Group visit requests, birthday party questions, field trip interest, volunteer sign-ups, “can we film here?” emails. Every museum, zoo, and garden gets a steady stream of inquiries, and sooner or later someone asks: can we just collect these through an Altru form so the information lands in our database?
The honest answer is that Altru’s online forms are built around transactions, not open-ended questions. That doesn’t mean inquiries can’t end up in Altru. It means you have to decide where the form lives and how the data gets in. This guide walks through the realistic options and the tradeoffs of each.
What Altru’s web forms are designed to do
Altru’s web forms exist to sell and record things: tickets, memberships, donations, and event registrations. Each one is tied to a revenue or registration process, which is why they create constituent records, transactions, and batches cleanly.
A general “tell us what you need” form doesn’t fit that model. There’s no product, no price, and often no commitment yet. We’re not aware of a dedicated, general-purpose inquiry form type in Altru. Features do change, so if you want to be certain, check the current web forms documentation or ask Blackbaud support directly whether a non-transactional contact form is available for your version.
Option 1: Repurpose an event registration form
Some organizations set up a free “event” that is really an inquiry intake, for example “Group Visit Request” or “Summer Camp Interest List,” and use the registration form to collect names and contact details.
Where this works: inquiries that are tied to a specific program or date range, where you mainly need a list of interested people.
Where it breaks down:
- Your event list and reports fill up with things that aren’t real events, which confuses staff and skews attendance numbers.
- How many custom questions you can ask, and how those answers are stored and reported, may be limited. Test this in a sandbox or on a hidden event before you launch it publicly.
- Free-text answers can be hard to query later, so a “tell us about your group” field may be readable on the record but awkward to report on.
If you go this route, use a clear naming convention (prefix everything with “Inquiry:” for example) so these can be filtered out of real event reporting.
Option 2: Use your website’s form tool and bring the data into Altru
This is what most organizations end up doing. Build the inquiry form with whatever your website already uses (your CMS form builder, a form plugin, or a hosted form service), route the submission to the right staff inbox, and then get the contact into Altru.
Getting it into Altru usually happens one of two ways:
- Manual entry for low volume. Staff search for the person first to avoid creating a duplicate, then add or update the constituent record and log the inquiry as a note (or whatever contact history your team already uses).
- Periodic import for higher volume. Export submissions to a spreadsheet on a schedule, clean them up, and import them into Altru as new or updated constituents. Agree on a standard source or attribute value, such as “Group Sales Inquiry,” so you can query these people later.
Where this works: almost every situation. You get full control over the questions, conditional logic, file uploads, and spam protection, and the form can match your website’s look.
The tradeoff: there’s a gap between submission and Altru. If no one owns the entry or import step, inquiries live in an inbox and never become records.
Option 3: Keep inquiries out of Altru until they convert
Not every inquiry deserves a constituent record. A one-off question about parking or a film location request may never turn into revenue, and adding those people can clutter your database and your mailing lists.
A reasonable middle ground: handle raw inquiries in email or a shared tracker, and create the Altru record only when the inquiry becomes a booking, membership, or gift. That keeps your constituent data focused on people with a real relationship to your organization.
Questions to settle before you build anything
- Who owns follow-up? Each inquiry type should go to a named person or team, not a generic inbox.
- What do you need to report on? If leadership wants to know how many group inquiries became bookings, you need a consistent way to tag those people in Altru from the start.
- How will you prevent duplicates? Inquiry forms are a common source of duplicate constituents, especially when people use a work email on the form and a personal one at the ticket counter. Decide on a lookup step before anyone creates a new record.
- What consent are you collecting? If inquirers will be added to marketing lists, ask for that permission on the form and record it in Altru along with the contact.
When the inquiry turns into a purchase
The inquiry form itself usually sits outside Altru, but the next step doesn’t have to. Once a group visit is confirmed or a camp family is ready to register, you want that payment recorded directly in Altru. Social Good Checkouts provides a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations that writes the transaction back to Altru, so the paid part of the process stays connected to your records even when the first conversation happened on a separate form.
Quick answers
Can I add an inquiry form to an Altru membership or donation form?
Those forms are built to complete a transaction, so they aren’t a good fit for someone who only has a question. Use a separate form for inquiries.
Is it better to log inquiries as notes or as attributes?
Use both for different jobs. A note captures the details of the conversation. An attribute or similar coded field is what makes the inquiry show up in queries and reports.
