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 their names. It is keeping the history, the next step, and the person responsible in one place everyone trusts.
Altru was built for admissions, membership, and annual giving. It was not designed as a major gifts or moves-management system the way dedicated fundraising CRMs are. That does not mean you need a second database for twenty people. It means you have to be deliberate about how you use the pieces Altru does have.
Start by deciding what “tracking” means for your shop
Before touching any records, agree on the handful of facts your director of development and executive director actually ask about. For most cultural organizations it comes down to:
- Who is a principal prospect, and who decided that.
- Who owns the relationship on staff (and which board member, if any).
- Where they are in the process: identified, cultivating, ready to ask, asked, closed, stewarding.
- What the ask is: a target amount, a project, and a rough timeline.
- What happened last and what happens next, with dates.
If you can answer those five questions for every prospect from a single report, you are tracking them. Everything else is extra.
Mapping those facts onto Altru
Flag the prospects on the constituent record
Use whatever custom coding your organization already relies on for constituent records (attributes, constituencies, or a similar code) to mark someone as a principal gift prospect. Keep the value list short and controlled. One flag for “principal prospect” plus one field for stage is easier to keep clean than a sprawl of free-text tags. Put the flag on the individual, and think about how households should be handled: if a couple gives jointly, decide which record is the primary one so the gift history and the prospect flag live together.
Record ownership explicitly
Relationship ownership is the field that drifts most when staff turn over. If your Altru setup lets you link a staff member or solicitor to a constituent, use that. If not, a coded field naming the owner is better than nothing. Avoid putting the owner only in a note, because notes don’t sort or filter well in queries.
Log contacts as they happen
Visits, lunches, tours, and calls need a dated entry on the constituent record with a short summary and the next step. Altru gives you places to record contact history and notes on a constituent; exactly which features are available depends on your configuration and edition. If you’re unsure, try it on a test record in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before rolling it out to the team. Whatever you use, require a date and a “next step” line in every entry so the record tells a story, not just a list of events.
Keep the ask separate from the gift
Revenue in Altru is for money that has actually come in or been formally pledged. A target ask of $250,000 is not revenue, so don’t enter it as a pledge to make it show up on a report. Store the target amount and timing in a coded field or a structured note, and only create revenue when there is a real commitment. Mixing the two will inflate your pledge reports and confuse finance.
Build one query and one report
The payoff comes from a single ad hoc query of constituents flagged as principal prospects, with output columns for owner, stage, target amount, lifetime giving, most recent gift, membership level and expiration, and the date of the last logged contact. Smart fields are useful here for lifetime and recent giving totals, since they save you from recalculating every time.
Sort that query by last contact date. Anyone who hasn’t been touched in 60 or 90 days rises to the top. Bring this list to a standing monthly prospect meeting and update stages in the room, so the data and the conversation never get out of sync.
Where Altru runs out
Be honest about the limits. Altru does not give you a visual pipeline board, weighted forecasting of open asks, or proposal tracking with multiple solicitors and approval steps in the way a dedicated major gifts platform does. Wealth screening and prospect research are also outside its core purpose. If your campaign planning depends on those, you have three reasonable options:
- Stay in Altru with discipline. For a portfolio of under thirty or so prospects managed by one or two people, the setup above is usually enough.
- Add a lightweight companion sheet for forecasting and strategy notes, while keeping contacts and giving in Altru. Treat the sheet as a working document and refresh it from your query rather than letting it become a second source of truth.
- Move to a fundraising CRM if principal and major gifts become a large share of your revenue and you add frontline fundraisers. That’s a bigger decision involving integration, cost, and training, and it’s worth discussing with Blackbaud and peers who have made the switch.
Small habits that keep it working
- Limit who can change the prospect flag and stage, so the list doesn’t quietly grow or shrink.
- Exclude principal prospects from mass appeal and renewal mailings unless the owner approves. A generic membership renewal letter to someone you’re about to ask for a naming gift sends the wrong signal.
- Review the flagged list once a year and retire people who are no longer realistic prospects.
- When a relationship owner leaves, reassign their prospects before their last day, not after.
Quick answers
Does Altru have built-in moves management?
Not in the depth that dedicated fundraising systems offer. You can approximate it with coded fields, contact history, and queries. Check with Blackbaud support for what your specific setup includes.
Should we enter a planned ask as a pledge?
No. Keep asks out of revenue until there is a real commitment, so your pledge and revenue reports stay accurate.
