A school calls to book a field trip for 60 students and promises a deposit by Friday. A donor mentions at a member event that they’d like a call about naming a bench. A vendor needs final headcount for the gala two weeks out. Each of these is a small promise, and each one lives in Altru somewhere: a group sales reservation, a constituent record, an event. What Altru doesn’t give you is a single place that taps someone on the shoulder when the date arrives.
That gap is real, and it’s worth being honest about. Altru isn’t built around a personal to-do list with pop-up reminders the way a sales CRM is. But it holds the dates you need, and with a little discipline you can turn those dates into a working follow-up system. Here’s how we’d set it up.
Start with interactions on the constituent record
For anything tied to a person or organization, interactions are the closest thing Altru has to a task. An interaction can carry an owner, a date, a category, and a status, which is everything a task needs. The trick is to use them for planned work, not just to log conversations after the fact.
- Record the follow-up as a future interaction. When the donor asks for a call, add an interaction with the date you intend to call, assign it to the person who will make it, and leave it in an open status rather than completed.
- Use categories that describe the work. “Follow-up call,” “Send proposal,” “Thank-you visit.” Keep the list short so staff actually pick the right one.
- Close it when it’s done. Mark the interaction completed and add a sentence about the outcome. That turns your task list into history the next person can read.
The exact status values and fields available depend on how your organization has configured interactions. Check your code tables before you write a procedure around them, and agree on what “open” means so everyone filters the same way.
Turn open interactions into a daily list
An interaction with a future date does nothing on its own. Someone has to look. Build a query of interactions where the status is still open and the date is on or before today, with columns for owner, constituent, category, and any comments. Add a second version filtered to the next seven days so people can plan ahead.
Then make looking at it a habit. Some teams save one query per staff member; others share one list and sort by owner. Put it on the agenda for a short weekly check-in so overdue items get reassigned instead of quietly aging. If your Altru setup lets you surface a query on a home page or dashboard, that helps, but confirm what your version supports before promising it to the team.
Group sales: let the reservation dates do the reminding
Group sales follow-ups are usually about money and headcount: deposits, final counts, balance due, chaperone lists. Most of those map to dates you already track on the reservation or in its notes.
- Decide which dates matter for every group (for example, deposit due, final count due, balance due).
- Make sure staff record those consistently on the reservation, in the same field every time.
- Build a query of upcoming group reservations that pulls those dates along with the contact and any outstanding balance.
- Review it on a set day each week, and log each outreach as an interaction on the group contact’s record so you can see who was reminded and when.
The consistency step is the one that breaks. If one coordinator puts the deposit deadline in a note and another uses a date field, no query will catch both. Pick the field before you build the report.
Events: work backward from the event date
Events have a fixed date, which makes them the easiest to plan around. Write a standard checklist for each event type (invitation send, RSVP cutoff, catering count, staffing schedule, post-event thank-you) with each item expressed as “X days before” or “X days after.” When you create an event in Altru, convert that checklist into real dates.
Whether Altru can hold that checklist directly on the event, and whether it will notify anyone, is something to confirm in your own environment or with Blackbaud support. If it can’t, keep the checklist in a shared calendar or project tool and keep the guest list, registrations, and revenue in Altru. Splitting it that way is fine as long as everyone knows which place holds what.
Marketing efforts: track the follow-up, not just the send
For appeals and mailings, the common miss is the step after the send: calling top prospects who didn’t respond, checking returned mail, or reviewing results before the next wave. Put those as dated items on your marketing calendar the day you schedule the send. For high-value individuals, create interactions on their records so the follow-up shows up in the same daily list as everything else.
When to add an outside tool
The query-and-habit approach works well for a small team. It strains when you need true push notifications, recurring tasks, or work that isn’t tied to a constituent at all. In that case, a shared calendar or project tool is a reasonable companion. Keep one rule: the constituent-facing outcome (the call happened, the deposit came in, the gift was promised) gets recorded in Altru. The outside tool holds the reminder; Altru holds the record.
Quick answers
Does Altru send email reminders for interactions?
Don’t assume it does. Test in your environment or ask Blackbaud support. Until you’ve confirmed it, treat a query that someone reviews every day as your reminder.
Should completed follow-ups be deleted?
No. Mark them completed with an outcome note. Future staff will want to know who talked to that donor and what was said.
