Giving staff free or discounted membership is one of the easiest perks a museum, zoo, or garden can offer. Setting it up in Altru so it doesn’t distort your membership numbers, clog your renewal mailings, or outlive someone’s last day is the harder part. The software mechanics are simple. Most of the work is deciding a few things before anyone builds anything.
Decide what an employee membership actually is
Before you open Altru, get answers from HR and leadership on these questions. Each one changes how you’ll build it.
- Who qualifies? Full-time only, or part-time, seasonal staff, board members, and long-term volunteers too? If volunteers and board are in, decide now whether they share the same benefit or get their own.
- What does it include? Free admission for the employee alone, or a household-style benefit with a guest or family members? Any store or café discount that your point of sale needs to recognize?
- Is it free or discounted? A free benefit and a discounted purchase are recorded very differently, and the difference shows up in revenue reporting.
- When does it end? At separation, at the end of a fixed term, or whichever comes first?
- Does it count as a membership? Your board report probably shows member totals. Leadership should decide whether staff appear in that number.
One more question for finance: whether a staff perk has any tax or payroll implications for your organization. That’s not an Altru question, but it’s better to ask before launch than after.
Three ways to build it
Option 1: A separate membership program for staff
This is the cleanest choice for most organizations. A dedicated staff program (with one or more levels if benefits differ by role) keeps employees out of your public program’s counts, renewal efforts, and retention reporting by default. When someone asks “how many members do we have,” you can answer with or without staff without building a special filter.
The tradeoff is upkeep: one more program to configure, train on, and include or exclude in each report. If your benefits for staff mirror a public level, you’ll also need to keep the two in step when the public level changes.
Option 2: A staff level inside your existing program
Adding an “Employee” level to your current program is quicker and puts staff on the same card design, scanning rules, and benefits structure as regular members. It works well if leadership is fine with staff appearing in member totals.
The risk is that staff become hard to separate from paying members. Every renewal appeal, lapsed-member campaign, and retention report then needs an explicit exclusion, and someone will eventually forget one. If you go this way, name the level clearly and build the exclusion into your standard queries right away.
Option 3: A discount on a regular level
If the perk is “staff pay half price,” a discount applied to a standard membership level may be all you need. The employee is a regular member who paid less. This keeps reporting honest about revenue, but it means staff fall into normal renewal cycles and are counted as ordinary members. Confirm how your discounts apply to memberships, particularly online versus at the desk, by testing in a sandbox before announcing anything.
Flag employees on the constituent record, too
Whichever option you choose, don’t rely on the membership alone to identify staff. Mark employees on their constituent record with an attribute or constituency (whatever your database already uses for this kind of thing). That gives you a reliable way to:
- Query current staff and compare that list to active employee memberships.
- Keep staff out of solicitations they shouldn’t receive, or include them in internal ones.
- Recognize staff who also hold paid memberships or give personally, which happens more often than people expect.
Use the employee’s personal record, not a shared or generic “Staff” constituent. Shared records make scanning and attendance history meaningless and tend to turn into duplicates.
Handle the term and the offboarding
Expiration is where staff memberships most often go wrong. Two common patterns:
- Annual term, renewed in bulk. Give every employee membership the same expiration date (often the start of your fiscal year). Once a year, pull your current staff list from HR, renew those people, and let everyone else lapse. Simple, but someone who leaves in month two keeps their card for ten more months.
- Short term, renewed often. Shorter terms limit how long a former employee keeps access but mean more frequent processing. Only worth it if your staff turnover is high.
Either way, add a step to your offboarding checklist: whoever handles separations tells the membership team, and the membership is ended or expired that week. That one handoff prevents most of the “is this person still staff?” questions at the gate.
Also make sure your automated renewal reminders skip the staff program or level. An employee getting a “Your membership is about to expire, renew today for $95” email is a small thing that people remember.
Check your reports before launch
Run your usual membership reports and queries with a few test staff memberships in place. Look for:
- Member counts that now include staff when they shouldn’t.
- Zero-dollar or discounted transactions showing up in revenue in a way your finance team won’t recognize.
- Staff appearing in renewal, lapsed, or upgrade lists.
Fix the exclusions now, and document them. The person who inherits these reports in two years will need to know that staff were deliberately filtered out.
Quick answers
Can I give staff a membership at no cost?
Yes, you can process a membership at zero dollars or as a complimentary benefit, but how that appears in revenue reporting depends on how you record it. Agree on the method with finance and test a transaction in a sandbox first.
Can employee memberships end automatically when someone leaves?
Altru doesn’t know when someone leaves your payroll, so no. Use fixed terms plus an offboarding step, and periodically compare a query of active staff memberships against HR’s current roster.
Should board members and volunteers use the same setup?
Only if their benefits are identical. Separate levels cost little and make it much easier to report on each group later.
