuickBooks setup traces back to one decision made in the wrong order: someone built the GL mapping in Altru first, then tried to bend QuickBooks to match.
How to Merge Duplicate Designation Paths in Altru (and What to Do Instead)
Designation lists tend to grow sideways. A capital campaign adds “Education Center Building Fund,” a later appeal adds “Education Center Construction,” someone builds a third path for a matching grant, and five years later your finance team is asking why one project shows up in three places on every report. The natural next thought is:
How to Report on Gift Codes in Altru: Queries, Totals, and Checks
“Can you pull totals by gift code?” sounds like a five-minute ask. In Altru it often turns into an afternoon, partly because “gift code” isn’t one field. Before you build anything, figure out which code the person asking actually means. After that the reporting is fairly routine. First, pin down what “gift code” means at
How to Find Altru Constituents by Gift or Pledge Amount
“Can you pull everyone who gave $500 or more last year?” It sounds like a search-box question. In Altru it’s usually a query question, because the everyday constituent search is built to find a specific person by name, lookup ID, email, or address. It isn’t built to filter by how much someone gave or pledged.
