Blackbaud Altru vs. DonationMatch

Destinations with both membership/donations and admissions will benefit from Altru's capability to track revenue from all angles. As a pretty robust system, you'll find many ways to utilize Altru including through mailings and mailing lists, major donor moves management, merchandise, and online forms.

It is a great tool for connecting businesses with products or services to donate with interested persons, via non-profit fundraisers, which can be selected based on values and mission. It is also an affordable way to solicit donations for non-profit fundraising events.

• Instant sharing of data across departments. When a visitor's address is updated at the front desk, that information is available immediately to our development staff.
• 360 degree view of our visitors. We can see all of a visitor's activity -- when they're coming to the museum, what events they attend -- which gives us a better understanding of their needs.
• Altru can be accessed from anywhere. If we hold an event off-site, we can still handle admissions/registrations so long as there is a network.
• Altru Tech Support is awesome! They are very patient and, if they don't know the answer, they find out for you.

• Expands audience awareness. Directly connects me with interested persons.
• Grows email list through participation in my donated content.

• Custom querying features can be cumbersome to build and don't always give you the results you expect.
• Online payments cannot always be re-designated, which can be difficult with high level donors and board members make pledge payments through an online form and then they cannot be re-designated to their pledge.
• Multiple donor or membership programs can be difficult to manage.

Incentivized

• Minor detail, but when you reply to messages the subject line turns blank, and I wish it would populate as re: original message subject.

Blackbaud Altru is a very integrated system, but training is lacking and the use of the system takes some getting use to

They are always available and very knowledgable. Many times I am able to come up with a solution before they've finished troubleshooting just by having talked through it with them. I really appreciate the Chat feature to answer simple questions in a timely fashion. The training I received was top notch and very detailed.

Incentivized

Having used multiple databases to collect data from visitors across all of our points of contact, we found we had information, but no comparison between areas. It was possible to have a volunteer who made a donation, bought a membership, made purchases in the shop, and attended a workshop, but only visited the galleries 1x a year. The result was to have power users without knowing it. While each of the products we had used were fine in their own right, they lacked the ability to tell us what we most needed to know - how often we were used across all of our points of service. Altru gave us that.

Incentivized

I've never used anything like this before. I used to do it all one non-profit at a time!

• It has become very tedious to account for registrants in each session of a class or camp, because you have to "sell" them into each session in order to have an accurate class roster.
• It is very easy to process payment and entry fees to our Museum and programs.
• It is easy to retrieve accurate information and records of patrons.

Incentivized