A local bank wants to buy a corporate membership. An elementary school wants to pay for a field trip deposit. A family foundation wants to make a gift online. In each case the payer is an organization, but most Altru web forms are built around one person filling in their own name, address, and email. What comes out the other side is usually an individual constituent record for whoever typed into the form, and the organization is missing or buried in a comment field.
This guide covers what to expect from Altru’s online forms when the buyer is an organization, how to design a form that captures what you need anyway, and how to tie the transaction back to the right organization record afterward.
Start with how your forms create constituents
Before you build anything, run a test. In a sandbox or test environment if you have one, submit each of your live form types (donation, membership, ticketing) as if you were a business: put the company name wherever the form lets you, use a work email, and pay with a test card. Then look at what Altru created:
- Was a new individual constituent created, or did it match an existing one?
- Did the company name land anywhere searchable, such as an organization field, an address line, a note, or an attribute?
- Is the revenue credited to the person, and is there any link to an organization record?
The answers depend on your Altru configuration and form settings, and we would rather you confirm them than assume. If you can’t tell whether a form can post revenue directly to an organization constituent, ask Blackbaud support before you promise anything to your corporate partners. In our experience, most organizations end up treating the online form as the intake step and doing the organization linking in Altru afterward.
Design the form to collect organization details
Even if the form can only create an individual, you control what information it asks for. A few changes make the follow-up work much easier:
- Make a separate form for organizational buyers. A dedicated “Corporate membership” or “School group deposit” form keeps these transactions out of your individual membership numbers and makes them easy to find with a query.
- Ask for the organization name as its own required field. Use whatever custom field or question option your form supports, and label it plainly: “Company or school name.” Don’t rely on people typing it into an address line.
- Ask who the contact is. The person paying is often an office manager, not the executive you want on the membership card. Add a field for the primary contact’s name and role if it matters for benefits.
- Collect a billing address separately if you can. A business address on an individual’s record causes mailing confusion later, especially if they’re also a personal member.
- Tell the buyer what happens next. A line on the confirmation page such as “We’ll follow up within two business days to set up your organization’s benefits” sets expectations if part of the process is manual.
Link the transaction to the organization record
Once a submission comes in, someone on staff has to finish the job. Keep it consistent:
- Find or create the organization constituent. Search before you add. Duplicate organization records (one for “First National Bank,” another for “First National Bank Inc.”) are one of the most common cleanup problems in Altru.
- Add a relationship between the individual and the organization. Mark the individual as an employee or contact of the organization, so the relationship shows on both records.
- Decide where the revenue and membership belong. For corporate memberships, many organizations hold the membership on the organization record and add named members or cardholders. For gifts, decide whether the organization gets hard credit and the individual gets soft credit, or the reverse. Write this down so everyone processing these forms does it the same way.
- Build a query for unlinked submissions. Filter revenue from your organizational forms where the payer has no organization relationship. Check it weekly. Anything on that list still needs a staff touch.
When a web form isn’t the right tool
Some organizational purchases don’t fit a public form at all. School group visits often involve a deposit, a balance, and a headcount that changes. Corporate sponsorships may be invoiced on net terms. For those, it’s usually cleaner to set up the order in Altru’s group sales or revenue areas first and then collect payment, rather than asking the organization to fill out a public form and reconciling it afterward. Keep the public web form for simple, fixed-price purchases like a standard corporate membership level or a one-time gift.
A note on reporting
Whatever process you choose, make sure your membership and revenue reports can separate organizational buyers from individuals. If corporate memberships are counted as individual memberships because they came through a regular form, your renewal rates and per-member figures will drift. A distinct form, a consistent attribute, or a dedicated membership program for organizations all give you a clean filter for queries and reports.
Where Social Good fits
The steps above are configuration and process work you can do in Altru without additional software. If your bigger issue is that the standard Altru webforms feel dated or awkward for buyers on their phones, Checkouts offers a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations that writes the data back to Altru. The organization-linking steps above still apply, so test how submissions arrive before you roll it out to corporate buyers.
Quick answers
Can an organization buy a membership through a standard Altru web form?
It can usually pay through one, but the record created is often an individual. Test your specific form and plan for a staff step to connect the transaction to the organization constituent.
Should we create a separate membership program for organizations?
If corporate or institutional memberships have different benefits, pricing, or renewal terms, a separate program makes reporting and renewals much simpler. If they’re just a higher individual level, a separate form may be enough.
