How-to
Setting Up a Custom Cash Drawer in Altru: Hardware and Desk Process
“Custom cash drawer” means two different things depending on who’s asking. For the IT person, it’s a piece of hardware: a drawer that isn’t the model your vendor recommended, or one plugged into a new register station. For the visitor services manager, it’s a way of working: a drawer shared by two cashiers, a float
How to Find Constituents Missing ZIP Codes in Altru (and Fix Them)
ZIP codes do more work in Altru than they get credit for. They drive visitor-origin reports for grant applications, decide who lands in a regional mailing, and let you tell a local family from a tourist. A constituent with no ZIP falls out of every one of those reports without anyone noticing. Finding them is
Setting a Default Payment Method in Altru Back Office: What to Know
The development associate keys in forty checks from a mail appeal. On every one of them, the payment screen comes up wanting a decision about how the gift was paid, and on every one they pick “Check” again. Then a cash donation from the front desk lands in the stack, nobody notices the method they
Fixing Pending Charges When a Sale Won’t Complete in Altru
The card reader beeps, the screen stalls, and the guest at the window says, “My bank app already shows the charge.” Now the cashier has to decide whether to run the card again. That one decision is where most pending-charge problems in Altru either get resolved cleanly or turn into a double charge and an
How to Credit an Appeal on Memberships Sold in Altru Daily Sales
A visitor walks up to the admissions desk holding your spring renewal letter and says, “I’d like to renew.” The cashier rings up the membership in Daily Sales, the member leaves happy, and the renewal letter that brought them in gets no credit. When you pull appeal results a month later, the mailing looks weaker
Altru Mail Preferences vs Appeal Categories: When to Use Each
A donor calls and says, “Stop sending me the year-end letters, but I still want the member newsletter.” Whoever takes that call has to decide where to record it in Altru. Two places look like they could work: a mail preference on the constituent record, or something tied to how your appeals are categorized. Pick
How to Import Appeals and Efforts into Altru (and What to Load First)
“Import our appeals” usually means one of three different things, and Altru handles each one differently. Before you build a spreadsheet, work out which of these you need, because the answer changes how much work you’re in for. The appeal and effort definitions themselves: the names, dates, goals, and codes for each campaign. Who received
How to Fix Errors When Editing Appeal Mailing Letters in Altru
You open the letter attached to your year-end appeal mailing to tweak a sentence or add a merge field, and Altru throws an error instead of saving. The appeal goes out next week. Before you rebuild the letter from scratch, it’s worth working out what the error is actually objecting to, because the fix depends
How to Run an Appeal Mailing in Altru, From List to Results
A year-end letter goes out to 4,000 households. Six weeks later the development director asks a simple question: how much did it raise? If the appeal was set up loosely in Altru, nobody can answer without a spreadsheet and a lot of guessing. The mailing itself is the easy part. The real work is setting
Altru Emailed the Wrong Customer? How to Contain It and Find the Cause
A visitor calls to say they just got someone else’s eTicket confirmation. Or a donor forwards an acknowledgment letter thanking a stranger for a gift. Either way, an email from Altru went to the wrong person, and you need to do two things: contain this one, and find out why it happened so it doesn’t
