Take a lecture series with eight sessions, or a summer camp split into weekly sessions. Each one is its own event in Altru with its own registration options. Then the member price changes, or you add a “bring a guest” option, or a deadline moves. You open the first event, make the change, save it, and you still have seven more to go.
Most administrators expect a series to act like a parent and its children: change the options once at the top and every session picks them up. In our experience Altru doesn’t work that way. Registration options and the settings on event registration forms are kept per event, and we don’t know of a way to push a change from a parent event down to its child events. Before you plan around this, check your own version. Test a change on a parent event in a sandbox, or ask Blackbaud support whether your release supports it. Updates do sometimes change behavior.
Until then, the practical goal is to make each per-event edit smaller, rarer, and easier to check.
Set up the series correctly the first time
Most repetitive editing happens because a series was built quickly and then fixed piece by piece. A little setup work up front avoids most of it.
- Build one model event first. Get its registration options, prices, capacity, and form settings fully right, and have someone else review them. Only then create the other sessions from it. If you create sessions by copying an existing event, they inherit whatever mistakes the original has. Copying a correct one is how you avoid fixing eight later.
- Keep a written spec for each recurring program. A one-page sheet listing each option name, price, who it is for, and any limits. Staff building next season’s sessions work from the sheet rather than from memory or from last year’s event, which may have been edited since.
- Use the same option names every time. “Member Adult” in one session and “Adult (Member)” in another makes reporting harder and makes it easy to miss one when editing.
When you have to change many events anyway
Price changes, new options, and corrected wording will still come up mid-season. Treat the change as a small project rather than a series of quick clicks.
- List every affected event before you touch one. An event query filtered by category, date range, or naming pattern gives you a definitive list. Export it or keep it open as a checklist.
- Decide what happens to people already registered. Changing an option’s price generally affects new registrations, not ones already taken. If anyone has already paid the old price, decide in advance whether you honor it, refund the difference, or collect more. Don’t leave that to whoever answers the phone.
- Make the edits in one sitting, with one person. Splitting the work across staff or across days is how session six ends up with the old price.
- Check from the public side. After saving, load each event’s online registration form as a guest would and confirm the options and prices shown. A form can look right in the back office and still show something stale online, especially if your website caches pages.
- Re-run the query and spot-check. If you added a column for the option or price, a quick scan shows any event that was missed.
Reduce how often it comes up
Some teams have more registration options than they need. If a series has a dozen price variations per session, every change multiplies. Ask whether some of the options can be combined, whether member discounts could be handled consistently through your membership program rather than per-event options, and whether a given program really needs separate events for each session or could be sold as a single event. These are trade-offs. One event means simpler setup but coarser attendance reporting, so make the call program by program.
It also helps to put registration option changes on your season calendar. If prices are reviewed once a year before the series is built, mid-season edits become rare.
Quick answers
Do child events inherit changes made to a parent event’s registration options?
Not in the setups we’ve worked with. Each event’s options are edited on that event. Test in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support to confirm for your version.
Is copying an event the same as linking it?
Treat it as a starting point, not a link. In our experience, once a copy is created, later changes to the original don’t flow to it, and the reverse is also true.
Can a third-party tool bulk-edit event options?
Be careful with anything that writes directly to event configuration. If you go that route, test it in a non-production database first and keep a record of what was changed.
