Take a Saturday family workshop with twenty registrants. Some of them got the member price, some paid full price, and one paid full price but swears she renewed last month. The educator running the session has a printed roster with names and ticket counts on it. It doesn’t say who is a member.
Membership status is useful at a program for a few reasons: checking member pricing, spotting lapsed members you could invite to renew, thanking members in the room, and, after the fact, seeing how much of your program audience is already connected to the organization. Altru stores both pieces of information. The trouble is that it doesn’t put them together on a program roster by default, so you have to join them yourself.
Why the roster doesn’t show it
In Altru, a program registration is a sale tied to a scheduled program. Membership lives on the constituent record, under the membership program the person belongs to. A standard program roster or attendee list focuses on the sale: who bought, how many tickets, which price type. Membership is a different part of the database, and the out-of-the-box program views don’t reliably pull it across.
There’s one more wrinkle. A registration is only connected to membership data if it’s connected to a constituent. Walk-up or anonymous sales and sales where staff didn’t look up the buyer will have nothing to join to. Before you build anything, check how consistently your staff and your online forms attach registrations to real constituent records. A roster report can’t fix missing links.
Altru’s native reports and options change over time. If you’re not sure whether your version already offers a membership column on a program roster, ask Blackbaud support or test in a sandbox before building a workaround.
Option 1: An ad-hoc query that joins the two
This is the most flexible approach, and most admins can build it in an afternoon.
- Start from program sales or registrations, not from constituents. You want one row per registration, filtered to the program and date (or date range) you care about.
- Add the registrant’s constituent fields: name, lookup ID, email.
- Bring in membership information through the constituent. The fields that matter most are membership program, membership level, status (active, lapsed, and so on), and expiration date.
- Add the price type from the sale, so you can see member versus non-member pricing next to actual membership status. Mismatches are the rows worth reviewing.
- Save it with a prompt or a clear filter for program and date, so staff can rerun it for each session without editing the query.
Two things to watch for. First, a constituent can have more than one membership row (a current one plus older ones, or memberships in more than one program). If you join without a filter, you’ll get duplicate rows for the same registrant. Filter to the membership program you care about and to current or most recent memberships. Second, household memberships: if your members are households, the person who registered may not be the primary member. Decide whether you want to look at the individual’s membership, the household’s, or both, and check a few known households by hand before you trust the output.
Option 2: Smart fields for a cleaner output
If the query gets messy because of multiple membership rows, a smart field on constituents can help. A smart field can calculate a single value per constituent, such as current membership level or latest expiration date, and you can add that value to your registration query as one column. That removes the duplicate-row problem and makes the output easy to read for staff who aren’t comfortable with queries.
Smart fields need to be processed to stay current, so check how often yours refresh. A roster pulled the morning of a program is only as fresh as the last smart field update. For a same-day roster, confirm the refresh schedule or run it manually first.
Option 3: Check at the point of sale
For small programs, the low-tech answer is often enough. When staff look up a constituent during a phone or in-person registration, the constituent’s membership is visible on their record. Train staff to confirm status then and to use the right price type. That doesn’t give you a roster, but it prevents most of the pricing problems that make people want one.
Getting it into the hands of program staff
Educators and program leads rarely work inside Altru, so plan the handoff:
- Export the query to a spreadsheet and sort by membership status, so lapsed and non-members sit together.
- Keep the columns short: name, party size, member yes/no, level, expiration. Leave out anything sensitive the room doesn’t need.
- Mark lapsed members clearly. A friendly “we’d love to welcome you back” at check-in is a better renewal touchpoint than any mailer.
- Save the export as a template so the same layout comes out every time, and staff learn where to look.
Using it after the program
The same query is useful beyond the day itself. Run it across a season of programs and you can see what share of your program audience is already a member, which programs attract the most non-members, and which lapsed members are still showing up. Those are good lists for targeted membership outreach, and they’re far more specific than a general “become a member” appeal.
Quick answers
Why do some registrants show no membership at all?
Either they aren’t members or the registration isn’t linked to their constituent record. Spot-check a few by searching for the person directly. If they turn up as a separate record, you may have a duplicate to merge.
Can I show membership status on a printed name badge or roster template?
Not that we can confirm as a built-in option. The dependable route is the query and export above, then formatting the roster outside Altru.
