Member pricing is easy to set up and hard to enforce. Adding a “Member” price to a ticket or a class registration in Altru takes minutes. The real work is deciding how the web form knows that the person clicking “Member” actually holds a current membership, and what happens when they don’t.
Each way of handling this involves a tradeoff between friction for real members and leakage to non-members. Below are the common approaches, what each one costs you, and the parts you’ll need to confirm in your own Altru setup before relying on them.
Start with how the discount is modeled
Before choosing an enforcement method, settle on how the member price exists in Altru. There are two common patterns:
- Separate member price types. “Member Adult” and “Member Child” sit alongside “Adult” and “Child” on the program or event. Reporting is clean, because revenue by price type tells you exactly how many member registrations you sold.
- A discount applied to the standard price. One set of price types, with a member discount on top. This keeps the price list short, but you’ll report on discounts instead of price types, and you need to check how your web forms present discounts to the buyer.
Pick one approach and use it for both daily admission and program registration. Mixing the two makes year-end membership benefit reporting harder than it needs to be.
Four ways to get the right price to the right person
1. Require members to sign in
If your Altru web forms support a constituent login, a signed-in member can be matched to their record, and the form can show member prices based on their active membership. This is the cleanest option when it works. The weak points are practical: members forget which email address is on file, household members share one login, and a lapsed member sees full price with no explanation. If you go this route, test the whole flow in a sandbox with a current member, a lapsed member, and a secondary household member, and confirm with Blackbaud support exactly which membership statuses unlock member pricing.
2. Use a member promo code
Some organizations print a code in the member newsletter or renewal confirmation. It’s simple and needs no login. The risk is obvious: codes get posted on deal sites and shared with friends. If you use one, rotate it on a schedule (each season or each program cycle), keep it out of public pages, and run a query on code usage against constituents without an active membership. That tells you whether the leakage is small enough to accept.
3. Honor system, checked at the door
Show member pricing to everyone, label it clearly as member-only, and verify at check-in. For timed admission this often works fine, because the member card gets scanned anyway. For multi-week classes or camps, it’s weaker: staff are reluctant to turn a child away on day one over a price difference. Decide in advance what happens when a non-member is caught. Most teams offer to collect the difference or sell a membership on the spot, and they write that into the confirmation email so nobody is surprised.
4. Member-only registration windows
For popular programs, early access often matters more to members than the discount itself. Opening registration to members a week before the public, through a separate form or a link sent only to current members, gives a real benefit. It does depend on the link not being forwarded, so pair it with a check of registrants against active memberships before the public opening.
Program registration has extra wrinkles
Classes, camps, and lectures raise questions that daily tickets don’t:
- Who is the member? The parent may hold a household membership while the child is the registrant. Decide whether the discount follows the household or the individual, and test that your forms find the membership through the household relationship.
- Expiration mid-program. A membership that expires before a summer camp starts raises a policy question: does the registration date or the program date count? Write the answer down.
- Limits per membership. If members get a discounted rate for two children but not five, Altru may not enforce that on the web form by itself. Confirm in a sandbox. If it can’t, an after-the-fact review query is your enforcement.
A weekly check worth keeping
Whatever method you choose, build one query you run every week during registration season: transactions using a member price type or member discount where the purchaser (or their household) has no active membership on the transaction date. Export it, review it, and contact anyone who slipped through. A short list means your method is working. A list that keeps growing means it’s time to tighten enforcement, usually by moving from codes or the honor system toward sign-in.
When the web form itself is the bottleneck
Sometimes the member pricing logic is fine and the problem is the purchase experience around it: the form is awkward on a phone, members abandon it partway through, or it doesn’t match the rest of your site. Social Good’s Checkouts replaces Altru web forms for tickets, memberships, and donations with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that supports Apple Pay and Google Pay and writes data back to Altru. If member pricing is part of your requirements, ask during a demo how members are identified so you can compare it with the options above.
Quick answers
Can a member get member pricing online without logging in?
Yes, through a promo code or an honor-system price type, but neither checks membership status at purchase. You give up enforcement in exchange for less friction.
Does a lapsed member still see member prices?
That depends on how your forms and membership statuses are configured. Test it with a real lapsed record in a sandbox rather than assuming.
