A family lands on your ticketing page for Saturday, sees that the 11:00 entry is sold out, and leaves. Sunday at 11:00 had plenty of room, and so did Saturday at 1:30. They never saw either one, because the page didn’t make the alternatives easy to find.
That is the real problem behind “other dates and times” in Altru online ticketing. The inventory exists. What’s missing is a clear way for a visitor to compare it. This article covers how Altru’s online sales present alternate dates and times, what you can adjust on your side to make those options more visible, and when it makes sense to put a calendar in front of the purchase flow.
How alternate dates and times usually appear
In Altru’s online sales, a visitor typically picks a program or event, chooses a date, and then sees the times available for that date. Other dates and other times are reachable, but they tend to be presented as a list or a secondary selection rather than a visual overview. For a short schedule that’s fine. For timed entry across a whole season, it gets hard to scan, and visitors who don’t find what they want on the first try often assume nothing is available.
Exactly how this looks depends on your Altru version, your web form setup, and how your programs and events are built. Before changing anything, open your own public ticketing page on a phone and a laptop, and try to buy a ticket for a slot that’s sold out. Note every place a visitor would have to click or scroll to find the next available option. That walkthrough is your baseline.
Things you can adjust inside Altru
Clean up event names and descriptions
When alternate dates show up in a list, the event name is often the only thing a visitor reads. Names like “GA Timed 2” or internal codes make that list useless. Use names a guest would recognize, and keep them consistent across dates so the list reads as the same experience on different days, not as different products.
Check how far out events are on sale
If events are created only a week or two ahead, the “other dates” a visitor can see will be thin no matter how they’re displayed. Build and publish your schedule far enough in advance that alternatives actually exist. The same goes for times: if some slots are held back for groups or members, decide whether they should be visible online at all.
Review capacity and sold-out behavior
Sold-out slots that still appear as options, or disappear without explanation, both confuse people. Look at how your sold-out events display on the web and whether that matches what you want guests to understand. If you’re not sure which settings control this in your version, test in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support rather than experimenting on the live site.
Keep programs from fragmenting
Splitting one experience into many separate programs (one per day, one per audience) can push alternate dates into different places on the site. Where your reporting allows it, keep a single program with multiple events so the date and time choices stay together.
Things you can do on your website
Much of the fix happens before the visitor reaches Altru at all.
- Publish the schedule in plain text. A simple “Timed entry runs every 30 minutes from 10:00 to 3:30, Wednesday through Sunday” on the visit page sets expectations before anyone hits a sold-out slot.
- Say what to do when a time is full. One line near the buy button (“If your time is sold out, try another day; weekday afternoons usually have space”) recovers a surprising number of would-be walkaways.
- Link to the right starting point. If your setup supports linking directly to a specific program or event, point each “Buy tickets” button at the most relevant one instead of a generic landing page. Confirm what deep links your web forms support before building around them.
- Watch your phone traffic. Date and time pickers that work on a desktop can be cramped on mobile. If most of your ticket buyers are on phones, test there first.
When a calendar view is worth it
All of the above improves a list. It doesn’t turn it into a calendar. If your schedule has many dates and many time slots, the clearest way to show “other dates and times” is a month view where each day shows whether it has availability, and clicking a day shows its open times. Visitors can see at a glance that Saturday is tight and Sunday is wide open.
Signs you’ve outgrown a list:
- Front desk or phone staff regularly hear “I couldn’t find a time” from people who later buy at the door.
- Sold-out slots get heavy traffic while nearby slots go unsold.
- You run seasonal or special-event ticketing with dozens of dates on sale at once.
For organizations in that situation, Calendar Builder from Social Good creates embeddable timed-ticketing calendars for your website that pull real-time availability from Altru. Altru keeps the inventory and the sales; the calendar just gives visitors a clearer way to see their options before they pick a time.
Quick answers
Can Altru show other dates and times in a calendar layout on its own?
Not that we’d count on. Altru’s online sales present dates and times in its own format, and how much you can change that varies by setup. If a calendar layout matters to you, confirm with Blackbaud support what your version offers.
Will a website calendar change how tickets are sold or reported in Altru?
It shouldn’t. The calendar is a display layer. Events, capacity, and sales still live in Altru, so your daily sales and advance sales reporting stays the same.
