A Saturday in May is down a third from last year. Was it the rain, the new exhibit next door, or a pricing change? Without a weather record next to your admission numbers, nobody can say, and the same argument comes back at every budget meeting. For outdoor sites like zoos, gardens, and historic grounds, weather is often the biggest single driver of walk-up attendance, so it’s worth recording on purpose.
Altru tracks the sale side well: daily sales, advance sales, group sales, and the revenue behind them. As far as we know, it has no built-in weather field or weather code on daily admission transactions, and nothing that pulls weather in automatically. If you think your configuration might offer a place to store it, test in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you build your process around it. The good news is that you don’t need Altru to store weather to report on it.
The key idea: weather belongs to the date, not the ticket
Weather doesn’t vary by transaction. Every ticket sold on a given day shares the same conditions. So instead of trying to stamp each order, keep one weather row per operating day and join it to your Altru numbers by date. That’s simpler for staff, harder to get wrong, and easier to analyze.
Three ways to capture it
1. A daily log kept by staff
A shared spreadsheet with one row per day. Someone, usually the opening or closing supervisor, fills it in as part of their shift checklist. Suggested columns:
- Date (the join key; use one consistent format)
- Weather code from a short fixed list, for example: Clear, Partly cloudy, Overcast, Light rain, Heavy rain, Storm, Snow, Extreme heat
- High temperature
- Midday condition, if mornings and afternoons often differ at your site
- Closure or delay (yes/no, and hours affected)
- Notes for anything unusual: school holiday, road closure, event nearby
Keep the code list short. Eight options that everyone uses the same way beat twenty that drift. Put the definitions at the top of the sheet (“Light rain = intermittent showers, grounds open normally”).
2. Historical weather data
Public sources such as NOAA’s climate data publish daily observations by weather station, including temperature and precipitation. Pull the station nearest your site and you can backfill years of history in an afternoon, which a staff log can never do. The trade-off: station data won’t capture “it poured at 11 and cleared by 1,” and the station may be miles away. Many organizations use public data for history and trend work, plus a staff log going forward for the detail that matters at the gate.
3. Something inside Altru
Some teams try to record weather in Altru itself, for example as a note or a custom field on a record tied to the day. Before doing this, confirm what your Altru setup actually supports and whether it shows up in queries and reports the way you need. Even when it works, it puts an extra step on the cashier for every sale, which is where consistency tends to fall apart. We’d usually recommend keeping weather outside Altru and joining by date.
Putting it next to your admission numbers
- Build a daily attendance query in Altru. Group daily admission by date, with ticket counts (and revenue, if you want it). Decide up front whether you’re counting only walk-up daily sales or including advance sales and groups. Weather mostly moves walk-ups; prepaid groups tend to show up regardless, and mixing them in hides the effect.
- Export it on a regular schedule, weekly or monthly, to the same workbook as your weather log.
- Join on date with a lookup formula or a pivot table, so each day shows attendance and weather side by side.
- Compare like with like. Average attendance by weather code, but split by day of week and season first. A rainy Saturday in July and a sunny Tuesday in February tell you nothing when compared directly.
Mistakes that make the data useless
- Logging the forecast instead of what happened. Record observed conditions after the fact. The forecast is interesting too, but keep it in its own column, since a bad forecast can empty a site that ends up sunny.
- Free-text weather. “Drizzly,” “kinda wet,” and “rain” are three values to a pivot table. Use a dropdown.
- Skipping closed days. A weather closure is your most important data point. Log it with zero attendance and a closure flag rather than leaving the row out.
- Forgetting events. If you run ticketed programs, add an event column or log them separately. Rain affects an evening outdoor concert differently than morning general admission.
- Nobody owns it. Assign the log to a role, not a person, and put it on the shift checklist. A log that’s filled in for three weeks and then abandoned is worse than none, because it looks complete when it isn’t.
What you can do with it
After one full season you’ll have enough to answer practical questions: how many fewer visitors a rainy weekend day really costs, whether extreme heat hurts more than light rain, and how to staff the desk and food service when the forecast turns. It also gives your board and finance team a straight answer when attendance misses budget, which is often the main reason teams start tracking weather in the first place.
Quick answers
Does Altru record weather automatically?
Not that we’re aware of. Treat it as data you bring in yourself, and confirm with Blackbaud support if you need a definitive answer for your version.
Can I add weather to past years?
Yes, from public historical weather data matched to your Altru daily attendance by date. You won’t get the fine detail a staff log captures, but it’s enough for year-over-year comparisons.
