The first sign is usually an email from a would-be visitor: “Your ticket link is broken.” You click it yourself and get an error page, a spinning loader, or a form that loads but won’t take a payment. Nobody on staff changed anything, and there’s no notice anywhere explaining why.
Web form links in Altru stop working for a handful of reasons, and they split into two groups: problems on Blackbaud’s side that you can’t fix, and problems in your own setup that look exactly like an outage from the outside. The fastest way to tell them apart is to figure out how wide the failure is.
Start with scope: one form, or all of them?
Before you open a support case, spend five minutes answering these questions. The answers point to very different causes.
- Is every web form down, or just one? Try a ticketing form, a membership form, and a donation form.
- Does the direct link fail, or only the version embedded on your website? Open the raw Altru form URL in a private browser window, separately from the page it lives on.
- Does Altru itself load for staff? If the back office is slow or unreachable too, the problem is almost certainly not your configuration.
- Does the form load but fail at payment? That’s a different failure from a form that won’t open at all.
When everything is down at once
If every form fails and staff are having trouble in Altru too, you’re most likely looking at a platform incident or scheduled maintenance on Blackbaud’s hosted environment. There’s nothing to fix in your database. What you can do:
- Check Blackbaud’s public service status page and any maintenance notices sent to your organization’s Altru contacts. Make sure those notices go to more than one person, so a vacation doesn’t mean nobody sees them.
- Open a case with Blackbaud support anyway, even if the status page shows an incident. A case gives you a record and, sometimes, more detail than the public notice.
- Post a short, plain notice on your ticketing and giving pages: online sales are temporarily unavailable, here’s the phone number, walk-up sales are still open. A visible message beats a broken page.
Outages that come with no explanation are frustrating. It’s reasonable to ask your Blackbaud account contact, after the fact, what happened and how you’ll be notified next time.
When one form is down and the rest work
This is almost always something in your own setup, even if nobody remembers changing it. Common culprits:
The form or its sale window expired
Forms tied to a program, event, or sales period can stop offering anything once dates pass, or once a program is no longer available for online sale. To a visitor, an empty or erroring form looks broken. Check the dates and availability on whatever the form is selling.
The form was edited, copied, or recreated
If someone rebuilt a form instead of editing the original, the new one may have a different address. Your website, emails, social posts, and QR codes still point at the old one. Keep a simple list of every live form URL and where each one is used, so a rebuild comes with an update checklist.
The website embed changed
If the direct link works but the version on your site doesn’t, look at the website side: a theme or plugin update, a page builder that stripped the embed code, or a new security setting that blocks content from another domain. Your web team can usually spot this from the browser’s developer console.
Nothing to sell
Sold-out timed entry, a capacity limit, or a price that isn’t set for online sale can all leave a form with no valid options. Whether Altru shows a clear message in each of these cases depends on the form type and setup, so test each scenario on your own forms rather than assuming.
When the form loads but payment fails
If visitors can fill everything in but the transaction won’t go through, focus on the payment side: your merchant account status, any recent changes to payment configuration, and whether every card type is failing or only some. Blackbaud support is the right first call here, since payment processing for Altru web forms runs through their services. Ask specifically whether there’s a known payment issue rather than a general outage.
Build a plan before the next one
You can’t prevent every outage, but you can shorten how long it takes to notice one and how much it costs you.
- Check the links on a schedule. Someone opens the main ticketing, membership, and donation links every morning before opening. A free website uptime monitor pointed at your top forms can catch overnight failures.
- Keep a backup sales path. Know in advance how phone orders will be taken and entered into Altru, and who on staff handles them.
- Keep a ready-made notice. Draft the “online sales are temporarily down” message now, so posting it takes a minute.
- Log every incident. Date, time, scope, cause, and how long it lasted. A few entries make a much stronger case in a conversation with Blackbaud than “it keeps happening.”
Where Social Good fits
Some organizations decide they want more control over the page guests actually buy from. Social Good Checkouts replaces Altru web forms with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations, with Apple Pay and Google Pay, and writes the data back to Altru. It still works with Altru underneath, so it doesn’t make platform outages disappear, but it does mean the purchase page lives on your own branded checkout instead of an Altru form.
Quick answers
Will Blackbaud tell us before planned maintenance?
Blackbaud typically sends maintenance notices to the contacts on your account. Confirm with support who is on that list and add a shared inbox if you can.
Are sales lost during an outage recorded anywhere?
If a transaction never completed, it won’t appear in Altru. Visitors who were charged but didn’t get a confirmation should be checked against your payment records and handled one by one.
