A trustee is a volunteer, a donor, usually a member, sometimes a committee chair, and occasionally a vendor’s spouse. When someone asks you to “track board members as volunteers” in Altru, the hard part isn’t finding a field to tick. The hard part is deciding which of those roles you need to report on later, and then putting each one where Altru can actually count it.
This guide walks through the choices, the trade-offs, and the housekeeping that keeps board data trustworthy after the first term rolls over.
Start with the questions you’ll be asked
Before you change anything, list what people will want out of this data. In most organizations it’s some mix of:
- Who is on the board right now, and who used to be (with dates).
- Board giving participation: did every current trustee make a gift this fiscal year? Funders and accreditation reviewers often ask.
- Volunteer hours, either for an annual report total or to put a dollar value on donated time.
- Committee service: who sits on finance, development, or the gala committee.
- Who should get board communications and be excluded from general appeals or solicited differently.
If nobody will ever ask for hours, you don’t need timesheets. If the development director lives and dies by participation rates, start/end dates on board service matter far more than anything else. Let the reporting drive the setup.
Your options for flagging board service
A constituency on the constituent record
Altru lets you mark what kind of relationship a constituent has with your organization. Adding a board constituency (if your database doesn’t already have one, an administrator can usually add it to the list) makes trustees easy to find in searches and queries. Use dates on it so former trustees stay identifiable instead of disappearing when someone removes the flag.
Good for: “who is on the board” lists and mailing segments. Weak for: committee detail and roles like chair or treasurer.
A constituent attribute with dates and a comment
An attribute such as “Board Service” with a start date, end date, and a value like “Trustee,” “Chair,” or “Finance Committee” gives you more detail. You can add multiple attributes for someone who serves on several committees or had two separate terms. Attributes are also straightforward to filter in queries, which matters for the participation report.
Good for: roles, committees, and term history. Weak for: anything involving hours.
Altru’s volunteer records
Altru includes volunteer management, so you can treat trustees as volunteers alongside your docents and event helpers and record the time they give. This is the route to take if board hours need to roll into an organization-wide volunteer total. Exactly how jobs, assignments, and time entries are set up varies by database, so build one test trustee in a sandbox (or confirm with Blackbaud support) before committing to it for the whole board.
Good for: hours and volunteer totals. Weak for: being the only place board status lives, since volunteer setup is built around time, not governance terms.
The combination most teams end up with
For most organizations a constituency or attribute marks board service, and volunteer time gets logged only if someone truly needs the hours. Pick one place as the official “is this person on the board” answer and write it down. Two half-maintained flags are worse than one good one.
Should you log board hours at all?
Be honest about whether anyone will do it. Trustees rarely fill out timesheets, so in practice staff end up estimating: meeting length times attendance, plus committee meetings and events. That’s fine if you’re consistent and label it as an estimate. A simple approach:
- After each board or committee meeting, the board liaison records attendance.
- Someone enters time for attendees on a regular schedule, monthly or quarterly, not “when we get to it.”
- Event help (staffing a gala table, giving a donor tour) gets logged the same way your other volunteers’ time does.
If that liaison role doesn’t exist, skip hours and keep the attribute clean. Partial hours data produces misleading totals.
Building the reports
Once board service has dates, the participation question becomes a constituent query: constituents with an active board attribute (or constituency) during the fiscal year, plus a giving filter or smart field for revenue in that same date range. Output names, role, and total given so the development director can see gaps before year-end, not after.
Two things trip people up:
- Household and soft-credited gifts. A trustee whose spouse writes the check may show zero personal giving. Decide whether household or soft-credit revenue counts toward participation and build the query to match.
- Mid-year terms. Someone who joined in May shouldn’t be held to a gift in January. Filter on the date ranges, not just a yes/no flag.
Housekeeping that keeps it accurate
- End-date terms the day they end. Put a reminder on the calendar for your board’s annual meeting. Don’t delete the old attribute; close it.
- Use a separate value for emeritus or advisory roles so they don’t inflate current-board counts.
- Check for duplicates before a new term starts. New trustees are often already in Altru as members or past donors, sometimes twice. Merge before adding board attributes so history and giving land on one record.
- Review communication preferences. Trustees often want board materials at a work address and personal mail at home. Confirm addresses at onboarding.
Quick answers
Can a board member be a volunteer and a member at the same time in Altru?
Yes. These are different parts of the same constituent record, so a trustee can hold a membership, have giving history, and carry volunteer and board information together.
Where should committee assignments go?
Attributes with dates work well because one person can have several, and each can be filtered in a query on its own.
