Name: Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud Altru®
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T18:31:16.974Z
Duration: 29 min 40 s
Description: Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud Altru®

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud Altru®": Hello, everyone, and welcome to our November 2025 product update briefing for Blackbaud Altru. My name is Nick Vilatis, and I'm gonna be getting us started here today, before passing to my colleagues, Kunal and Devindra, who will be handling the, bulk of today's content. And then I will get you guys out of here with a few, opportunities to learn more and continue to better leverage Altru. Just to take a glimpse at our agenda for the day, again, I will get us started with, helping us settle in with some housekeeping, notes and then taking you through the development themes that we focus on as we develop Altru. DaVinci is actually gonna then go through some use cases that, actually kind of further contextualize those development themes for you. After that, Kunal is going to walk you through what's been, released since our last, the last time we met in this setting, which would have been in May earlier this year, followed by what's coming next, things that are actively being developed that we can say with confidence will be released, in the earlier half of next year. Then Davenger's gonna come back with, some more tips and tricks to help you better unlock Altru's potential and leverage it to be more successful and a more powerful tool for your organization. And then, again, I'll close this out with some opportunities to go out and learn more and continue to leverage Altru more prolifically. Just to, again, help us get settled in, if this is your first time joining us here on GoldCast, it is our webinar platform. The webinar is audio only, so you don't have an opportunity to speak back to us, unfortunately. But, hopefully, you can hear me okay through your computer speakers right now. If you like captions, you can toggle those on and off with the CC button. And then if you encounter any audio or technical issues, the best troubleshooting step, as silly as it may sound, is just to refresh your browser, which should you bring you back to the live point in the presentation. So if you have any glitching or lagging, just go ahead and refresh, and, hopefully, that will, get you back up to speed. If, you know, your problems or or issues are so overwhelming, fear not. You will get a recording of this within twenty four hours, and you can watch it at your convenience. I did mention you can't talk to us, but we hope you will do your best to do so through the q and a tab, which is there at the top right. That is where you can submit questions and comments throughout today's presentation. We do have some folks behind the scene that will be following up on this, hopefully, in real time. If we don't get to it, right as it's coming through, we certainly will, follow back up with you. So please pepper our q and a with your questions and comments throughout. As you do so, please be as specific as possible. Don't just, you know, simply say, when was this available or when will this be available. Please refer to the features by name because, again, we might be following up after the fact, so that'll help us make sure, we can get your questions in the most timely needs possible. Next to q and a, you'll also see a docs tab, which is gonna have a lot of, links and helpful resources that'll be referenced throughout this presentation. So there's a companion guide which sort of summarizes it. These slides will be available in PDF format, and then there's also gonna be some release notes and, knowledge based articles and, links to future webinars and such as we go through the presentation. So those can all be found in that docs tab. So having gotten through that a little bit more fun with, good old fashioned boilerplate text here to get us started, but, just an acknowledgment that today's presentation contains forward looking statements that are always subject to change due to unforeseen, excuse me, unforeseen circumstances, and any forward looking projections do not represent a guarantee. So please, as you're making purchase and business decisions, please base those decisions on features and functionality that are currently known and And then just to further set the scene for today's presentation, I'm first going to go through our guiding themes for Blackbaud Altru. If you've been in one of these presentations in the past, this should look familiar, and that is by design as we seek to remain consistent in our development, article and themes over the years. And if you are joining us for the first time, I do see a couple of, first time registrants. We say welcome to you. If you are new to Altru or or just kind of investigating for the first time, just wanna say that Altru is a cohesive management system designed to meet the needs of all stakeholders within your arts and culture organizations. So from the development director to your membership management, membership manager, to the marketing comms, marketing comms teams, and to the ticket sellers, Altru seeks to tie all your team's efforts into one reliable source of truth. Yeah. I'm sorry. I kinda stumped over that. But now on to the themes. Our first theme is to help you inspire your patrons, and we aim to make it easier and more enjoyable for your patrons to interact with your organization, encouraging them to do so repeatedly, and, hopefully, you can grow those relationships to be more valuable. Next up, we hope to help you engage your employees by streamlining, the normal arduous tasks and, the data analysis trends that your teams have to do internally. We hope to make those easier for your staff so that they can focus more on your patrons and less on back office. And finally, we hope that you, can help to amplify impact by connecting other solutions and expanding Altru's ability. Altru is, of course, not just a product, but instead a customizable ecosystem that you can grow with over time. And to better paint this picture, I'm gonna pass it to Devindra who's going to walk you through, an example of a use case journey that sort of ties all these themes together, in one. Thanks, Nick, and sorry for jumping the gun here gun there. I was so excited to get started on my topic here. So really appreciate this opportunity to share an example of how we partnered with an organization that approached our customer success team with an interesting challenge. Now pardon the pun. The organization was looking for insight on how Altru and online giving could assist them in a donor challenge campaign. Now I'm sure many of you are familiar with the concept of donor challenges, but most of you have probably not explored that opportunity through Altru. Donor challenges or challenge grants are a type of funding where a donor pledges a certain amount of money on the condition that the nonprofit raises a specific specified amount from other sources. We encourage organizations to explore this mechanism because donor challenges are designed to encourage broader donor participation, leverage additional funding, build fundraising capacity, increase visibility and urgency around the campaign. Now as you can see in this slide, there's several benefits to using donor challenges with online giving forms and appeal mailings in Altru. The first is increased donor engagement. Donor challenges create urgency and excitement by showing that every gift helps unlock additional funds. With online giving forms, we can display real time progress, motivating donors to participate, higher conversion rates. Leveraging Altru's appeal mailings, we can send targeted challenge messages encouraging donors to act quickly. When donors see their contribution as a multiplier effect, they're more likely to give. Transparency and trust. All two's integration with online giving allows us to track challenge progress and share updates with donors. Online giving forms can display the remaining amount needed to meet that challenge goal. Simplify tracking and reporting. Alltrue automatically records gifts toward the challenge, so this reduces any post transaction manual work. We can also generate reports in all two to measure campaign success and donor participation. And finally, enhanced marketing opportunities. Enhance mark combining appeal mailings with online forms creates a multi channel approach. We can combine highlight and promote this challenge through emails, social media, and printed appeals for maximum reach. As we all know, all of this can encourage larger gifts. Donors often increase their gift size when they know it will help meet a challenge goal. Matching or challenge campaigns can attract major donors who want to leverage their impact. And I can give a personal anecdote here. I was participating in a challenge campaign, and when I found that we were a little bit short for a local radio station, I went in and plugged in multiple donations that same day just to make sure we met that daily goal. So it works. Here's a quick overview of how we can set up an efficient process using AllTrue and online giving. Step one, create the donor challenge record in your AllTrue database. Be sure to connect this challenge to a designation and appeal set up in Altru. Friendly reminder, set up the designation and appeal using Altru best practices to assist with future reporting through Altru. Step two, build out the online giving form connected to this All True designation and appeal. Use the gold meter on the form to display the challenge progress. Promote this online giving form and see how your gifts are tracked automatically. And in step three, create an appeal mailing. Leverage the appeal functionality in Altru to create targeted segmented communications to your for your constituency, promoting this challenge with direct links to the online giving form. To close the loop, here are some potentially familiar looking screenshots of the different components working in sync. In the background, we have the donor challenge set up in AllTrue. On the right hand side, we can see the online giving form that connects to the designation assigned to this donor challenge, and finally, the appeal mailing that drives traffic to the online giving form. I'm sure this has probably got a number of attendees thinking how they can take advantage of this. And a little bit later in this session, we'll be sharing some tips on how we can help you with this effort. I'm going to hand over to Kunal for some insight on exciting things the product team has been working on. All yours, Kunal. Hello, everyone. I'm back. I'm just going to grab a few minutes of your time to shine light on some auto functionality that we have noticed is very easily overlooked by organizations and typically not a part of their scheduled operations, and that is data tune ups. This slide is, is your data reliable? So you can see in here, Altru provides two resources to help you with your data tune ups. The first data tune up services is deceased record finder. It identifies deceased individuals in your database and helps update your records. Now we can run this service one or two times a year. Address finder uses the postal services NCO pay information to update address information. We can run this service up to four times a year, matches up with your quarterly processes perfectly. By running these processes, you're going to save time and resources with updated constituent status and contact information. Updated constituent information, on the other hand, will give you more confidence to take full advantage of the communication resources and targeted messaging that is available in Altru. So why did I think of this concept for the PUP? This slide is one of the reasons for that. Typically, two percent of the constituent database records may be deceased. Now let us be honest. In a CRM database, not all constituents are, quote, unquote, equal. However, it's not uncommon, but sometimes this 2% can be a very important group of supporters and contributors. We believe 13% of Americans move everywhere every year, So there's a very good chance that some of them are in your all true database. Many times, our communications may have a regional focus. And so with a more accurate list of addresses, we can set up more targeted engagement. In line with this 13% moving, it's not uncommon for nonprofit organizations to have 26% of their addresses be invalid or outdated. So running the data tune up processes on a regular schedule can have an immediate impact on saving time and money and deliver a direct impact on your ROI. Now do note that the data tune up processes are a different animal than other mechanisms in Altru that update constituent records. Unlike duplicate merge and constituent batches that are self contained in Altru, data tune ups actually export the constituent information securely out of Altru to a preassigned data service. The service then returns the updated data back into Altru for your team to review and run a preconfigured constituent update batch. So the initial setup is a tad different, and the overall process is a bit more elongated. So if you see in this slide, step one is within the data tune up settings of the administration section of Altru. Within the configuration section, in the finder settings link, you will need to populate your username and secret key. I'm sure some of you are probably asking, what is my username and secret key? Please note that these credentials are specific to the data tune up functionality. If you do not have that information, please reach out to all two support, and they can get this information for you. Do note this information may take a couple of days to retrieve. You'll also need to enter your organization's NAICS code. There's a link within this window to help you find this code. However, I found that sometimes your organization's controller or finance office may also have this information. Step two, review the data tune up settings for your preferred address formatting and FTP connection to make sure everything is working as planned. And finally, in the final step, when you're actually going about setting up your processes, do plan to set up these processes in advance because it can take a number of days from start to finish. Typically, we recommend giving yourselves five to seven business days for the complete process with about two or three business days for the actual updates to be returned. Now remember, you're not in this alone. There are variety of resources available to help you navigate data tune up mechanisms. I have found the data tune up user guide to be a great reference to get started. Remember, we have our trusty knowledge base with its AI assisted search function as a fantastic resource to help you find the answers you need. If all of these self help resources do not give you the specific answer you're searching, you can always reach out to customer success or support for assistance in finding the right direction. And I would be remiss not to mention the Altru community. Sometimes getting input from peers is one of the best channels for insight. Thank you once again for your time. I'm going to hand it over to Nick for some additional insight. Yes. Thank you, Devindra, and thanks especially to all of you for your time today. Hopefully, Devindra's data tune ups there, something you all can can leverage and and make sure that your database is healthy and humming along smoothly. And then, hopefully, Kunal's highlights of what we've released since our last meeting as well as what's coming and, you know, eye opening as well and and excite you to get out and use Altru. In that spirit, a few opportunities to learn even more. First off, Kunal did mention some things from online giving and payment services, but those worlds are ever expanding so that they warrant their own pubs. So we hope you will check those out as well. If you are watching this live, the online giving one is in about an hour and a half, and then the payment services one would be tomorrow. So, if those posted times do not work, certainly sign up, and you will get an on demand link to watch the recording at your convenience. You can scan the QR code there on your screen if you have your phone handy. If not, the links are in the docs tab as well. So please go out and catch those pubs and, stay up to date on your options and what's available to you in the worlds of online giving and payment processing. Next up, connect for success. Our CSM teams are, excited to offer you and your peers the opportunity to connect via virtual roundtable discussions of, topics of shared interest. These can range from things that are super ultra specific, with the features and buttonology, up to high level, fundraising and just support or engagement ideas and topics in general, and then everything in between. The beauty of these is they are led and steered by you all. So please bring your topics, of note, to the table and be on the lookout for invitations from your CSM or always reach out directly to get involved and be aware of when those are coming up. And speaking of our customer success teams, even if you're not ready to maybe sit down and have a conversation, they do an amazing job of servicing some, just always areas of interest to help you, again, use Altru more effectively. So some thought provoking content for you, which you can watch these webinars at any time. And as you can see there, those links or, icons on your screen are not clickable, unfortunately. Again, go to the docs tab to get to the webinar page, but you can see those topics are real, and available to you today. So anything from membership retention to optimizing guest experiences to better leveraging your data internally. Everything under the sun has to having to do with Altru, we probably have a webinar for it. So, get out there and take those in on your time and hopefully learn and continue leveraging Altru. Next up, training. If you are new to your organization or perhaps, your organization is new to Altru or if you just wanna hone your skills and continue to become a a more effective user, Blackbaud University is the place to do that. We are dedicated to make sure that, you have everything you need to get the most out of all of your Blackbaud solutions, Altru included, of course. The training options are available to you via interactive classes that are instructor led, so you can get hyper specific about issues, very, very unique perhaps to your organization, or you can consume, on demand e library courses that are available twenty four seven so you can grow your skills at your own pace and according to the outcomes that are most important to you and your organization. And you can get to Blackbaud University by going to learn.blackbaud.com, or, of course, stop me. If you've heard this before, you can click the link in the docs tab. And finally, Devindra mentioned the Altria community, but just wanted to shout it out one more time. We invite you to please, please, please get active in the Altria community if you're not already. It gives you the opportunity to network with your peer organization so you can seek advice on specific challenges you're facing. If you are, you know, going through something, chances are it's not totally unique. So it's a great opportunity to see if some of your peers have perhaps encountered those issues before and, might have a a novel idea on how to work around it or or get through it. Or maybe on the other hand, if you've had a, you know, tremendous success with an event or a new campaign, you can you can sort of champion that cause and inspire others and and amplify your mission a bit. And then, of course, it's a great way to reach out to us. As Kunal mentioned, the, the group sales functionality that's coming out, in the first couple months of next year, that was the number one most emphasized, issue from the Idea Bank. So we thank you all for surfacing that and highlighting it as a need. You know, we're always mindful of that and and watching the idea banks, and this is one that we picked up and, you know, went out and executed on. And it's now an active development, and we're testing it internally and excited to bring it to you all in good time. So always always, more of that. Please, be active in the community and with the idea banks. And with that, we will say thank you, on behalf of Devindra and Kunal. Again, I'm Nick Veladis, and excited to present to you. And also on behalf of all of our teams internally here at Blackbaud that work within Altru, we know that you all are amazing community. The arts and culture community is one that we're very excited to serve, and and just, again, thank you for your time and your partnership with Blackbaud and Altru. Have a great rest of your day. Hopefully, see you at some future pubs as well as, the upcoming webinars from your CSM teams, and we will talk to you soon. Thanks again, and everyone have a great day.