Monthly kits have become a steady earner for a lot of museums, science centers, zoos, and gardens: a box of activities mailed to families, a seed-of-the-month packet, a craft kit tied to a current exhibition. The education team builds them. Then someone has to work out how to sell them in Altru, and that turns out to be the hard part.
The short version: Altru isn’t built around recurring product subscriptions. It handles recurring donations, memberships with terms and renewals, and one-time merchandise and program sales. A “charge this family every month and ship them a box” product doesn’t fit neatly into any of those. You can still run a kit program well. You just have to choose which shape it takes in Altru, and be honest about what each shape costs you.
First, decide what you’re actually selling
Before touching Altru, get answers to three questions from whoever owns the program:
- Is it prepaid or pay-as-you-go? A family buying “six months of kits” up front is a very different transaction from a family paying each month until they cancel.
- Is it tied to membership? Some organizations sell kits only to members, or bundle kits into a higher membership level.
- Is any part of it a gift? Usually not. A kit is a purchased product with real value, so it shouldn’t be recorded as a donation, and the buyer shouldn’t get a tax acknowledgment for it. Check with your finance team before anyone suggests “just set it up as a recurring gift.”
Those answers point you toward one of the setups below.
Option 1: Sell a prepaid bundle
This is the simplest and, for most organizations, the cleanest. Instead of a true subscription, you sell a fixed run: three, six, or twelve months of kits, paid once.
In Altru, that usually means a merchandise item (or a program, if your team already sells kits that way) priced for the whole run. The sale lands on the constituent record like any other purchase, revenue posts once, and nobody has to chase a monthly payment. Your fulfillment team works from a query of who bought which bundle and when.
Trade-offs: a bigger up-front price can scare off some families, and you lose the “cancel anytime” appeal. Deferred revenue may also matter to your finance office, since you’re collecting cash for kits you’ll ship over several months. Ask how they want that handled before launch, not after.
Option 2: Make kits a membership benefit
If your kit buyers are mostly members already, consider a membership level (or an add-on level) that includes a monthly kit. Altru is strong at memberships: terms, renewals, expiration dates, and benefits are all native. A “Family Plus Kits” level renews like any other membership, and your existing renewal process carries the program.
Trade-offs: the payment is still annual (or whatever your membership term is), not monthly. Benefit tracking also needs care. Whether you can record monthly kit fulfillment as a benefit in the way you want depends on how your membership program and benefits are configured, so test it in a sandbox or confirm with Blackbaud support before you announce anything.
Option 3: Bill monthly, one transaction at a time
If the program really needs month-to-month pricing, the practical answer in Altru is a separate sale each month rather than an automatic recurring charge. Each month, subscribers pay for that month’s kit, and the payment is recorded against their constituent record as a normal product sale.
The question is how they pay. Calling every family for a card number doesn’t scale, and asking them to find a web form each month leads to drop-off. Most teams that go this route send a payment link by email at the start of each billing cycle, with a clear deadline tied to the ship date. Families who don’t pay by the cutoff simply don’t get that month’s box, which is also your cancellation mechanism.
Trade-offs: this is the most work to run. Someone has to send the links, watch who has paid, and hand a clean list to fulfillment every month. It also isn’t automatic billing; families have to act each time. If you’ve heard that Altru can store a card and charge it monthly for a non-donation product, verify that with Blackbaud directly before building around it. We wouldn’t assume it.
Running fulfillment without spreadsheets everywhere
Whichever option you pick, the same operational pieces keep the program from falling apart:
- One query that defines “active subscriber.” Prepaid bundle buyers whose run hasn’t ended, members at the kit level who are current, or monthly payers who paid this cycle. Build it once and have everyone use it.
- Clean mailing addresses. Kits ship, so a stale address costs you a box and postage. Check addresses at the point of sale and review households where the buyer and recipient differ, such as grandparents buying for grandchildren.
- A clear cutoff date. Pick the day each month when the list is pulled for packing. Payments after that roll to the next month.
- A record of what shipped. A constituent note, attribute, or interaction for each shipment, whichever your team already uses consistently, so the front desk can answer “did my September kit go out?”
- A way to measure retention. Count subscribers by month. If people drop off after month two, that’s a content or pricing question for the program team, not a database problem.
Which one should you pick?
If you’re launching for the first time, start with the prepaid bundle. It fits Altru without workarounds, keeps revenue simple, and tells you whether there’s real demand. If most buyers are members, the membership-level approach lets your existing renewal process do the heavy lifting. Move to monthly billing only when you’re sure the flexibility is worth the extra monthly administration.
Where Social Good can help
For teams billing kits month to month, Link2Pay sends families a branded pay-by-link for each cycle, and the payment posts to Altru, so you aren’t re-keying card payments or reconciling a separate processor. It doesn’t turn Altru into an automatic recurring-billing system; it makes the monthly “send a link, collect payment” step much less manual.
