Preparing for 20/20 Vision

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I’ve been excited about 2020 since the 1990s. I remember thinking the switch to 2000 was going to be so strange—and then I wondered if we’d all have 20/20 vision in the year 2020.

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Since then, I’ve worked in the nonprofit and social good space for two decades. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard and said things like:

I wish I would have known that sooner
Looking back, I would have done x-y-z differently
Knowing what I know now, I would have done that differently

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As you prepare for the end of 2019 and the arrival of 2020, what are some of your goals for your organization and Altru?

Increasing memberships and retaining members?
Writing better appeals?
Cleaning up your database?
Doing things more quickly?
Or something else?

As I do my own preparing for 2020, I want to ensure that I cover all your top Altru topics with Blackbaud University courses, blogs, and discussions.

Do you have ideas? Let me know in the comments, or complete the poll at the top-right of your Blackbaud Community Altru home page. Let’s help each other make 2020 the best year yet!

News ARCHIVED | Blackbaud Altru® Tips and Tricks 09/19/2019 10:17am EDT

Added by Melissa Rancour

4 Comments

Angela Brown Oct '19

I wish we had known about Altru appeal mailings sooner. When we first began using Altru we were using queries to pull mailing lists and the clean up was maddening. Appeal mailings has solved all of our issues and prompted us on some needed data clean up for an even better result.

Wendy Hickok Sep '19

For Finance- The Total Payment Revenue Report needs to be able to sort by Payment Method. right now you can only sort by Date, Constituent Name, Transaction Type, and Amount. But on a Financial end we reconcile by Cash, Check, Credit Card, and Gift Card so it would be nice if the report could be sorted by that and show a total for teach Revenue Type by Payment Method. Currently we have to add up all the Cash payments for Admission and then the Credit card payments for Admission. Then all the cash payments for Parking and then the credit card payments for Parking. And exporting to a CSV file is too time consuming to reformat.

J Kiku Langford McDonald Sep '19

I wish I had known how to use mail merge logic to customize/personalize letters sooner! I would have set up our renewal processes much differently and now I have to re-do the whole thing.

Dylan Davison Sep '19

Hi! I'd love to hear some Altru success stories and see if others can grow from your success. For example - have you leveraged analytics with your ticket buyers? Grew membership retention with auto-renew? Let's share some success and inspire to raise the bar!