What's New

To ensure accurate reporting between your Altru and Blackbaud Merchant Services accounts, Credit Card Updater is now automatically enabled in Altru. Previously, you had to manually enable it to see the updated results in Altru.

Also, all stored cards are now eligible for updates. Previously, Altru ran a business process to register and deregister cards with the Credit Card Updater service.

For more information, see Credit Card Updater.

Note: Credit Card Updater automatically runs for all Blackbaud Merchant Services accounts and is included in your standard rate!

Now when you view a proxy user's record, from the Personal Access Token (PAT) tab, you can see details about why a PAT was revoked or made inactive. For example, you can see if Altru automatically marked the PAT inactive due to five or more invalid login attempts.

From Administration, Application users, select a proxy user from the list. Then, select the Personal Access Token tab. Under Reason and Details, view why a PAT was revoked or made inactive.

We made the following improvements to the password reset and user registration web form pages:

• Based on updated guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), web form passwords now remain valid for 9,999 days. Previously, patrons were prompted to reset their passwords every 365 days.

• When a user requests a password reset, the page now instructs them to check their email for instructions or register to create an account. Previously, the page only instructed patrons to check their email, which didn't account for instances where a user may not yet have registered.

• After a user registers or signs in, the message that displays is now tailored to each use case. The user sees “Thank you for registering…” if they registered for a new account or “You are now logged in…” if they logged in with an existing account. Previously, all users would see “Thank you for registering…” which led to confusion.

• Other general improvements to the sign-in workflow.

To better support the Altru and Omatic Cloud Data Integration, under Administration, System roles, we added an Omatic Role system role. This role provides access to various tasks and features necessary to facilitate the integration. Previously, you needed to request the role from Blackbaud Support.

As part of ongoing enhancements to web forms, we removed JQuery Migrate, which was no longer needed. We also upgraded the Bootstrap datepicker component to version 1.9.0.

Warning: These changes may affect customizations such as those made by CSS or JavaScript. We recommend that you plan to review and test your web forms after the upgrade to ensure forms work as expected.

To improve the time it takes to open a link from Web, Manage web forms, we updated all URLs from http:// to https://. Previously, there was a slight delay when selecting a web form URL as Altru redirected to the secure version of the page.

To improve performance of reports, we upgraded the version of Microsoft Report Viewer used.

Now when you add a new merchant account from Revenue, Blackbaud Payment Service merchant accounts, Altru only shows available gateways such as Blackbaud Merchant Services. Previously, unsupported gateways appeared in the list.

To encourage donors to share their support of your organization with their friends, you can enable social sharing for Optimized Donation Forms. Social sharing options will appear to donors when the form launches from a hyperlink or button using the Optimized Loader Script on your website.

From Online Giving, Overview, create or edit an Optimized Donation Form. Next, from Confirmations, select Display social sharing options under Social sharing.

To learn about social sharing and how to use the Optimized Loader Script, see Enable social sharing and Publish an Optimized Donation Form.

To show the impact of your recurring gift plans, view the Total raised from plans from Contributions. The chart displays the amount raised across all recurring gift plans and the amount raised from all types of payments. For more information, see Contributions.

To show the impact of your organization's recurring gift plans, you can view the Recurring gift plan forecast chart in Contributions. It displays past performance, future projections, and potential revenue across active plans and includes a recommended set of action when plans meet specific criteria, such as contacting donors when their plans are paused past 90 days. For more information, see Recurring Gift Plan Forecast.

To ensure accurate reporting in Altru, if you try to skip the last payment of a recurring gift plan before its end date, you now have the option to terminate the plan. To learn how to skip payments, see Pause, Resume, or End Recurring Gift Payments.

Now you can add gifts received via cash or check to a goal meter in website components to reflect the total amount received for a giving event.

From a goal meter in website components, under Source, enter the total number and amount received for offline gifts. For more information, see Goal Meter.

To help you manage recurring gift plans, now you can view plans ending in 90 days, enabling you to contact donors for an extension. To view plans that meet this criteria, from Contributions, select the prompt Contact donors with recurring gift plans that end in 90 days under Needs Attention.

To learn how to update these plans, see Recurring Gift Plans Ending in 90 Days.