Someone scans a barcode at the door, the scanner beeps green, and the guest walks in. Then a week later the education coordinator pulls the attendee list for a workshop and half the people who were plainly in the room show as “registered” but not “attended.” Somebody now has to tick boxes by hand from a paper list or memory.
That gap shows up most often with registered programs: lectures, classes, camps, member previews, tours with a named roster. The fix starts with understanding that a scan and a check-in are often two different things in Altru.
A scanned ticket is not always a checked-in registrant
In Altru, a ticket and a registrant can live in different places. The ticket is a sales item with a barcode, and scanning it records that the ticket was redeemed. A registrant is a constituent tied to a specific program or event, with their own attendance status. Depending on how your program or event was set up and how the sale happened, scanning the ticket may update the ticket and leave the registrant’s attendance untouched.
We can’t promise exactly how your configuration behaves, because it depends on the program type, whether the event uses registrations, and how the sale was entered (daily sales, advance sales, group sales, or a web form). Before you design a workaround, find out what your scans actually change.
A five-minute test
- In a sandbox or on a low-stakes test program, sell one ticket to a test constituent through the same channel your real guests use.
- Note the registrant’s status on the event or program before scanning.
- Scan the ticket using the device and method your door staff use.
- Look again at the registrant’s attendance status, and at the ticket’s redemption status.
If the registrant flips to attended, your problem is probably training or a different sales channel creating records that don’t link up. If only the ticket changes, you’re dealing with a structural gap, and Blackbaud support can confirm whether there is a setting you’re missing for your version.
Ways to close the gap
Reconcile from scan data after the event
If scans are recorded but attendance isn’t, the scan data is still your best evidence. Build a query of tickets redeemed for the program and date, and compare it to the registrant list for the same event. Anyone on both lists gets marked attended. This is manual, but it’s a short, repeatable task instead of guesswork, and it gives you one source to defend if a report gets questioned later.
Mark attendance at the door instead of scanning
For small, named-roster programs (a 20-person class, a donor tour), skip scanning entirely. Print or open the registrant list and have the greeter check people off directly on the event record. It’s slower per person but the record is right the first time, and there is nothing to reconcile.
Decide which record your reports trust
The less obvious problem is that different people report from different records. Education may count registrants marked attended; visitor services counts scanned tickets; development wants member attendance for stewardship. Pick one as the official attendance number for each program type and write it down. If ticket redemption is the standard, build your reports and smart fields off that and stop asking staff to maintain registrant attendance at all.
Prevent the mismatch going forward
- Sell registered programs through one channel. When a class is sold partly at the desk and partly online through different forms, the resulting records may not connect the same way. Fewer paths means fewer surprises at check-in.
- Require a named constituent on registered sales. An anonymous ticket can’t become an attended registrant later, no matter what you scan.
- Brief door staff on the difference. A volunteer who knows “green means the ticket is good, not that their class attendance is recorded” is less likely to skip the roster step when you need it.
- Schedule the reconciliation. If you go the query route, tie it to something that already happens, like a weekly reporting review, so it doesn’t drift for a month.
Scanning at the door
For the scanning step itself, Social Good’s Ticket Scanner lets staff scan Altru tickets and membership barcodes on mobile devices at the door, which helps when you have more entrances than fixed scanners. It doesn’t replace the decisions above: test what a scan updates in your setup, choose which record counts as attendance, and reconcile if the two don’t line up.
Quick answers
Can I bulk-mark registrants as attended after the fact?
That depends on your Altru version and permissions, so check in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support. If there’s no bulk option, a reconciliation query at least narrows the manual work to the people who actually showed up.
Do membership scans count as attendance?
Scanning a member card typically records a visit or admission, not a registration for a specific program. Treat them as separate measures unless your testing shows otherwise.
