“How many classes did Maria teach last spring, and which ones?” It sounds like a question Altru should answer in ten seconds. In practice, many education departments end up digging through calendars, email threads, and a payroll spreadsheet to piece it together, because the instructor was never recorded anywhere a query could find.
Altru is built around programs, events, tickets, and constituents. It is good at telling you who attended a scheduled program and what was paid for it. Tracking who taught it takes a deliberate setup decision. Below are the realistic options, what each one gives you, and the tradeoffs to weigh before you pick.
Start by deciding what “activity” means for you
Before touching configuration, write down the questions you actually need answered. They usually fall into a few groups:
- Assignment: who is teaching each scheduled session, so staff and guests know.
- History: how many sessions each instructor led over a season or year, and for which programs.
- Payment: hours or sessions to pay contract educators or stipends.
- Outcomes: attendance and revenue for sessions a given instructor led.
Altru can reasonably support assignment, history, and outcomes if instructors are linked to events in a consistent way. Payment and timekeeping almost always live in a separate HR or payroll system, and trying to force that into Altru tends to create more work than it saves.
Step one: make every instructor a constituent
Whatever approach you choose, instructors need constituent records. Staff educators, contract teachers, and volunteer docents should all exist in Altru with a consistent marker, such as a constituency or an attribute that identifies them as an instructor. That gives you one clean list to filter on, and it keeps instructor records from being confused with the guests and members who share the database.
Check for duplicates while you are at it. A contract educator who is also a member and a past donor may already have two or three records. Merging them first saves you from splitting their teaching history across records later.
Option A: use Altru’s event resources or staffing, if your setup supports it
Altru’s scheduling side includes ways to attach resources and staffing needs to events, which some organizations use to assign people to sessions. If that functionality is available and enabled in your Altru environment, it is the most structured option, because the instructor is tied directly to the specific event occurrence.
Be honest with yourself about how well this fits before you commit. Questions to test in a sandbox or confirm with Blackbaud support:
- Can a specific constituent be assigned to an event, or only a generic role or resource type?
- Do those assignments show up in event queries so you can report on them?
- How painful is it to change an assignment when a substitute steps in at the last minute?
- Does it carry over when you copy or schedule recurring program sessions?
If the answers are mostly yes, standardize on it. If the assignment exists but cannot be queried, it will help day-of operations but not your year-end reporting, and you will need one of the options below as well.
Option B: a custom field or attribute on the event
A lighter approach is to record the instructor directly on each scheduled event, using an attribute or similar custom field. This is easy to explain to schedulers: when you build the session, fill in the instructor.
The catch is data quality. If the field is free text, you will get “Maria,” “M. Lopez,” and “Maria L.” for the same person, and your counts will be wrong. Wherever possible, use a field type that points to a constituent record or a controlled list of names rather than typed text. Then build an event query that returns program, event date, and instructor, and save it so anyone can rerun it for a date range.
Option C: track it outside Altru and link back
Some teams keep a simple instructor schedule in a shared spreadsheet, keyed by Altru event name and date. It is not elegant, but it works when instructor assignments change constantly and the people scheduling them do not have Altru access.
If you go this route, make the spreadsheet match Altru exactly: same program names, same event dates and times. At reporting time you can export an Altru query of events with attendance and revenue, then line it up with the instructor sheet. The risk is drift; nobody updates the sheet after a substitution, and the history quietly goes wrong. Assign one person to own it.
Reporting once the data is there
With instructors linked to events by any of the methods above, the reports most departments want are straightforward:
- Sessions per instructor for a date range, grouped by program.
- Attendance per instructor, by combining event capacity or ticket counts with the instructor field.
- Revenue by instructor, useful for evaluating which programs and teachers draw registrations.
- Upcoming assignments, a forward-looking list instructors or coordinators can check weekly.
Build these as saved queries first. Only turn them into formal reports once the numbers have been checked against what the education team knows actually happened.
A few habits that keep it accurate
- Record substitutions the same day, in the same place as the original assignment.
- Keep canceled sessions marked as canceled rather than deleted, so they do not inflate or erase anyone’s history.
- Review the “sessions per instructor” query monthly with the education lead. Errors are easy to fix within a month and nearly impossible to reconstruct a year later.
- Write a one-page procedure for schedulers that says exactly where the instructor goes. Consistency matters more than which option you chose.
Quick answers
Does Altru have a built-in instructor module?
Not as a dedicated feature, as far as most administrators would describe it. What you can do depends on which scheduling and resource features are enabled for your organization, so confirm in a sandbox or with Blackbaud support before designing around them.
Should instructor pay be tracked in Altru?
Generally no. Use Altru to produce an accurate count of sessions taught, and hand that count to whatever system handles payroll or contractor invoices.
