A public library buys a museum pass. Over the next twelve months, dozens of different families check that one pass out, walk up to your admissions desk, and hand over a card with the library’s name on it. Then the library’s coordinator emails asking how many people used it, and renewal comes with a purchase order instead of a credit card.
Altru’s membership tools are built around a person or household buying benefits for themselves. A library or corporate pass doesn’t fit that shape, so it works best when you make a handful of deliberate setup decisions before the first pass goes out. Below is how to think through those decisions, plus the options most organizations choose between.
First, decide what the pass actually is
“Library membership” can mean very different things. Before you build anything in Altru, write down answers to these:
- Who holds it? The library (an organization constituent), or a named staff contact at the library?
- Who uses it? Anonymous patrons who change every few days. You won’t know their names unless you collect them at the desk.
- What does it admit? A fixed number of people per visit, free or discounted admission, or general admission only, with special exhibitions excluded?
- Does it include member benefits? Store discounts, member events, and member pricing on programs usually don’t make sense for a rotating group of borrowers. Most organizations leave them out.
- How is it paid and renewed? Libraries often pay by invoice or check on a fiscal-year cycle, not when the card expires.
Your answers usually point toward one of the two setups below.
Option 1: A dedicated membership program for institutional passes
This is the most common approach. You create a separate membership program (or a level within an existing one) used only for library and organizational passes, so it never mixes with your household members in reports and renewal mailings.
Setup considerations
- Constituent. Create the library as an organization constituent, with the coordinator linked as a contact. Before committing, confirm in your Altru environment whether a membership can be held directly by an organization record. If you’re not sure, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support. Some organizations instead put the membership on the coordinator’s individual record and relate that person to the library.
- Admissions and benefits. Set the admit count to match what the pass promises (for example, “admits two adults and up to four children”) and strip out benefits you don’t want anonymous borrowers to receive.
- Card. Print the library’s name on the card, not a person’s. If your card template pulls a member name, make sure the organization name renders cleanly. Many libraries also ask for a laminated or sturdier card, since it changes hands constantly.
- Term and price. Keep these separate from consumer levels. Institutional pricing tends to reflect heavy, repeated use rather than one household’s visits.
- Renewal. Leave these memberships out of your standard renewal emails and letters. A query filtered to this program or level makes it easy to exclude them and to build a separate renewal list for invoicing.
The tradeoff
You get clean membership records and a clear renewal list. Usage reporting is harder, though. Visits are scanned against one membership, so you’ll see total visits, but you won’t know who the borrowers were unless the desk captures that separately.
Option 2: Treat the pass as an admission arrangement, not a membership
Some organizations skip memberships entirely. They record the library’s payment as revenue on the organization constituent, then admit pass holders through daily sales using a dedicated discount or price type, such as “Library Pass – Free Admission.”
This approach has some real advantages:
- Every pass visit shows up in daily sales reporting, with the number of people admitted, so answering “how many people used it” is just a report.
- Pass holders never land on member lists, so they won’t get renewal mailings, member event invites, or member pricing by accident.
- You can create one discount per library or one shared discount. Per-library discounts make per-library usage reports trivial.
The downside is that the pass itself isn’t a record in Altru. Staff have to check the physical card (and its expiration) by eye, and expiration dates and renewal timing live in a tracking list, not on a membership record. Some organizations handle this with a note or attribute on the organization constituent that holds the pass’s start and end dates.
Things that trip people up
- Member counts. Institutional passes in a regular program inflate your “active members” number. Agree on whether your board reports include them, and filter accordingly.
- Front desk training. Give staff a one-line rule (“Library pass: admit up to X, no member discounts in the store”) and a way to look the pass up when it’s damaged or forgotten.
- Lost cards. Decide in advance whether you’ll reprint for free and whether the old card gets deactivated.
- Usage reports for the library. Libraries often justify renewal with usage numbers. Build the query or report once, save it, and send it with each renewal invoice. It’s good stewardship, and it makes renewal easier.
- Collecting borrower info. If you want to market to borrowers, a quick ZIP code or email capture at the desk is more realistic than creating a constituent for every visitor. Check that your library partner is comfortable with this first, since some libraries have patron privacy policies.
Corporate and community organization passes
Everything above applies to employer passes, school partnerships, and community group memberships too. The main difference is that a corporate pass is more often limited to named employees. In that case, a membership with named add-on members or cardholders may fit better than an anonymous pass. Before you build it, confirm how many named members your membership levels support.
Quick answers
Should library passes count as members?
That’s a policy choice, not a technical one. Many organizations track them separately so member counts reflect households and individuals.
Can a library renew by invoice?
Yes, operationally. Record the payment against the organization when it arrives. The key is pulling these memberships out of your automated consumer renewal cycle so they aren’t chased like lapsed households.
