When the Honeymoon Phase is Over ...

I've only been married for a year and a half, so I won’t pretend that I’m an expert in marriage.  By most people’s standards, my wife and I are still in our “honeymoon phase.” Even though our marriage is recent, it can still be easy to forget about those things I initially found attractive in her.

As a Solutions Engineer for Altru, I get to demonstrate the product to organizations that are looking to upgrade or consolidate their systems and take advantage of Altru’s functionality. I get to hear first-hand which features organizations believe could improve their business processes and save them time.

Are these the same features that your organization is still excited about? Have you been able to use them and see the positive impact on your business? Maybe it’s time to “remember the early years” and re-visit some of those features that attracted you to Altru in the beginning. Here are just a few of the items that I've seen new organizations get excited about when they first start learning about Altru:

360 Degree View:

By consolidating the various areas of your business (i.e. Development, Membership, Program sales, etc.), Altru it gives you the unique advantage of reporting on your entire organization in one system.  Are you using this to your advantage in your reports, queries, mailings, reporting, and membership conversions? Some examples of this could be querying on the number of member visits by date, or using reports like the Total Revenue & Payments report to see a total view of your organization’s revenue. To see a list of the most valuable queries from other organizations, visit our MVP Query contest here.

Mobile Functionality:

Since Altru is a cloud-based system, it can easily be pulled up on your tablet or mobile device. Most of the tasks in Altru can be successfully completed on a tablet or smart phone. Also, by saving your Altru landing page as a bookmark in your internet browser, you can quickly access Altru from your smart phone. Tip: I use Google Chrome and sign into my account on my smart phone so this carries over all of my bookmarks from my computer. Here’s a website that shows how to add bookmarks in Google Chrome.

Also, don’t forget about our Mobile Check-in and Mobile Query functionality. They are built specifically for mobile devices and can be found on your Altru launch page. With Mobile Query, you can check the box when saving a query to Make this query available in Mobile Query and then open the query from the link on the launch page to view it in a format specifically designed for mobile devices.

Notifications:

Organizations see the value in letting their staff know specific things about a constituent when they come to the front desk. Notifying a front desk staff that a patron is a major donor, board member, or that they left their coat at last week’s event could help them make the most of that front desk interaction. To learn more about using notifications and the different ways that Hands On Children’s Museum is incorporating them, visit our blog post here.

You don't need flowers or a bottle of wine, but it might be a good idea to take a step back and think about the things that got you excited about Altru in the beginning. Try to rekindle the romance and use the items above as a starting point in making sure your organization is using Altru to its fullest. What are some of things that got you excited about Altru in the beginning?

Let us know in the community!