How-to
Adding an Existing Interaction to a Prospect Plan in Altru
A development officer has coffee with a donor, logs it on the constituent record that afternoon, and two weeks later the board chair asks for a cultivation report on that prospect. The coffee isn’t there. It was recorded as a stand-alone interaction, not as a step on the prospect plan, so anything that reads from
How to Sort Event Guests Alphabetically Under Their Host in Altru
Two days before a donor dinner, someone prints the registrant list to check names at the door. The hosts are in order, but under each one the guests come out in whatever order they were entered. Under one host you get “Zimmerman, Abbott, Lee.” Under another you get two rows that just say “Guest of
How to Build a Total Giving History Report in Altru
Development directors keep asking for the same four columns: donor name, lifetime giving, last gift amount, last gift date. It sounds like something you’d find under Reports. In Altru it usually isn’t a single canned report you run. You build it, most often as a constituent query with a few smart fields behind it. Once
How to Add Soft Credits in Altru, Including for Past Gifts
A board member asks why her husband’s foundation gift doesn’t show up on her giving history. A major donor wants credit for the gift his company made at his urging. A couple gives from one checking account, and only one of them appears on the donor wall list. Each of these is a soft credit
How to Track Manufacturer Item Numbers for Altru Merchandise
Reordering a plush otter should not require a scavenger hunt. But in plenty of museum and zoo gift shops, the buyer pulls a low-stock list out of Altru, then opens a vendor catalog, a three-year-old invoice, or a sticky note on the stockroom shelf to figure out what the supplier actually calls that otter. The
Finding Closed Drawer Reports After a Deposit in Altru
Three weeks after a weekend rush, finance asks why Saturday’s cash came in forty dollars short. You go back into Altru to pull the drawer report for the register in question, and it isn’t where you left it. The drawer was closed, the deposit was made, and the report you printed (or meant to print)
How to See Who Added a Payment in Altru (and Who Changed It)
A $250 payment shows up on a constituent record with the wrong designation, or applied to the wrong pledge, or entered twice. Finance wants to know who keyed it so they can ask what happened. You open the payment in Altru, scan the page, and the person who entered it isn’t obvious anywhere. That’s a
Can You Authorize a Card Instead of Charging It in Altru?
Hotels and rental counters do it all the time: swipe the card, place a hold, and settle the real amount later. So it’s reasonable to ask the same of Altru. You might want to hold a card for a school group that hasn’t confirmed its final headcount, a facility rental with a damage deposit, a
How to Send Annual Giving Statements to Donors from Altru
Every January the same email arrives: “Can you send me a summary of what I gave last year? My accountant needs it.” Answer it one donor at a time and you lose a week. Send everyone a year-end giving statement in the first weeks of the year and most of those emails never get written.
How to Track Who Attended vs. Who Only Bought Tickets in Altru
A ticket sale and a visit are two different facts. Altru is very good at recording the first one: who bought, what they bought, for which date, and how they paid. The second one, whether that person actually walked through the door, is much harder to see when you open a constituent record. A patron
