The morning huddle needs a sheet of paper: which programs run today, which rooms are booked, which school groups arrive at 10:15. The calendar in Altru has all of that, but getting it onto paper in a readable form is harder than it should be. Plenty of administrators end up taking screenshots and pasting them into a document every day, which works until someone adds a booking at 8:45.
Below are the options that hold up, from quickest to most reliable, along with an honest note on what Altru does and doesn’t do out of the box.
First, what’s actually built in
Altru’s calendar views are designed for working on screen: checking availability, opening an event, scheduling a program. They aren’t built as print layouts. Depending on your version and browser, you may or may not find a print option that produces something clean, and a calendar that looks fine on a wide monitor often gets cut off or shrunk to unreadable size on letter paper.
Because this varies, check it yourself before building a workaround: open the calendar view your staff use, try your browser’s print preview, and if the result is poor, ask Blackbaud support whether a print-friendly view exists for your setup. If it does, use it. If not, the approaches below are what most organizations settle on.
Option 1: Browser print with a few adjustments
For an occasional printout, the browser can do more than people expect:
- Switch to the narrowest useful view. A single-day or list-style view prints far better than a month grid.
- Use landscape orientation and set the scale in print preview (try 70 to 85 percent) until nothing is clipped.
- Turn off headers and footers in the print dialog to save space.
- Print to PDF if you need to email the schedule instead of handing it out.
This is still a snapshot, and it still depends on someone remembering to do it. It’s fine for a weekly planning meeting. It’s not great as the daily operating sheet.
Option 2: Build the schedule from a query
This is the approach that scales. Instead of printing the calendar itself, you print the data behind it.
- Create a query of the events or program schedule you care about, filtered to a date range. Include start time, end time, program or event name, location, and capacity or sold counts if staff need them.
- Sort by date, then start time, so the output reads top to bottom like a day sheet.
- Save it with a relative date filter (today, this week) if your query setup supports it, so nobody has to edit dates each morning. If you aren’t sure the filter you need is available, test in a sandbox or a copy of the query first.
- Export to Excel and format once: bold the times, add borders, set print area and landscape. Save that as a template so the next export only needs a paste.
The result is a plain, legible list instead of a grid, which is usually what floor staff wanted anyway. It also lets you produce different versions from one source: a version with group contact names for the education desk, a version without them for volunteers.
Things to include that a calendar view won’t show
- Group sales arrivals with headcounts, pulled alongside the program schedule
- Room or location setup notes
- Remaining capacity for timed programs, so the desk knows what’s still sellable
Option 3: Check the reports you already have
Before building something new, look through the reports available in your Altru environment for schedule, daily sales, or event-related reports. Some organizations find an existing report covers most of what the printed calendar was for, and reports are designed to print. If one is close but not quite right, it may be faster to ask your Blackbaud contact or a consultant about adjusting it than to maintain a separate spreadsheet.
Keeping the printout from going stale
Whatever you choose, paper is out of date the moment someone books a new group. A few habits help:
- Print as late as practical, ideally right before the morning briefing.
- Put a “printed at” time on the sheet so staff know how current it is.
- Agree on who announces late changes, so the paper isn’t the only source.
- Keep one screen at the desk showing the live Altru view for anything that changes during the day.
When the calendar is really for the public
Sometimes the printed calendar is meant for visitors or partners rather than staff: posted at the entrance, handed to teachers, attached to an email. In that case, a public web page that shows the schedule is often the better answer, because people can check it themselves and it stays current. Social Good’s Calendar Builder creates embeddable website calendars for timed ticketing that show real-time availability from Altru. It isn’t a replacement for an internal staff sheet, but it can take a lot of “can you print me the schedule” requests off the desk.
Quick answers
Is there a single print button for the whole organization calendar?
Not one we can promise works the same for every Altru environment. Check print preview in your browser and confirm with Blackbaud support for your setup.
What’s the most reliable daily printout?
A saved query of the day’s events and programs, exported and printed from a formatted Excel template.
