I am really excited about the recent Altru 4.4 release and the new (community driven if I may add!) feature of emailing receipts from Daily Sales. And yes, Advance Sales is also in the cards for an upcoming release! This will not only save paper and add efficiency, but now also opens up new opportunities with email capture. I thought it would helpful to put together some key points and recommended practices on how we can take advantage of this new data.

As we review opportunities for using these new emails, it is helpful to keep in mind a couple of things:

• Email addresses entered through this sales process are connected to sales transactions. When a transaction is not connected to a constituent record (are “anonymous”), these emails are not connected to a constituent record. These emails are typically our focus as they relate to potentially new relationships to help your list grow.
• Altru is a constituent relationship management system. For this reason, when it comes to sending any communication out of Altru the recipient list is based on constituents in the system.

The two items above mean that we cannot directly use any of the “anonymous” sales order emails directly in Altru communications processes to engage a relationship. So what options do we have? Well, we have a couple of options, and a key factor in making a decision is based on what application you use to service your broad email list. Do you use an external email service (Constant Contact, Emma, etc.) to send out e-newsletters or do use Altru?

Using an External Email Service

Let’s start with the external email service option as that is used by some organizations. We can run a query on a regular basis to pull these email addresses from the Sales Orders not connected to constituents and enter them into the email service. Key elements of the query that we might use below are:

1. This is a sales order query so we target our daily/advance sales transactions.
2. We can restrict the date interval to match up with the schedule you will pull email addresses on.
3. We use the criteria to omit those records connected to constituents so we can focus on pulling only “new” emails that are not connected to existing constituents in the database.

I have included the Lookup ID and Transaction Date in the display just for informational purposes. They can be helpful if you want to review transactions. After you have reviewed the list of emails, just use the export icon and select Download to csv for the csv file that you’ll import into your email service. That’s it!
Using Altru for Emails

If you prefer to send marketing communications out of Altru, you have a couple of options.

Set up Constituents at Transaction

Time permitting, when a person responds with a preference for an email receipt, your staff could create a constituent on the fly.  This is very easy. They just have to click on Add constituent.
For the sake of efficiency, you may want to pre-determine which fields you would like to be entered at this time (the minimum required could be something like first name, last name and email address.) Please note that while adding the constituent, the standard duplicate verification protocols apply, so if the staff is adding a person with similar phone/email/full address is in the database, Altru will alert of a potential duplicate. This is the ideal process as you have an accurate (albeit abbreviated) constituent record at the start.

Create Constituents from Anonymous Transaction Emails

We all recognize that constituent entry at the front desk is not always ideal, especially when things get busy. There is a process one can replicate to add these anonymous emails into the database as “dummy constituents.” The process involves using the export from the query above and adding some additional fields to the file so we can then import the emails and connect them to constituent records. The import template can be based on these fields:
We can adjust the export file from the query to include the fields above:
In the import file that you create, I recommend using the header names as listed above as it will save clicks in mapping during the import process. I set a common last name (with no first name) for the constituents and also assigned them to a “Sales Email” constituency. This way not only are these “dummy” constituents easily identified, but with the constituency we can easily exclude them from other communications.

The next step is to complete the import and commit the batch. Once you have completed this process, the emails will then be connected to a constituent record that is easy to identify in search results:
We can also identify this within the constituent record:
With a constituent connected to this email address, we can now include these emails in Altru communications designed to expand your base. For example, you can offer ticket discounts to these constituents to encourage repeat visits or offer membership promotions (discounts) to reach out for members. Please remember not to include the merge fields for the recipient names in these communications as we are using substitutes! It is helpful to become familiar with CAN-SPAM regulations as you explore sending emails to these addresses. After the actual person connected to this email becomes a constituent in the database, we can then merge these records.

Hope this provides your team with a sufficient number of options that you can adapt to meet the needs of your organization and take advantage of these sales transaction emails.

OData allows you to import data from Altru into other programs such as Microsoft Excel and Tableau in order to consume, share, and manipulate the data in pivot tables, power views, and dashboards. OData is available from any query in the system. You can share dashboards and charts created with OData with any user, regardless of their Blackbaud permissions. However, because users must enter their Blackbaud credentials when they consume the data, any data refreshes respect the user’s security permissions.

In order to create reports outside of Altru using OData, first we will need to setup the root URL so that Altru can produce the OData link. This is a one-time setup that needs to be done prior to trying to get an OData link.

1. The root URL can be found in the address bar, you will need to copy this link. You will be copying everything prior to /webui as seen below.
2. From Administration, select Set application root URL.

3. Paste the link into the Application root URL field and click Save.
Opening OData in Excel 2013

• OData can be opened in Excel 2010 and 2007 as long as PowerPivot is installed, however it works best in 2013, as you do not need to install anything.
• First, we will need to get an OData link.
  1. From Analysis, select Information library, click the double arrow button to the left of the query name and click Get OData link.
  2. Copy the link.
• Now we will need to open a new blank worksheet in Excel.
  1. Select the Data tab.
  2. Click the From Other Sources button, then select From OData Data Feed.
  3. Paste your copied link from Altru into the Link or File field, then enter your Altru User Name and Password and click Next. Note: You may find that you encounter the error below. If this occurs, enter blackbaudhost\ before your username as it appears in the 2^nd screenshot below.
  4. In the Select tables box, mark ODataQuery.ashx and click Next.
  5. On the Save Data Connection File and Finish screen, you can change the file name and give it a friendly name. Then click Finish.
  6. Select how you want to view the data and click OK.

What you end up with is your query results in Excel that you can save and refresh when needed.

Check out a video here and don’t miss the great OData and Power Pivot Tips that we shared in an earlier blog post.

It’s back-to-school time! For some of you that means a bit of relief from the busy summer season. For others, it’s just the start of working with school groups planning for the rest of their year. Either way, it’s often a transition in focus about this time of year.

For Altru education, this month brings a trial run of a new reoccurring class on Membership Communications (we hope to release it for everyone in October), and new Masters Workshop content that we haven’t offered before. Behind the scenes, we’re still working on expanding our coverage of training materials into areas where we don’t have them currently and on improving the resources that we already have. We’ve got a lot that we’re hoping to wrap up as the year winds to a close – so fall will be a busy time for us.

Check out the Masters Workshops for September and the schedule of our recurring classes below:

Altru Masters Workshop: Visitor Services Revenue and Attendance Analysis – September 3rd – 3-4pm ET – Register here

This Altru Masters Workshop will cover reporting on Visitor Services, attendance, and revenue. In this class we will review the standard report options in Altru and discuss the ability to use query to report on attendance for programs and events and program revenue in your Altru database. The General Sales 101 class and Query 101 class are recommended prerequisites for attending.

Altru Masters Workshop: Managing and Promoting Matching Gifts – September 9th – 1-2pm ET – Register here

During this one-hour instructor-led Masters Workshop session we’ll review the various processes in Altru available to manage the matching gifts process. We’ll also touch up on the various mechanisms that can be leveraged to promote matching gift opportunities amongst your constituents. Revenue 101 in Altru is a recommended prerequisite for this session.

Altru Masters Workshop: Doing More with Combination Packages – September 17th – 1-2pm ET – Register here

In this Masters Workshop, we will review the best practices for using combination packages in Altru and how to plan to sell these combinations using Web Forms. This is a one-hour instructor-led session. Before taking this class it is recommended that student have completed Ticketing 101 in Altru and Web Forms 101 in Altru.

Altru Masters Workshop: Managing Gifts of Membership – August 29th – 3-4pm ET – Register here

In this one-hour instructor-led Masters Workshop session, learn how to manage gift memberships in Altru. We’ll cover how to add a gift message to web forms and incorporate some of the new gift membership fields into member letters and cards.

Did you know?

While these are special Masters Workshop sessions are run live only once or twice a year, we record them whenever possible and post the recording and a copy of the class materials on our website. Check out the past Masters Workshops.

And as always, we have our regularly scheduled classes:

Appeals & Mailings 101 – September 1, 16, 28
Batch 101 – September 29
Daily Financial Reconciliation – September 14, 30
General Sales 101 – September 2, 8, 21
Introduction to Altru – September 4, 9, 24
Managing Group Sales Reservations – September 10, 23
Membership Setup 101 – September 11, 21
Merchandise 101 – September 15
Query 101 – September 2, 14, October 1
Query 201 – September 17, 29
Revenue 101 – September 10, 25
Ticketing Setup 101 – September 9, 24
Web Forms 101 – September 17, 28

Don’t forget, you can get to all of our Altru education resources by visiting www.blackbaud.com/altru-training. Make it a bookmark in your web browser today!

Altru’s volunteer module is a versatile feature that helps us manage this key resource of your organization. Recently we posted a series on how we can leverage the configuration and processes of the volunteer module to best meet the needs of your organization.

One key component of any volunteer program is keeping a track of the time volunteers are devoting to support the mission of your organization. The importance of this data is multifold:

1. It gives you an accurate estimate of the resources involved in delivering programs (how much time does it really take to set up that fundraising event?) or conducting operations (managing your collections data or stuffing envelopes for the EOY appeal.)
2. May be a documentation requirement for grants or similar funding mechanisms.
3. Key measure to recognize, celebrate, and honor the efforts of dedicated volunteers supporting your cause.

Depending on the extent of your volunteer program, adding these hours into Altru can become a bit of task in itself. Fortunately, Altru has batch or import process options to save you time.

The Difference Between Using Batch and Using Import for Timesheet Entry

The Timesheet batch template is very useful in adding multiple time allotments into Altru together as a group of entries. The import process can be even faster as you are not populating a batch in Altru but setting up a simple .csv file that is then imported into Altru. However, before we start setting up an import file, it is important to review key differences between batch and import.

With batch, we are populating a batch template within Altru. So, when we are searching for volunteers or job occurrences, the search fields within the batch template help us pinpoint specific constituents or assignments. With an import file we do not have this luxury, so we have to specify the constituent through their lookup id and the job occurrence by its name.

Primary Factors for Using Timesheet Import

Due to the differences mentioned above, it would help to review some of the key requirements before we can bring the import process online for timesheet data entry:

1. For jobs with repeat occurrences, each of the job occurrences requires a unique name.
2. The import file requires the ID of the constituent so they are easily identified.
3. We have considerable flexibility in assigning hours to volunteers – the volunteers need not be directly assigned to a job occurrence. This can be useful if it is not important for your organization to keep track on each specific volunteer assignment and would prefer to use just one generic “Timesheet assignment” to collect the time contributed by volunteers.

While we have a Knowledgebase article that covers the process in greater detail, I thought it would be helpful to have a quick run-through of the configuration and process.

Using Query to Identify Assignments and Setup the Import File

One mechanism to speed up the timesheet process is to use a query to find out which volunteers need hours booked. The screenshot below displays how we can pull this information based on a specific time interval (for example, last week):
Using the fields listed below and Export to Excel directly from the Preview Results window:

Lookup ID (Volunteer Look up ID)
Name (Volunteer)
Volunteer\Assignments\Job Occurrence\Occurrence name (Job Occurrence)
Volunteer\Assignments\Job Occurrence\Start Date (Start Date)

The reason to change the names of the column headers is to help us auto map the fields in the import process. The export file will include the QUERYRECID column that we do not need, so just swap it out with the column header name “Hours Worked” and enter the hours worked for each assignment:
This is the perfect time to save this file in two versions: one as an Excel file (for future reference) and another as a .csv (for the actual import).

Running the Import Process

As you run the import process of the Timesheet batch, the field headers allows us to use the single click Auto-map process to quickly map the fields.
To avoid any exceptions in the import process, confirm that the Set Options configuration is as per below:
After you have run the import process, confirm that all records have processed successfully and then use the convenient Go to Batch entry link to commit the batch created.
In the Commit batch window, make sure that you have selected the check boxes for: Validate batch before committing, Create exception batch, and Create control report, before using Start to begin the process.
You can then spot check the control report to confirm that data has entered as intended:
And that is it! I do hope this tip allows you to take greater advantage of the volunteer module in Altru; to keep track of how your volunteers are adding value to your operations and also save you time in completing the time entry task.

Bonus Tip: Want to save even more time? I recommend checking out the OData tip shared recently by my colleague Rick. Very useful in shaving off a step or two in setting up the import file!

In September 2014, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio announced that any resident of NYC could obtain a NYC ID (free of charge) and in turn, use that i.d. to receive benefits around the city, including free one year memberships to 33 cultural institutions in the five boroughs, including zoos, arts centers, art museums, and botanical gardens. (Link: http://www1.nyc.gov/site/idnyc/benefits/museums-and-cultural-institutions.page) The first program of its kind in NYC, the response was overwhelming initially, with some NYC residents waiting many weeks for an appointment to apply for a NYCID.

What a revolutionary program that benefits not only residents of NYC, but so many of the city’s world class cultural institutions! Any one can receive the ID card and obtain memberships, allowing families and other residents free access to these institutions and reducing their barrier to entry. Residents who previously couldn’t or didn’t want to pay for admission or a membership, can now access the wide array of exhibits and programs that may not have been available to them previously. In turn, these organizations are bringing in new visitors and members they may not have otherwise engaged. It is beneficial for both constituents and institutions, and in turn, the many communities that are housed within the city.

This takes the concept that many museums use – free access for community residents on certain days or times – and expands on it in a major way. The selling point of memberships is the tangible benefits it offers, like free admission. When memberships are given for free, does that devalue the membership or is it a new way of engaging a brand new audience?

A major challenge, of course, is how institutions will continue to develop these new found audiences. Though the program is now halfway through its inaugural year, Mayor DeBlasio has not announced if the same cultural institution membership benefits will be available beyond 2015, or if renewing members will be eligible for the same free membership benefits or if they’ll be required to become paying members.

It is a similar issue that other organizations have faced when offering Groupon memberships. People who become members via Groupon and other similar deal websites have notoriously low renewal rates. Museums who have successfully retained Groupon members have found success through techniques such as offering renewing members special renewal rates or discounts, but with the NYCID program, residents pay nothing (well, not directly, though certainly the city’s taxes are helping to fund the program.) While the participating institutions will face some challenges in retaining and engaging these new constituents, institutions that can engage new visitors early and often and help new audiences see the value – and even more so the necessity – of the institution in their lives, may see success in retaining NYCID card holders.

What do you think? Would you like to see a similar program in your community? Do you think something like this would have a positive impact for your organization, your patrons, and your community?

As we approach the time of year in which many organizations host their Annual Gala, one ongoing struggle many organizations have is how to best manage seating arrangements at these events. The good news is that Altru has a fantastic seating arrangement feature which can be a big time saver!  This feature allows you to create a layout for how many tables and chairs you have at your event and then take any registrant and assign them to the desired table/seat.

Now the question becomes; but why use Altru for my seating arrangements? Well, the advantages of using the seating arrangement feature in Altru are 4-fold:

• It is very easy to edit/change selections that you have previously made
• It is easy to produce “groups” that wish to sit together
• Altru has built in reporting to make it easy the night of the event to perform check-in and usher attendees to their seats
• You can use this valuable information in many different ways within Query
  • Next year, see who sat with who
  • See if people used the “seating notes” field about preferences last year and be aware ahead of time this year

As you can see, there are lots of great benefits to using the seating arrangement feature in Altru. We’ve also got a few tips and tricks that will really boost the effectiveness of this feature and make your life even easier!

Configuring the Seating Layout

After you have created the fundraising event in Altru you can click on the feature Configure seating layout:
The first thing you need to do is decide on the layout of the room for your event. Most events use the Sections, Tables and Seats option for their layout. For this example, we will be using 2 Sections, 25 Tables per section and 10 Seats per table, providing us a total of 500 seats for the event:
You can even begin some naming of the sections, tables and seats to further help you keep track of where to place your registrants. Maybe you need a section for VIP/Sponsors and a section for General Admission. Even though we had 25 tables per section on our first step, we can also adjust the allocation of tables on the Sections tab to reflect what the physical setup of the event space will actually have:
Another decision can be made on the Tables tab of whether you would want to have each seat in the room have a unique ID number (Use continuous numbering) or whether you would like each seat to simply be numbered 1-10 for each table:
After going through all of the tabs on this window, click Save.

Now you can begin to place people in seats as they register. Some offices will update the seating arrangements on a regular basis, while others will wait until right before the event and do one big project to assign all registrants at the same time. I find it helpful to check on the seating arrangements on a regular basis leading up to the event as there are many tools built into the assignment function to aid in this effort.

Assign Registrants to Seats

If you have registrants who have made requests to sit with certain people, or, internally, you want to record a note about a registrant, you can add a Seating note to their registration that will appear within the Assign Seats feature. To do so, find the name of the person on the Registrants tab of the event, click the double arrow next to their name and select Edit registrant:
To begin assigning registrants to seats, click the Assign seats link in the event record:
There are a number of great tools found within the Assign seats feature. For example, if you are assigning registrants to seats on a regular basis, you might want to change the Show filter to see only registrants not yet assigned a seat. This can make the list easier to manage as you get more and more registrants and some have already been seated.
You can also use the Groups tool to help keep people who want to, or need to, be seated together easily identified. This would be common for Sponsorships, or people who purchase entire tables at your event and want to be seated with the guests they are bringing. You can choose to Add a new group and then use the “drag and drop” method to highlight a name in the Registrants box, and “drag” the name down to the group you would like to place them in:
Once you have a group compiled and know what table you will be seating them at, “drag and drop” the group to the desired table:
Once a registrant has been placed in a seat, additional information will appear in the Registrants window to include their seat assignment:

Seating Arrangement Reports

Once you have completed your assignments, or if you wish to view what assignments have already been made, there are two reports built into Altru that you can use: View seating summary and Event profile.
For the Event profile report, choose to view only Selected sections and only select the option for Seating. This will show all registrants who have been assigned a seat.
Now that you know some tips and tricks for using the seating arrangement feature, I hope that this will prove useful in your upcoming events season. If you’d like to learn more about how to use this information in Query, I would recommend taking the Query 201 class to learn about creating complex queries.

Ever wonder what happens to the ideas you suggest or Me Too on the community? I’m here to tell you how we take your suggestions and make them reality in the product. First let me introduce myself though. I’m Courtney Grainger Goodin, the new Altru Product Manager. I joined the team this summer as Jonathon moved on to a new role here at Blackbaud. I can’t say enough how awesome it is to be back home with my Altru family.

So ideas – in the Community as you are entering and voting for ideas, we’re regularly reviewing the feedback to identify ways we can address your it. Some ideas are smaller and we can quickly tweak functionality to meet the needs addressed in the idea. Other ideas are larger in scope and require more investigation that we can capture through a survey, comments in the Community, or emails. For these ideas we work through a process internally called Discovery – we’re working to “discover” what the right answer/solution might be. We do this as a team called a triad. The Triad consists of a lead engineer, who grounds our conversation to ensure we’re on the route to a high quality/feasible solution, a user experience designer, who helps draw on industry best practices and design patterns, and myself, the product manager, who helps keeps us focused on the what and the why of the opportunity we’re currently working on.

One example of this is the idea to enable recurring donations online. This idea had 47 followers and 72 Me Too’s. So the first place to start was with you! Over the past 6 weeks we’ve met with over a dozen clients talking through what their needs for what an online recurring giving solution would look like. We start the process with a conversation – where are you today with your recurring giving program?

Once we have a baseline of where you are today, we start digging into what you are looking for. We utilize low and high fidelity prototypes to test out different scenarios, settings, and workflows. Between calls, we tweak and edit the prototype until we get to a point where we have maximized the options within the system that we can expand, build upon, or modify. The goal at the end is a functional prototype that we can then present to our development team to review and then determine the best way to implement the feature or functionality.

So ideas may start with one person, but as more votes are submitted the ideas are pulled into this discovery process for development to make the idea a reality. For perspective, since the community has been launched 134 ideas have been implemented in the product and 5 more are planned for our October release!

In support, we have heard from a lot of you that you are working on importing records lately. Whether you are updating addresses with do not mail tags, importing memberships, or just adding some new constituents to your database, we’ve heard a lot more chatter than normal about import!

Import is an amazingly powerful tool and a great way to get a lot of data into Altru at once, but it takes some clear direction and practice to master it!

I’ve compiled all of our import resources into this post so that you have the tools consolidated in one place for your import projects.

Let’s start big to small, general to specific to give you a good sense of the big picture of how import works, down to the details and specifics of doing particular types of imports:

1. Batch and Import Guide for Altru: A great resource to get a sense for the big picture of how batch and import work together. In addition, a great step by step resource for certain parts of the process, like resolving batch exceptions once your import finishes, generating a header file for the import, and more.
2. Import Basics Master Workshops: An hour long recorded class on the basics of importing with session notes you can reference as well. Walks you through importing a constituent batch.
3. How to import records into Altru: A Knowledgebase solution with sample import files, a video, and step by step instructions for importing new records, primarily.
4. How to import titles to constituent records: A Knowledgebase solution that helps you add titles to multiple constituent records at once, something that may help clean up your name formats for mailings.
5. How to import constituents with attributes: A Knowledgebase solution that walks you through importing new attributes onto constituent records instead of adding them one by one to constituent records.
6. How to add multiple attributes of the same category to an import process: A Knowledgebase solution with screenshots that walks you through importing multiple attribute values for one attribute. For example, perhaps you have an attribute called Special Events to track which special events your patron came to before you converted to Altru. This solution walks you through importing multiple of these attributes onto one constituent record for each event they attended, as an example.

These are some of the most common import questions we receive, but we are working to put together other resources for new import questions that we hear. What import projects are you working on that you would like more documentation for?

Altru webforms are not exactly practicing yoga, but they are becoming more flexible! We are excited to announce that this popular idea in our Altru community is part of our upcoming upgrade: mobile ready webforms. Along with the technical achievement of adding this feature to the forms, I am really impressed at how our engineering team has added this feature to the existing toolkit for designing web forms.

Before diving into the mechanics, I should slip in a quick mention that when we mention the term “mobile ready” we are actually referring to making the web forms “responsive.” The premise behind this feature is not just having design transition from the desktop into the palm of your hand – but to have the same design also adjust to the myriad screens that come in between (laptops, tablets and now even phablets). This way the web design is flexible and automatically adjusts to the size of the screen without requiring web user input. Now you can see what I meant by my reference to Yoga – which I know was a bit of a stretch! (Last pun I promise!)

In terms of implementing responsive design for web forms, the process is as simple as it can get. Kudos to the engineering team for adding a responsive design version for the existing templates available in Page Designer.

What I like about this feature is that you can keep your current approach (components based on the template selected) to designing web forms and adapt it to the responsive feature option by swapping out to the responsive version of the template. So let us have a look at an example of this design in action. The screenshot below is of a membership web form using the 2 column template in its widest format as we would view it on, say a desktop:

So, as you can see it looks pretty standard – not dissimilar to the standard two column template. However, the magic comes into play when we view this in on a smaller screen like a mobile phone. From the screenshot below, we can see how the template narrows down automatically to accommodate for the restricted width:

In the image above, we can also see that while the navigation columns have disappeared, they are replaced by an icon to represent the navigation. If one clicks on that icon, they are led to a display that represents the navigation.

Transferring to a Responsive Template

I am sure that many of you are quite excited and eager to transition your current design to the responsive version of your current template.  However there are some things to consider and plan for before tripping the change.

• Please note that responsive templates are just a platform – they will not automatically convert your existing Web forms design components into an ideal mobile-ready design. For example, if you have a 980 pixel-wide header image, your template will not automatically adjust the size of that image. So, please review your existing design to make sure that it meets the parameters for a responsive format. While these designs can look simple, their code can be pretty sophisticated, so we encourage tapping resources that have knee-deep experience in responsive Web design to help adjust your current set up to conform to responsive parameters. If you don’t have someone on staff that fits the bill, our Blackbaud interactive team is not only experienced with web design, they’re also experienced with Altru, making them the perfect choice to do this work for you.
• Keep it even simpler! – While our mantra while designing Web forms is to keep it simple, when it comes to mobile ready Web forms, we recommend going even simpler. Remember users are on a small screen and they should be able to focus and complete their task efficiently.
• Be sure to check your design across different screen resolutions. All smartphone screens are not the same. Refer to online resources to identify popular screen resolutions. The chrome browser has a really neat Responsive Web Design Tester extension that will help you check the design on a desktop.
• Please remember that if your forms are live, design changes will be displayed to the public in real time. As it may not be possible to deactivate your Web forms, try and avoid working on the design when your online traffic to Web forms is likely to be busy (before a popular event or right after you send out a major appeal).
• Back up before and back up after. Please remember to keep backup copies of the HTML and CSS code of your original design before you start your transition to the responsive templates. This way you can quickly revert back to “square one” if needed.  Making backup copies is really easy: For the CSS, just copy the code from the Advanced CSS window into a text file.  For the HTML portion, open the HTML view of each section of the template copy the HTML code into its own text file.
• Please note that while the Web form templates are mobile ready, the acknowledgement emails have still the same functionality so please keep them simple so they are easily viewed on a smartphone screen. The basic rules are to keep the email design very simple (a single column display) the maximum image width less than 580 pixels.

Andrew Fort’s excellent blog post on the importance of preparing for a mobile platform also reinforces the importance of taking advantage of this new feature as it becomes available.

Please be sure to actively promote this update in your constituent communications. Apart from an announcement in your constituent communications as you launch this feature also remember to slip in a mention next to the web form link for your membership renewals or fundraising emails.

For an elegant example of how you can mesh your existing web site design with a responsive web form, just check out the membership form for Currier Museum of Art’s membership form. While currently the template is non-responsive, the design will transition very easily to the responsive version template. Please note you are not alone on this effort. If you need any assistance in adapting to responsive design please do not hesitate to reach out to your account executive (if you are already live with Altru) or consultant (if you are in the implementation or client success phase of your Altru project) and we will be glad to assist you with transitioning to a responsive design.

It seems to me like this year has flown by! Hard to believe that October is upon us.

I’ve been starting to think about all of you and how it’s about time to be getting ready for fall and end of year appeals. I know that during my time in the development office that meant rounds of passing around appeal mailing lists and finding every data problem we had in constituent records. More often than I like to admit, the issue were fixed on the Excel mailing list and not in our database, and the next appeal mailing list had exactly the same problems. I’d like to help all of your avoid my past mistakes.

Over the next three months, we’ve planned our Masters Workshops to help you do three important things – 1. Cleaning up your Altru database; 2. Pulling the best mailing lists you can and using Altru Appeals in the best way possible; and 3. Readying your End of Year reporting.

October is focused on the clean-up, November on better queries for appeals and for end of year reporting, for development, membership and visitor services, and December on end of year reporting and analysis and updating and improving your acknowledgement letters.

It’s also exciting for me to be able to announce that we’ve got a brand new online class! As I mentioned last month, the new Membership Communications class will be released this month – check out the class list below for the dates it’ll be running.

Happy Learning!

Altru Masters Workshop: Tips and Tricks for Constituent Record Maintenance: The Basics – October 6th – 1-2pm ET – Register here

Want to figure out why you keep mailing “Mr. Jones and Jones”? Wondering what to do if you are in your own database three times? This one-hour instructor-led online event will help you better understand the tools in Altru to help keep away the dust bunnies and make sure your database is an accurate record of your supporters. Prerequisites for this class: Introduction to Altru and Query 101 in Altru.

Altru Masters Workshop: Tips & Tricks for Constituent Record Maintenance: Constituent Update Batch & Global Change – October 12th – 1-2pm ET – Register here

In this one-hour instructor-led online Masters Workshop, we will explore two common and powerful database update tools available in Altru, global change and constituent update batch. Discover how to correct data mistakes in your system, when to use each tool, and how to avoid common stumbling blocks while cleaning your records. Familiarity with Batch in Altru is recommended before attending this class.

Altru Masters Workshop: Tips & Tricks for Constituent Record Maintenance: Duplicate Prevention and Management – October 22nd – 1-2pm ET – Register here

In the one-hour instructor-led Masters Workshop, take a step toward learning to manage your database like a pro. Learn how to help prevent and manage duplicates, search for and update erroneous or missing data, and create processes to save time doing all of it!

Altru Masters Workshop: A Look Back – New Features Review 2015 Q3 – October 30th – 1-2pm ET – Register here

In this one-hour instructor-led online event, we will discuss all of the changes made to Altru in the past six months. With our every 2-months release schedule, we release six times a year, making changes both big and small in many different areas of Altru. This session will ensure that you are up to date on our new functionality and any workflow changes. We’ll cover Altru 4.3-4.5, reviewing all releases from June 2015-October 2015.

Did you know?

While these are special Masters Workshop sessions are run live only once or twice a year, we record them whenever possible and post the recording and a copy of the class materials on our website. Check out the past Masters Workshops.

And as always, we have our regularly scheduled classes:

Appeals & Mailings 101 – October 15, 28
Batch 101 – October 26
Daily Financial Reconciliation – October 13, 29
General Sales 101 – October 8, 23
Introduction to Altru – October 6, 21
Managing Group Sales Reservations – October 5, 22
Membership Communications – October 12, 27
Membership Setup 101 – October 7, 20
Merchandise 101 – October 12
Query 101 – October 1, 14, 26
Query 201 – October 16, 28
Revenue 101 – October 5, 21
Ticketing Setup 101 – October 9, 19
Web Forms 101 – October 16, 29

Don’t forget, you can get to all of our Altru education resources by visiting www.blackbaud.com/altru-training. Make it a bookmark in your web browser today!

The Altru team prides itself on how well we know our clients – and in turn, they seem to get to know us. Our support team sits together, so we’re always exchanging info on clients and cases, making sure we know the ins and outs of each organization and database, so we can provide the most specialized answers to your questions. We’re a small team, so when you call or chat in, you’ll chat with the same 5 or so people. That being said, there will be two new voices on the end of the line. Meet two of the newest members of Team Altru – De’Andre Daniels and Paige Feigley:

De’Andre:

How long have you been working at Blackbaud?

I started at Blackbaud on April 16, 2015.

What do you like the most about working on the Altru team?

Because of the size of team Altru and the age of the Altru product we have the unique opportunity of being able to form connections with our customers. I already recognize many customers by their voice!

Are there any fun facts you would like to share about yourself?

I have been playing musical instruments since I was 8 years old. I taught myself how to read music and play the recorder. Since then I have branched out to the clarinet, tenor saxophone, and percussion instruments.

Paige:

How long have you been working at Blackbaud?

I have been working at Blackbaud since November of 2013. I transferred to the Altru team from Financial Edge.

What do you like the most about working on the Altru team?

Our Clients! They are the coolest customers we have at Blackbaud – museums, aquariums, zoos… what’s not to love?

Are there any fun facts you would like to share about yourself?

Outside of the ‘baud I am an artist, I love to paint!

In early October, you’ll find new features in your Altru^™ solution that will improve the visitor experience and save time for CFOs.

• Responsive Web Form Layouts for Mobile Devices
  With responsive web forms, your visitors can easily purchase everything from tickets to memberships on the device of their choice. Why do you care? Conversion rates are 34% higher for responsive donation forms. With Altru Release 4.5, we’ve added responsive web form layouts, which resize a form’s content to fit the resolution of the user’s screen. Not sure how to get started? Blackbaud’s team of experts can now design responsive Altru web forms to match the look and feel of your current website. Contact your account manager for more information.
• Email Receipts
  With the last release, we added the ability to email itemized receipts from Daily Sales. Now you can email receipts from Advanced Sales too! You can also add images—such as your logo—to the email template for itemized receipts in Daily Sales and Advance Sales.
• Discount Report
  The discount report now includes details about promotional code usage to make it easier to track how each code performed. You can group the report by program, membership level, or merchandise, in addition to user and discount.

Visit the Altru New Features page to get all the information and guidance you need to begin using the new features right away.

We are thrilled to release this new functionality to you and always welcome your feedback.

In our last release, we added the ability to email itemized receipts from Daily Sales for your patrons convenience and to save time and paper. In the 4.5 release, we added the ability to email receipts from Advance Sales as well!

Depending on your organization’s configuration, ticket sellers will have the option to print, email, or send no receipt when completing an advance sales order. Once configuration is complete, a new Email field will appear on the Advance Sales page.

To enable email receipt printing, go to Tickets, Sales methods. Select Advance Sales. Go to the Itemized Receipt Options tab and activate all the receipt actions that you’d like to offer to patrons.

Here you will also configure how you’d like your email receipts to appear.

Next to Email receipt, click the down arrows and select Email template.

Exciting news: You can now add images to the email template for itemized receipts in Daily and Advance Sales! Your organization may want to add your logo or promote an upcoming event. From the Receipt email screen, click HTML from the Email opening or Email closing toolbar.

Click the HTML Source Editor Screen, enter the URL for the image and click Update.  Now you will see your image in the Email opening/Email closing.

For a variety of different reasons, patrons to your fine facility might not want to pay full price for a ticket, and you may wish to accommodate for those reasons. You can accomplish this with discounts in Altru.

The Discount report in Altru lets you take stock of all the different reasons why someone might not have paid full price and the value of the discounts that were given. In Altru 4.5, we’ve made a few enhancements to the discount report so you can better analyze your discount usage patterns.

Report Groupings

In addition to grouping the report by Discount and User, you can now group the report by Program, Membership Level, and Merchandise.

Because of the nature of the groupings, some of these items will also act as filters, and that is detailed on the report when it runs. Specifically, Order discounts are excluded when certain groupings are used:

Promo Code Details

Prior to Altru 4.5 the Discount report would display a single line item for each Promo Code discount that had been used. Since each discount could have multiple codes, it was not possible to use the report to see the more detailed usage breakdown. In Altru 4.5 the individual codes in each Discount record now appear in their own row on the report:

Some considerations

While we are really excited about these new features, a couple of things that did not make it into this round of Altru enhancements:

• Adjustable discount reasons – these are not detailed the way promo codes are, but it has been identified as something we want to add.
• Membership Group-by – this report does not yet include membership promotions added in back-office transactions.

We want to hear how these changes will help you use this report, so let us know in the comments!

You’ve probably heard of our Altru champions program, where we recognize and reward our most active and helpful community members. Each year, we choose a Champ of the Year; someone who has gone above and beyond to make the community a welcoming and worthwhile place. This year, the award goes to Dan Peters of the Museum of History and Industry, in Seattle.

You may have spoken with Dan in the community. If you’ve ever asked a how to query question and another member answered, it was probably Dan. If you asked for advice on using Odata, he had some to offer because this is the area he enjoys most. He says, “I really like the ability to analyze our data, so my favorite feature is the Information Library and OData. The ability to create custom reports and analysis out of Altru via OData and data visualization software that I can refresh and update quickly allows our organization to run smarter and more efficient.”

Although Dan has only been using Altru for 9 months (the length of his time at MOHAI), he’s become a power user, and gives the community some credit for that; “it has helped me better understand Altru, and even proactively deal with problems before they affect our organization. Plus I can learn about how other users are using the product and how to best handle complex situations.” He added, “I love to help people, and get a lot of satisfaction from solving problems. Even more, I learn a lot from everyone else in the community!”

Be sure to congrate Dan in the community, or if you see him at bbcon, where we’ll be sending him to be recognized for being our Champ of the Year.

If you’ve got questions about our champs program, or want to get involved, email me.

New features released in Altru 4.5 included email receipts for Advance Sales, the ability to add images to the email receipt template, enhancements to the Program Events list including better sorting options and bulk delete, and improvements to the Discount report.

Join us on Wednesday October 21st at 4pm ET/1pm PT for a quick demo of the new features and an opportunity to ask questions.

Register now!
Password: Altru

P.S. If you can’t make the training, don’t miss the awesome recap of all the features, including videos, on our New Features page. We’ll also try to get a good recording of the training and post it afterward.

Guest Post from Shannon Knight, RISD Museum

Visitors provide data to museums and other institutions all the time: when they make a donation, when they become a member, when they visit or attend an event. And we, as museum staff, use that information to make decisions that (hopefully) result in better services for those visitors. But that’s only possible if the information we’ve gathered is consistent and accurate.

Back in 2011, the staff at the RISD Museum knew there was a problem with the integrity of our data, not to mention the accessibility. In order to use the latest visitor data in any way, several weeks of work were required since that data was scattered all over the place. Ticket sales and event registration were handled by one system. Online purchases took place via another system. Memberships and donations were handled by yet a third system that wasn’t designed for either memberships or donations and was not directly accessible by Museum staff. Youth program registrations were kept in a variety of Excel spreadsheets. Contact information could be found in Word documents and on pieces of paper tacked to bulletin boards. Any time we wanted to utilize data – whether to make a decision or to create a mailing list – we had to scramble to pull all the information together. And, with the inconsistencies of the disparate systems, there were always questions as to the accuracy of the data.

At this point, it became clear that we needed a new enterprise system that was designed specifically for a cultural institution and that understood our business practices and needs. Enter Blackbaud’s Altru! All data related to our visitors – whether membership, attendance, or donations – would be kept in one, easy-to-access place. It was perfect for what we wanted to do. Out of the box, it was a clean, beautiful system, just waiting to be populated by clean, beautiful data. But, since we already had roughly 23,000 constituents, we decided to migrate the data from all of our old systems into the new one. And that data was not at all clean or beautiful.

The biggest lesson learned during our migration process was a variation on an old adage: garbage out, garbage in, garbage out. When we pulled data from the old system, we decided to take everything, all the way back to 1972. This included not only the major donor who had a lifetime of giving, but also the student who gave $5 during a phone-a-thon in the late 80’s and was never heard from again. We spent roughly six months mapping the data to the new system and fixing as many problems as we could before Blackbaud engineers imported it into Altru. While the migration process itself went extremely smoothly, Bad Data followed us into the new system. Some were things we simply missed, such as phone numbers with incorrect area codes or addresses with duplicate Line 1 and Line 2. The other types of issues we ran into came from not fully understanding how the new system worked. For example, our membership program in Altru only allows one membership per person; however, our migrated data created a separate membership for each level that the individual had ever purchased over the course of their lifetime.

In retrospect, it may have been better to only migrate data that was directly relevant to our organization today. So the major donor mentioned before would have been migrated, but not the student we only had contact with once in the late 80s. This would have minimized the old data that needed to be cleaned up.  Hindsight, of course, is 20/20 and there are several things we’ve done since migrating to identify and correct Bad Data:

• Run the Duplicate Constituent report monthly. Records that match on 100% of the criteria are automatically merged every week.
• Request a National Change of Address (NCOA) report from our mailing house for every mailing that is sent.
• Identify bounced emails from email appeals and other email communications.
• Create queries to identify inconsistent constituent information, such as female constituents with “Mr.” as the title, or records with an unknown gender but a common name such as Thomas or Janet.

We also created a Data Integrity Team with representatives from all groups in the Museum that either create data or have information needs. By meeting regularly, we can identify what type of questions we want to answer and make sure we have the reports and queries to support those questions. To make sure those reports and queries are accurate, we revise the data gathering processes as needed and document data standards so that everyone responsible for entering data knows how to do so correctly.

With all these efforts, you would think that our data clean-up is finished. And it would be – if new data wasn’t coming into the system every day. We plan to always have new visitors to the Museum and will continue to interact with existing constituents. So data integrity will always be an issue. And data clean-up will never, ever be done.

As I mentioned in my last update, when scheduling Masters Workshops for the end of this year, we tried to make sure we were supporting the tasks that would help you have a successful end of the year. In October, we focused on database clean-up (even the Altru Learn Lab at bbcon was focused on data health!) In November, we’re taking a look at queries and appeals, so that you can pull the best possible mailing lists and segment your mailings how you want them.

We’ll finish up the year focusing on end of year reporting and improving or updating your acknowledgement letters for those year end gifts and the coming new year.

Also, last month we released a new class – Membership Communications in Altru. I highly recommend it for anyone responsible for membership cards and membership renewal notices.

Happy Learning!

Altru Masters Workshop: Focus on the Field – Advanced Appeals and Segmentation – November 4th – 1-2pm ET – Register here

In this one- hour session, we will discuss appeal mailing solicitations and segmentation. This session will focus on end of year solicitations like the annual fund drive, membership drive and donor thank you letters. At the end of the session, you should be able to create multiple selections for different groupings of constituents and attach to an appeal mailing. You should also understand the importance of segmentation and how it affects the responses to marketing efforts.

Altru Masters Workshop: Focus on the Field – Query Tips for Ticketing – November 4th – 4-5pm ET – Register here

Have you ever wished you had a query decoder? Or found yourself expanding endlessly in Browse for Fields in? Well, then this workshop series is for you! The first of a three part series, this one-hour instructor-led workshop will review the architecture of common query source views for ticketing (Sales Order and Reservation) and how they compare to a sales order record. You’ll also leave the class with an arsenal of common fields and techniques for all of your ticketing queries.

Altru Masters Workshop: Focus on the Field – Query Tips for Fundraising – November 11th – 4-5pm ET – Register here

Have you ever wished you had a query decoder? Or found yourself expanding endlessly in Browse for Fields in? Well, then this workshop series is for you! The second of a three part series, this one-hour instructor-led workshop will review the architecture of common query source views used for Fundraising (Constituent and Revenue) and how they compare to constituent and revenue records. You’ll also leave the class with an arsenal of common fields and techniques for all of your fundraising queries.

Altru Masters Workshop: Focus on the Field – Query Tips for Membership – November 18th – 4-5pm ET – Register here

Have you ever wished you had a query decoder? Or found yourself expanding endlessly in Browse for Fields in? Well, then this workshop series is for you! The third of a three part series, this one-hour instructor-led workshop will review the architecture of common query source views used for Membership (Constituent and Membership) and how they compare to membership records. You’ll also leave the class with an arsenal of common fields and techniques for all of your membership queries.

Did you know?

While these are special Masters Workshop sessions are run live only once or twice a year, we record them whenever possible and post the recording and a copy of the class materials on our website. Check out the past Masters Workshops.

And as always, we have our regularly scheduled classes:

Appeals & Mailings 101 – November 9, 30

Batch 101 – November 18. December 4

Daily Financial Reconciliation – November 11, 30

General Sales 101 – November 3, 16

Introduction to Altru – November 2, 20

Managing Group Sales Reservations – November 6, 17

Membership Communications – November 13, 30

Membership Setup 101 – November 5, 16

Merchandise 101 – November 12

Query 101 – November 10, December 3

Query 201 – November 12, December 3

Revenue 101 – November 3, 19

Ticketing Setup 101 – November 4, 17

Web Forms 101 – November 13, December 2

Don’t forget, you can get to all of our Altru education resources by visiting www.blackbaud.com/altru-training. Make it a bookmark in your web browser today!

*Update: Due to migration issues, the community migration has been delayed until early December. We will keep you posted as we have new dates.

Several months ago I mentioned that Blackbaud has begun launching new communities. RE, REnxt, eTapestry, Target Analytics, and several others are now up and running. In order to provide a cohesive experience for all our customers, the Altru community will be migrating over to the new platform as well.

I’m pretty excited about the new space. We will move over topic archives, and the community will have all your resources – links to the new features page, training, Knowledgebase, etc. Additionally, the new platform has some great features that will be available to you. Here are a few:

• You’ll have the ability to search for community members by their product (Altru), vertical (Arts & Cultural), role (Membership), organization name and zip code. You can friend these members, send them private messages, and form groups.
• You’ll have the ability to post events. If you’d like to plan a user group meet up, or connect with members at a conference, you’ll have a place to post details, invite members, and RSVP.
• You’ll also have the ability to upload documents. No more screenshots of helpful documents. If you’ve created a doc you’d like to share with the group, you’ll be able to do that.

When will this happen?

We will have to shut down our current community for a few days, starting Wednesday, Nov 18th. This will allow us to move topics to the new space. You will still be able to view and search this community, but you will not have the ability to post new topics, as they wouldn’t be moved over. The new community will be available to you on Tuesday, Nov 24th. The old url will be rerouted, so you don’t need to update your bookmarks, etc.

More details about the move – including which topics, ideas, and profile information will move – is available in this community post.

I’ll be doing a walkthrough of the new space, after we’re set up there. You can register here. Come check out the new features and I’ll answer any questions you have.

In the meantime, please go ahead and join the new community!

In December, we are wrapping up the Masters Workshops focused on having the best possible end of year with Altru. We’re focusing on end of year reporting and improving or updating your acknowledgement letters. I’ve also posted the classes that we ran in October and November on data clean-up and health, Appeals, and Query tips. You can check them out on our consolidated Altru Training page under the Masters Workshop header.

Altru Masters Workshop: Improving your Acknowledgements – December 2nd – 1-2pm ET – Register here

This Masters Workshop explores the best practices for one of your most important donor communications: your acknowledgements! During this hour-long session we will review acknowledgement configuration, offer suggestions for improved segmentation, demonstrate adding common merge fields, and provide tips and tricks for using the letter content editor.

Altru Masters Workshop: End of Year Reporting and Analysis Part I – December 7th – 1-2pm ET – Register here

In this one-hour instructor-led hour session, we will discuss things you should do to prepare for your Annual Report such as basic end of year reporting including attendance for the year and revenue tracking. This is the first of a two-part series.  Part II must be enrolled in separately.

Altru Masters Workshop: End of Year Reporting and Analysis Part II – December 14th – 1-2pm ET – Register here

In this one-hour instructor-led follow-up to the End of Year Reporting and Analysis Part I session, we will discuss in-depth end of year reporting and preparation for the new year. Topics include writing off unpaid pledges, creating future fiscal years, grant reporting, and sending out annual statements to your donors. This is the second session of a two-part series.  Part I must be enrolled in separately. We recommend attending Part I as a prerequisite for Part II.

Did you know?

While these are special Masters Workshop sessions are run live only once or twice a year, we record them whenever possible and post the recording and a copy of the class materials on our website. Check out the past Masters Workshops.

And as always, we have our regularly scheduled classes:

Appeals & Mailings 101 – November 30, December 18

Batch 101 – December 4, 21

Daily Financial Reconciliation – November 30, December 17

General Sales 101 – December 11, 30

Introduction to Altru – December 7, 23

Managing Group Sales Reservations – December 10, 29

Membership Communications – November 30, December 14

Membership Setup 101 – December 9, 21

Merchandise 101 – December 10, 17

Query 101 – December 3, 15

Query 201 – December 3, 16

Revenue 101 – December 8

Ticketing Setup 101 – December 9, 22

Web Forms 101 – December 2, 16

Don’t forget, you can get to all of our Altru education resources by visiting www.blackbaud.com/altru-training. Make it a bookmark in your web browser today!