It’s the morning of a members-only lecture. The speaker is stuck in traffic and you need to email or call everyone registered. You open the event in Altru, and the registrant list shows names and registration status, but no email addresses or phone numbers. Now you’re clicking into constituent records one at a time while the clock runs.
This is one of the more common frustrations with Altru events. The event record is built around who is coming and what they registered for. Contact details live on the constituent record. Getting the two side by side takes a little setup, but once it’s in place you can pull a contactable registrant list in under a minute.
Why the event record doesn’t show it
In Altru, a registrant is a link between a constituent and an event. The registrant entry carries event-specific details, such as registration option, attendance, and guests. Email, phone, and address belong to the constituent, because the same person may attend ten events and you only want one copy of their contact information to maintain.
That design keeps data clean, but it means the event’s registrant list isn’t a contact sheet. Whether you can add contact columns directly to that list depends on your Altru version and configuration. We haven’t seen a reliable built-in way to do it. If you want to be sure, check in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support whether your environment allows it before building workarounds.
The dependable approach: an event registrant query
Queries are where Altru lets you join event data to constituent data. Build one ad-hoc query you can reuse for any event:
- Start from the registrant or event-registration source in the query designer rather than from constituents. That keeps one row per registration.
- Filter on the event, and set the event filter as a prompt if your version supports prompted criteria. If not, save the query as a template and change the event each time.
- Add output fields from the related constituent: name, primary email address, primary phone, and preferred address if you mail anything.
- Add event fields you’ll need on the day: registration option, attended flag, number of guests, and any registration notes.
- Exclude registrants marked as canceled so you aren’t emailing people who already backed out.
- Save it somewhere your event staff can find it and grant permissions to the people who run events, not just the database admin.
Run it, export to Excel or CSV, and you have names and contact info for that event. Saving the results as a selection also lets you use the list for an email or mailing elsewhere in Altru.
A note on “primary” contact fields
Pull the primary email and primary phone, not every email or phone on the record. Otherwise a constituent with three phone numbers shows up as three rows. If you’re getting duplicate rows anyway, look for a one-to-many field you added by accident, such as all addresses or all registrations.
Guests and the contact gap
The query only finds contact info that exists. Two situations trip people up:
- Unnamed guests. If a registrant brings guests who were entered as unnamed or placeholder guests, those guests have no constituent record and no contact info. You’ll only reach them through the person who registered them.
- Registrations taken without contact fields. Phone or walk-in registrations where staff skipped email are common. Make email a required field on your event web form, and give staff a short checklist for registrations taken by phone.
It’s also worth checking whether registrants were matched to existing constituents or created as new ones. A new duplicate record with an email address and an older record with nothing will both look like the same person on a roster, and only one of them is linked to the event.
Making it fast for event staff
The query solves the data problem. The rest is habit:
- Name the query clearly, something like “Event registrants with contact info,” and put it in a shared folder.
- Run it the day before every event and save the export with the event file, so the list is already on hand if something changes on short notice.
- Use the same query for check-in rosters. Adding the attended flag means the same list works for follow-up afterward: thank attendees, and send a different message to no-shows.
- Treat the export as sensitive. It’s a list of names, emails, and phone numbers. Don’t leave it on a shared desktop or forward it to a speaker who only needs a head count.
Quick answers
Can I add email and phone columns to the registrant list on the event itself?
We haven’t found a dependable built-in way. Confirm with Blackbaud support for your environment. A saved query is the reliable route either way.
Will the query show contact info for guests?
Only for guests who have their own constituent records. Unnamed guests won’t have any.
Can I email registrants directly from the results?
Save the results as a selection and use it as the audience for an email or mailing in Altru’s marketing and communications area, the same way you would for any other list.
