Name: Mastering Data Management: Altru - Utilizing batch and Global Changes
Uploaded: 2025-07-23T19:00:35.706Z
Duration: 29 min 28 s
Description: Mastering Data Management: Altru - Utilizing batch and Global Changes

Transcript for "Mastering Data Management: Altru - Utilizing batch and Global Changes": Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the session. I'm glad you're here. I hope you're glad you're here. We're gonna start in just a moment. I wanna make sure everyone has a chance to join. Alright. Our numbers are going up, up, up, which means people are here, here, here. So I'm excited you're here. We're gonna get going. We are today, we're gonna be talking about using batch and global changes in Altru. Thank you for joining us here. My name is Evan, and I am the host today. Oh, Chrissy, you know me too well. Blackberry or raspberry? I'm gonna go blackberry pie. Yeah. For those of you who don't know me, I'm a, ultra enthusiast as well as a pie enthusiast. I love to talk about pies in all my meetings. I I also been talking a lot about ice cream. It's something else I like to talk about in the summertime. But blackberry over I've never had raspberry pie, Chrissy. And if you guys don't know what we're talking about, we're in the chat looking at pies. So my name is Evan. I'm a customer success manager at Blackbaud. Hello. I live in Windom, Maine. I'm a lover out of outdoors, consumer of pies. And this time of year, I'm a particularly big swimmer because I live right near Sebago Lake, if you know where that is in Maine. Wonderful. I'd love to know more about you guys as well, so feel free to share with me anything you wanna share in the chat. I would love to know who you are, where you are, what you do for a living, help how do you help your organization maybe, what your organization does, and most importantly, what's your favorite pie, why is it your favorite pie. We could basically skip talking about batches today, just talk about pie. So feel free to go into the chat, which is in your upper right. It's Chrissy already has, and she wants to know what do you guys like, Blackberry or Raspberry Pi? I don't think I've ever had Raspberry Pi. I love raspberry jam. So feel free to put yourself out there just like Chrissy did. Tell me what you're thinking. Okay. I don't even know what derby pie is. I feel like I just had a learning moment. Thank you, Jonathan. What is derby pie? Gonna look that up. Oh. So if you don't know, and I just Googled it, Derby Pie is an open faced custard pie with chocolate walnuts and a pastry crust. What? Key lime pie takes the cake. Thank you, Maddie. I also love key lime pie. I basically love all pies. You're not gonna find me going, no. I don't like that pie. And Laurie, she's ready to set us all up with blackberries and raspberries for our pies and jams. Thank you very much. You guys are great, and you can feel free to keep talking about pie and something in the chat. The chat is the best way to get a hold of me. So if you feel like you wanna tell me something, throw it right up in there in the chat right over there. Some quick housekeeping things, this audio should be broadcast through your computer. So if you can't hear me, we've been talking about you this whole time and it's awkward. Refresh your browser if you're having issues. Use chat to ask questions. There's a cogwheel that can adjust your settings at the bottom. And your feedback is important. I'll have a survey at the end. So let me know all about it. Kelly got apple pie with vanilla ice cream. That's a classic, Kelly. Apple pie is my favorite pie. Old fashioned cream is amazing. Old fashioned cream pie. All these pies and you guys are making me starving. I shouldn't have brought it up. It's it's too too soon. I just had lunch. But keep talking about pie. Let me know how you're going. So today, we're gonna talk about a couple of things. Right? These are tools to better use Altru. So I wanna make sure you guys get a thing going today. We're talking about batch, because with batch, you can add or update multiple records in your database all at once. It's a efficient alternative to working with records individually, and it saves lots of times. So if you're working in bulk, you are not opening and working with individual records one at a time. You're just opening one big page and you're changing a lot of records. Right? For example, if you have a similar information such as a group of volunteer time sheets from Saturday's walkathon, it is a lot easier to add that information to your database in a group format using a time sheet batch, which is a real batch. If you guys if there's something I don't go over here but you do wanna know more about, you know what I mean, make sure to either throw us an email, reach out to your success manager. You can always check out me and even if I'm not your success manager, I'll get you in touch with whoever you need to get in touch with. But if there's things we don't go over but you wanna know more about Lydia. But before you can do a batch, you have to work with the following batch configuration tasks to make sure that there's a consistent environment for your batch processes. Okay? So you have to configure your numbering, configuring the workflow, and the templates. You have to make sure those are all set. So a lot of people say to me, like, what are the things I could add with batch? Well, it's a huge list. Okay? Some of the big ones though that people love to use it for is, for, like, constituents, just adding a bunch of them. There's also a constituent update batch. So if you wanna change something about, a bunch of records that you have, there's also the, event batch and the event registration batch. Those are big ones too. Using the event registration batch, you can create a list of all the people that you wanna register for something that you maybe didn't get a chance to update before. But these are all on here and they are all something that you guys might wanna be involved in working with, so check them out. I'm gonna mention this at the end, but I'm gonna mention it again now and I'll mention it probably one more time. In the upper area where you saw a chat, there's also a docs section. You should click on that. There is tons of fun stuff that I put in there, that are gonna help you guys get better with batch and and, global changes as well. Okay. One of the things I talked to you about earlier was adding constituent records or updating them. In the constituent batch, the program lists the fields included in the selected batch template in the spreadsheet so you can enter information in a database. Or if you're doing a constituent update batch, you do a search for those who you want to change and then edit their fields. Okay? So it's a pretty easy thing to work with in batch, but, it can sometimes feel a little daunting. So I've decided that you guys deserve a quick demo. So if you pause, the slides for just a second here, I'm going to change and do a screen share. And you should be seeing the batch entry screen from Altru on your screen. This is a generic Altru database that we have here at Blackbaud. It is run and only run by people here at Blackbaud. No organization is affiliated with it. And all the data in it is complete nonsense, so you'll forgive me if that's what you see. This is a example. I'm just gonna show you of a constituent batch that's already in here. But I wanna show you a how to make a brand new one. So let's add a batch. Let's do an event registration batch. They're so much fun. In an event registration batch, you simply have to start up by looking for the event you want. We've got an event called the Altru batch party. Absolutely. Right? And who we wanna add to this? Who's going to the party? Yours truly, of course. I'm coming as an adult, although I hardly qualify. You can add your guests, the date you're coming, your registration, and whether or not you actually attended. Of course, I attended. And you can do this for multiple people, multiple times. So you can be doing this all for the same party Or you could be saying, I only have information about these particular people and I wanna change their different events. Kelly asked me, can I talk about the need or not to to have the lookup ID for constituents? This seems to trip me up. If I have a list of names from event, I won't have the lookup IDs. Some might be in Altru already and some might not. That's totally understandable. You can see the lookup ID right here on my screen. That just helps you verify, if you have somebody whose name is perhaps Bob Smith, and you're like, oh, I'll just put Bob Smith in there, Kelly. It's not a big deal, except for that there might be multiple Bob Smiths, and you need to make sure you have the right one. And you're also correct that it's actually more of an import thing and not batch where you need to have the lookup IDs. But that is important, Kelly, because the system does not know who you were talking about. The best way that you can do that if you're trying to import a bunch of people is you can try to find their IDs by going in the system ahead of time and then, exporting those out. It's really the best thing I can say for that. But in this case, I just wanted to show you that we can also, you know, do a couple of different things and I can do the same person. Over and over again. So I'm now telling myself that I'm here multiple times. Okay. And this isn't set up correctly. It doesn't have a registration option, so it won't let me click one in here. So it's already stopping me and saying you can't register for him. So this will tell me that I need to actually go back in. I can delete this row, but I can actually go back in and make changes to the June 2025. Or I perhaps set them up for the different a different party. Okay. When you're ready to be done with this, you're just gonna hit save. It'll take you back to this area right here where you can see your batch, and we're gonna just kinda go like this. And we're gonna say commit this batch, Validate before. Alright. Alright. Alright. There were three processed, three successful, so we had no problems. So everything is good, and all those people have been registered for the event that you had in mind. That's just one of the many different kinds of batch entries you can do in here. As I said, your list is pretty long. Here's all of your templates right here. Constituent batch, constituent update batch, all this kind of stuff is all in here. You should make sure you get a chance to go up in the doc section where I put a lot of stuff about batches in there. Okay. We're gonna talk a little bit more. I wanna talk about global changes. Okay. Global change is different than a batch. With a global change, this functionality allows you to make select changes to a specific group of records in your system. Okay? So for example, you have trustees for your organization and they're rotated annually. So every year, you have to remove the trustee constituency from all the previous year's trustees and maybe you wanna use a selection of your previous year's trustees, so use the delete user defined constituency global change. This definition will remove that trustee constituency from all expired trustee records. Was that confusing enough for you? Good. Some other examples, where global changes we have is updating membership status, adding or deleting constituent attributes, which is a big one, adding a mail code, adding solicit codes, and deleting constituents. The last one, we gotta be careful about. So if you use global change to delete records, they are almost impossible to get back. I'm gonna say it again. If you use global change to delete records, they are almost impossible to get back. So be very careful when making any global changes. I recommend using small selections at first to do a test if you've never done one before. Okay? But as you might have guessed, I am gonna show you how to do some global changes. Can a global change be used to remove specific note types? You know, I don't think that's something that we can do. Let me see. Good question, Joe. I know we can delete a constituent attribute and a constituency. I don't believe it's there, Joe. Great question though, and I appreciate it. So let me give you a quick show. You're welcome, Joe. Alright. Let's see here. Okay. Here we go. Here's, to get to global changes, you go to administration and and then you're gonna go over here and you're gonna click on global changes under data. I got a question from Chrissy. She says, what about auto renewal removals? Like, are you saying do a global change to remove auto renewals from a group of members? No. I don't believe that that's one in here. So here are your choices right here for add right there. And you can see we have audit tables, batch reports, business, and constituents. And you can set all your things in here and you can update a membership status. Chrissy, that's about all you can do with that. But the one of the more common ones people like to do is adding, of course, constituent interactions or attributes. So maybe we wanna do a constituent attribute. Now if you're gonna do this one, you gotta know that with all of these global changes, you have to have a selection made in advance, a selection of people you're gonna pull from. Okay? So we're gonna make a global change to a constituent attribute. And what we've got is a selection that we're gonna look out for right here. Oh, can't find the one we want. That's alright. We're just gonna add one real quick. Alright. We're looking for every constituent whose first name is equal to Bob. So now our query is are kinda pull things together so that our global change can look at everyone who fall into our query with the first name of Bob. You'll forgive me. It's running slow because it knows you're watching. So this is the boring part. Sorry about that. Joe, thank you so much. You read my mind. You can look at a picture of me looking off in the distance with my giant child walking in the background instead while I try to make this do something. Jeff, thanks. We all work in Altru. We know. We know. Kelly says she's tried to add global changes to add constituent attributes where the attribute can have multiple values and the attribute can be on a consistent record multiple times. It is to denote members of a donor circle and the attribute value is the year. I find that the global change only puts the newest year on those records, didn't have the attribute for a previous year. Does this seem right or should there be a way to do this? A global change is basically gonna make a group of people and add an attribute. That's what it really can do and globally remove them as well. So you're gonna, probably not find that that is gonna work for you the way you're trying to do it. So that might be your problem, Kelly. And we're gonna try it again. Sorry. Working much better. Do you see this? So now we it's when it says category, this is basically what type of a, attribute are you adding. And we're gonna say that everybody whose first name is Bob is allergic to being called Robert. And there it is right here. Process global change. This is gonna to our change. Kelly, if everyone is in your selection, it should be able to add an attribute, but it sounds like you're trying to add more than one attribute in one change. And it's gonna if it's the same attribute type, then it might overwrite it with whatever the most recent one you're doing. So if you're running it again and again and again, you would need to, like, set up the way it's being, like, situated as, attribute types. Like, you notice that when I did that, it had a category on it. That might be your problem. So you wanted to ask if I could add another one allergy to the same people. So I did this one right here. So let's add another one. If I wanted to add a constituent attribute, you'll see that there's only a choice for one category and one thing. I can't add multiple allergies at the same time to this group. Right? You can if you uncheck the override existing value, then it will leave another one on there. So if I come in and and I use my same selection, and now I change the allergies to something else. Right? They're allergic to the word pink. Alright. Now it's not gonna overwrite their allergy that I gave of their their full name, Robert. It's gonna overwrite it. It's gonna leave that one there and give them another one, but it's gonna have to be done separately. Does that make sense? So that's how that would work. Okay? Was that confusing enough for everybody? So with batch and global changes, you can give yourself the opportunity to affect multiple records at the same time and they're powerful tools. We recommend taking time to learn more about them from the Altru courses or Blackbaud University, and you should take all proper precautions when working with them. Speaking of working with us, if you guys are ever interested in working with Blackbaud, we're always looking for more advocates. If you're interested in becoming an advocate for Blackbaud, let me know. I'm not not aware, Joe, of a specific one. So, yeah, I don't think there's an ultra two an ultra tool to remove notes types. Amber, thank you for reaching out and saying you'd like to be an advocate. It's great. I will add you to our list. Speaking of things that you guys are great at, I'm going to launch a survey. And if you guys would fill that out, I would be so helpful. Make sure, you guys check those resources that I loaded up for you. They're in the docs section right above the chat, so check out those. And if you are interested in getting a little bit more out of your Blackbaud subscription that you have, you may be also interested in a advisory plus subscription. Basically, advisory plus is like getting a Blackbaud personnel to work for your team to help you meet certain goals in your system. So if you have an Altru Advisory Plus subscription, you would have an Altru expert who meets with you on a regular basis, does one on one consulting to help you guys achieve, your goals, tailored guidance using your data, and deep experience. So if you're interested in that, throw something in the chat, and I'll have somebody reach out to you about that as well. We do find that a lot of people are getting more out of their systems by using advisory plus. My customers who use it love it. Don't forget, you have lots of other resources besides me at your fingertips, university, customer support, the knowledge base is updated. That's where I got all these docs and stuff from. My favorite, the Blackbaud community where you guys talk to each other. So talk to each other, and let me know how that goes. The Blackbaud community is fantastic stuff. It's the best place. And most importantly, I wanna say thank you guys for coming. Taylor, I see that you wrote that in there, and I will make sure to have somebody reach out to you. Okay? Thanks guys for coming. Oh, Chrissy. Excellent. Thanks so very much. Thanks guys for coming today. Really appreciate it. You guys asked great questions. You helped me do a better session, and we talked about pies that I'd never heard of before, and now I'm gonna go eat those. So have a great rest of your week. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great rest of your summer. I appreciate everything that you guys do for your community. I think that the arts are essential and what you guys put out there in the community is fantastic. So keep doing what you're doing, and I really do hope that you guys got something out of this session to make your organization more successful. Take care. Bye bye.