How to Show Today’s Date on Altru Web Forms (and Get the Time Zone Right)

It sounds like a small thing: put today’s date at the top of the ticket form. Guests buying same-day admission on a phone want to know they’re about to buy for today, and staff selling from a kiosk or a tablet like the reassurance too. But an Altru web form doesn’t have an obvious “insert today’s date” option, and typing a date into the form’s header text obviously goes stale by tomorrow morning.

Here’s what’s realistic, where the date can actually come from, and the one detail (time zones) that trips people up.

First, decide what “the date” is supposed to do

Teams ask for this for different reasons, and the right fix depends on which one you have:

• Reassurance. “Today is Saturday, November 1” printed above the ticket selection so walk-up and same-day buyers don’t second-guess themselves. This is display only.
• Pointing people at the right session. You want today’s timed entries to be the obvious choice. That’s really about the date picker or calendar, not a line of text.
• Proof of purchase date. Someone wants the date on the confirmation or receipt. Altru already records the transaction date on the sale; the question is whether your confirmation template shows it.

Only the first one is truly a “show the current date on the form” problem. The other two are better solved elsewhere, so check which you’re dealing with before building anything.

Option 1: put the date on your own web page, around the form

Most organizations don’t send buyers to a bare Altru form; they link from or embed it within a page on their own website. That surrounding page is yours, and your web team can show a live date there with a few lines of JavaScript. It lives completely outside Altru, so there’s nothing to configure or break on the Altru side.

The important detail is time zone. A plain JavaScript date uses the visitor’s device clock, so someone planning a trip from another time zone could see the wrong day late in the evening. Format the date in your venue’s time zone instead:

const today = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-US', {
  timeZone: 'America/Chicago',
  weekday: 'long', month: 'long', day: 'numeric', year: 'numeric'
}).format(new Date());
document.getElementById('today-date').textContent = today;

Swap in your own time zone, and add an element with the id today-date where the text should appear. If the page is cached by your site’s caching layer, this still works, because the date is calculated in the visitor’s browser rather than baked into the cached page.

Option 2: add it inside the Altru form itself

Altru web forms let you customize header and footer content and styling, but whether your forms will run custom JavaScript, and where it’s allowed, is something to confirm rather than assume. Behavior can differ by form type, and scripts that work in a preview don’t always survive in the live form.

If you want to try it:

1. Test on a copy of the form, or in a sandbox if you have one, never on your live ticket form.
2. Add the same snippet to the form’s custom content area and check the form on desktop and on a phone.
3. Run a complete test purchase to make sure nothing else on the form changed.
4. If scripts are stripped or ignored, ask Blackbaud support whether the form type you’re using supports them. Don’t spend a day fighting it.

If scripts aren’t an option, a static fallback still helps: wording like “Tickets below are for the date you select” is less elegant than a live date, but it’s never wrong.

If the real goal is “make today the obvious choice”

Showing the date doesn’t change what’s preselected in the date picker. If guests keep buying for the wrong day, look at how your sales calendar and program schedules are set up in Altru, and whether today’s sessions are actually still on sale at the hour people are buying. A same-day cutoff that closes sales earlier than expected looks to a guest like “today isn’t available,” and printing the date won’t fix that.

Checking the date on confirmations

For receipts and confirmation emails, review the template your web form uses and see which fields it can include. If the purchase date or the visit date isn’t there, check whether the template offers it as a field before building a workaround. If you’re unsure which date a field pulls (the sale date versus the scheduled visit date), make a test purchase for a future date and look at what comes through.

When the form itself is the limitation

Workarounds like this tend to pile up: a date script here, a styling override there, a note asking mobile users to zoom in. If you’re spending real time making Altru’s web forms do things they weren’t designed for, it may be worth replacing the buying page instead. Social Good’s Checkouts is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that replaces Altru web forms for tickets, memberships, and donations, with the sales writing back to Altru.

Quick answers

Is there a built-in setting to show today’s date on an Altru web form?
Not one we’d count on. Confirm with Blackbaud support for your form type; otherwise, display it on the page that hosts the form.

Why does the date show tomorrow for some visitors?
The script is using their device’s time zone. Set your venue’s time zone explicitly, as in the snippet above.