Blackbaud Altru

Well suited for smaller organizations that want to centralize many systems. Smaller organizations will have less constituents to manage and fewer events (our organization has 100,000+ constituents, daily programs/events, and a large donor base). Many areas within Altru are not updated to be functional for 2020. Because of this, we do not use the merchandising feature, the volunteer portal, or marketing communications.

It does a little bit of everything "okay enough" to be better than having separate systems. It's restrictive in many areas, but being able to do SO much in one database outweighs the negatives! It is 100% necessary to have a data manager who spends all of their time in Altru doing data cleanup, researching and writing policies and procedures, training new users, keeping staff up-to-date on new processes, creating queries and running reports, creating workarounds for "unfixable" issues within the database.

Altru shines in capturing constituent data. If you are looking for a product to collect user info and their use patterns then this database works. The challenge is getting the data out in a format usable for decision making and application. Reporting can be a bear. The preloaded key performance indicators and reports are useful but may not fit your need. Every institution is different, and every department has different needs. This product tries to bridge the gaps to create communication between areas, but at a cost. This will not serve any of the departments at 100% of what is wanted out of a database. Altru is a whole institution choice for the benefit of cross-department collaboration.

Altru is best suited for a primary sales system and donor and member management database. It is good at compiling and exporting user data and input into queries and Excel sheets. It is not suited for class and camp registration, especially if they involve multiple days and weeks. Altru does not have the capacity to sell or manage multi-day events, without some manipulation through the "back end" of the system.

Our organization has had great success with Altru. You can find a lot of work-arounds for things in Altru, so even if it is not exactly what your organization is used to doing, you can usually always find a way to make it work. And Altru is great at listening to feedback from its users. If there is something that the Altru community is really pushing for, they will usually try and implement it in one of their many updates throughout the year.

The one thing to keep in mind if you switch to Altru is that, like with any enterprise system, you're not just buying a piece of software, you're also buying the underlying business practices. The biggest hiccups the RISD Museum had in switching to Altru weren't related to the software as much as they were related to figuring out how to do our business within the constraints of the system. Fortunately, Altru was a very close match to what we already did.

It's worked well for our newly-expanded museum over the past year. We've got a growing membership program (~12,000 members) and our highest visitation and we can find that information we need for reporting from the reports and queries. For the most part, we've been satisfied with what Altru has to offer. For the areas we find lacking, support offers a page where you can contribute an idea for improvement to be voted on, and we have seen some of these implemented in the update releases which are scheduled every 45-90 days. We are only in our first year of use, but I think down the road we will have the majority of our needs figured out.